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Lombardi analyst update

On April 2nd, Lombardi held their second analyst update by teleconference; I found the first one back in January to be informative, and obviously Lombardi had sufficient positive feedback from it to continue. Strangely enough, we were instructed to embargo information about the new Blueprint until today, although the Blueprint team blogged about it on the weekend.

Phil Gilbert started out with a high-level corporate update, including their growth — both new hires and through their channel — and some of the new sales where they continue to compete successfully against larger vendors. However, most of the information was about their products and services.

Blueprint, their SaaS process discovery tool, now has 2,400 customer accounts (averaging 5 users per account) in 88 countries. A major update was just released, where they’ve moved on from just business mapping to a more complete BPMN modeler. Later this year, they’ll be improving the wiki-style documentation capabilities in the process repository, and at the end of this year or early next year, they’ll be moving some of Teamworks’ performance analysis tools — process simulation and executive dashboards — into Blueprint. Phil tried to counter the fears of companies not wanting to keep key business information in a hosted environment outside the firewall, but I know that until Blueprint can be hosted outside the US, where privacy laws are not well-aligned with many other countries such as Canada, a lot of my customers wouldn’t even consider it. I asked Phil if they planned to host outside of the US, and he said “probably in 2009” but indicated that it would be based on customer demand. The only other analyst on the call who seemed concerned about this — especially when it includes passing back operational data to the modeling environment for simulation — was Neil Ward-Dutton, who was the only other person who wasn’t US-based.

We had a demo of the new version of Blueprint, which includes the ability to reuse processes across Blueprint projects as linked subprocesses: a significant architectural improvement. The new diagramming capabilities include in-line embedded subprocesses that can be expanded and collapsed in place (nice!), the ability to easily convert a single step to a subprocess, and backward looping. It also includes a Visio importer, although not in the free version. In other words, this has clearly moved beyond the “toy” label that many other vendors have been applying to Blueprint, and appears to be a fairly full-featured process modeling tool now.

They’ll continue with their current Blueprint pricing model that has a free version for a single user and a limited number of processes in order to try it out, then subscription pricing of $50/user/month for the professional version, which includes the Visio importer and Teamworks integration.

The other major announcement is about three packages of services that Lombardi will be offering, all of which involve working closely with the customer and using Blueprint to document the processes:

Process inventory, a 3-week engagement that includes a full inventory of level 1 “as-is” processes within an organization, identification of 30+ key business KPIs and SLAs, and a report of process improvement opportunities and roadmap. Expected price is $40k.
Process assessment, a 2-day engagement to assess a single process: ranking the problems and opportunities, level 1 and 2 “as-is” process maps, and identification of 5-10 key process KPIs and SLAs. Expected price is $15k.
Process analysis, a 2-week engagement that follows on from the process assessment with a full analysis of a process by adding detailed ranking of process problems and opportunities, level 1 and 2 “as-is” and “to-be” process maps, the identification of 10-20 key process KPIs and SLAs, and an estimated potential ROI analysis. Expected price is $40k.

The idea is that a customer would have the process inventory done to take a look at all of their business processes and select one or two critical ones, then have the assessment and analysis done for each of those critical processes.

These service packages are available now worldwide, and are working to train their partners to provide these services, although they don’t yet have any partners who can deliver the entire set of packages.

TransitCamp: Moving the Metronauts Community Online

Metronauts already has a website, of course, but there’s more to an online community than a website: it’s about enabling and fostering collaboration. The Metronauts site is a place for people who are passionate about transit in the greater Toronto area.

There are a three main collaboration features on the site: conversations, projects and events. Conversations and projects are similar to blog posts in that you can create one, add tags (using your own folksonomy), and add comments to one started by someone else. You can vote for your favourite conversations to improve their karma (popularity). Events are a bit more structured, in that they have information such as date/time and location that can be fed into calendaring formats.

This isn’t just for "official" (if there were such a thing) Metronaut website people to add conversations, projects and events; anyone in the community can participate, such as Rannie Turingan’s project for a visual essay contest. Events can be big ones like today’s TransitCamp, or smaller events focused on specific transit topics. Any other page on the site can include embedded video, photos, slides and other multimedia.

Ideas for publicizing the efforts:

Flash mob of Metronauts on a busy transit route in order to raise awareness of transit issues.
Volunteer advocates to help distribute transit information at major stations: the Metronauts Ground Crew.
How do we engage drivers in the conversation to get them involved and interested in transit?
Create Facebook events for things such as "take transit to work day", where you can invite your Facebook friends who typically drive to try out transit.

Outstanding questions about the site:

What should the Metronauts site be? When to use the Metronauts site directly versus linking to a social networking site such as Facebook?
What is the role of a Metronauts site moderator?
How do we syndicate or blogroll external blog posts onto the site?
How do we involve people who aren’t particularly tech-savvy, both in terms of presenting simplified interfaces and training/mentoring? This is a classic problem with any sort of user-generated content site, where more than half of the population isn’t even visiting the site, and a large portion of the remainder are spectators or occasional commenters.

Metrolinx is also seeking engagement with the community, both through the Metronauts site and through other venues that they might use to allow community involvement in the transit planning process.

TransitCamp: How Do We Leverage Worldwide Transit Knowledge?

Mark Mulholland organized a session on leveraging worldwide knowledge about transit, since there’s more and more groups everywhere who are trying to improve their transit systems. Why not use the wisdom of the crowds to leverage good ideas that have been proven elsewhere to get the most bang for our limited bucks? There are also opportunities to collaborate with other transit-focused groups, as opposed to just picking up their ideas, to develop new ideas together and potentially create open source solutions that can be shared.

Ideas for fostering collaboration and idea exchange with other transit advocates from around the circle:

Exchange programs for staff in transit organizations (opposition to this idea: "I don’t want to pay for politicians to travel around on my tax dollars"). The current problem is that it’s mostly politicians who are doing the travelling to look at other transit systems, not the staff at the transit systems who can actually implement the solutions. An interesting discussion of Metrolinx’s recent trip to the UK and Madrid, including a link to their report, is here.
Important to look at the context: what works in one country won’t work in another because of political and economic conditions.
Ability to share stories from transit experiences around the world, both from the point of view of visitors and residents.
Need to find transit expertise worldwide and incorporate that into our local projects.
Look at our needs, and find places in the world that have had to address those same needs. In other words, work from the needs rather than a presupposed solution.
Leverage local bi-national chambers of commerce (e.g., Indo-Canadian, Australian-Canadian) to find similar groups in other countries.
Add links to other TransitCamps and transit-related groups to this wiki to make it easy to find other like-minded groups.
There need to be links from the community back into the transit organizations to ensure that the ideas generated are considered for use. In general, how do we cross-pollinate between the community and the transit organizations?
We need to consider ideas from other transit systems about customer service standards, and understand the customer service problems that we have now with our local transit systems.
Public online forum for collaboration and capturing information (such as this TransitCamp wiki, Vancouver’s TransitCamp which is supposed to be here but isn’t, and San Francisco’s TransitCamp links), and for publishing research and findings from transit authorities such as Metrolinx. For example, transit geeks in San Francisco are using Get Satisfaction as a forum for discussions about transit in a very user-friendly question-and-answer format rather than a more free-form (and sometimes more intimidating) wiki format.

The wiki page for this session, which includes these notes of mine plus other attendees’ contributions, is here.

TransitCamp: MyTTC

My friend Kieran, as a result of last year’s TransitCamp, got together with a couple of other transit/technology geeks to create MyTTC, a community-driven site for Toronto transit information that will launch in about two weeks, in time for the next TransitCamp event. They did this in response to the deficiencies of the official TTC website, which is famously bad for providing decent information about actually using the third most heavily used transit system in North America.

MyTTC is focused primarily on routes and schedules, and contains all of the route and schedule data that they’ve gleaned from the TTC site and other sources. Each route is mapped using embedded Google Maps, with individual stops marked and the arrival times expected for surface vehicles at each stop. There’s also transfer information for each stop and route, so that you can see which other routes connect to that route and stop, and other context-sensitive information about stops.

But it’s more than just a static information site; it has a lot of wiki-like aspects for user-generated content (although it’s built on Ruby and Merb rather than a wiki platform). Users can add stops to routes — the TTC routes/schedules only show main stops, not every stop — and the scheduled time for the newly-added stops will be interpolated from the existing data. Users can also add other context-sensitive information about stops, such as typical delays at certain times of day, points of interest, and places to wait out of the weather where you can see the bus/streetcar approaching. Users can also bookmark their favourite stops, which will appear on their personalized home page when they’re logged in.

One of the largest issues that they’ve had, and are likely to continue to have, is getting data from the TTC: many transit authorities are notoriously miserly with their data, in spite of the fact that it’s created mostly with public funding. For MyTTC, they used the route and schedule data that’s available on the TTC site, much of it captured manually (and painfully), but TTC hasn’t been willing to share any data in a more easily-ingestible form, or to share the data that will soon be generated by global positioning systems on surface vehicles. This, of course, is a political problem rather than a technical problem, and likely others will need to be involved to help resolve this.

MyTTC is attempting to create a platform where the data is fully open (although they are not, at this time, making the code open source): they will be providing full XML and JSON APIs, SQL dumps of the data, and GTFS (Google Transit Feed Spec). In fact, their contacts at Google have said that Google Transit will accept their data in place of TTC’s, likely because it’s more accessible and complete. They don’t plan to monetize the APIs, but would rather have other sites export the data and use it for their own purposes directly.

The platform itself is transit system-agnostic, and could be used for any transit system. There’s explicit support for the iPhone, and other mobile platforms such as Blackberry will be tested — in fact, I think that I just volunteered for that. There are plans for some SMS interfaces, such as being able to send an SMS message to the site with your current location and get back related information, and we discussed the use of Twitter including direct access (like the BART experiment last year) and Twitter-based applications (like CommuterFeed). They also want to add a trip planner to MyTTC before the launch.

The wiki page for this session, which includes these notes of mine plus other attendees’ contributions, is here.

TransitCamp!

Most of the unconference "camp" type events that I attend are technology-related, but today I’m attending TransitCamp in Toronto, originally conceived by a few of my TorCamp friends and now happening in other cities as well as becoming a vital part of the greater Toronto area transit planning process. What started out a year ago as an informal collection of people interested in transit has evolved into a much more mainstream channel for sharing the conversation about transit amongst the providers, consumers and any other interested parties.

One of the general managers of Metrolinx said a few words in the opening session; it’s great that they’re participating directly although this isn’t their event. This is the first in a series of events that will happen around the greater Toronto area, since transit is not just about downtown, but also about how all the regional transportation options tie together.

If you’re attending TransitCamp or want to follow along with the sessions, they’re all on the wiki (or will be, once all the notes are entered).

If you’re interested in transit in Toronto, join the community at the Metronauts site.

You can follow a collection of the conversations on the Onaswarm Metronauts swarm, or through Twitter on the #metronauts or #transitcamp hashtags.

What did Earth Hour do for us?

I’ve heard a lot of criticism of Earth Hour over the past few days, mainly that it was a token public effort by people who aren’t really committed to any permanent change. Whether that’s true or not can’t be determined from last night’s behaviour alone, although I have read that some local businesses were using this as a test for how they can reduce their energy consumption on a regular basis while still maintaining safety standards.

In looking at last night’s behaviour specifically, consider the expected power demand curve for today (Sunday) in Ontario: pretty low at 8am when I grabbed these from the Ontario Wholesale Electricity Demand and Price Information site, expected to climb before noon as people start to make lunch and do laundry, then increase to a peak around 8pm when the sun has just set, the dishwasher is on after dinner, and people settle down to the TV or computer for a couple of hours. The green curve is actual demand, the darker step graph is the projected demand, and these guys are usually pretty accurate.

Now here’s what happened yesterday, which included Earth Hour at 8pm (20 on the horizontal axis):

I wished that I had captured the projected demand curve earlier in the day for comparison, but I suspect that the expected curve would have been much like today’s graph shown at the top. We see a higher demand midday than today, due to more businesses open on Saturday than Sunday, but then an interesting phenomenon: long before Earth Hour starts at 8pm, power consumption drops off, and stays well below the midday peak for the remainder of the evening, even after Earth Hour completed at 9pm.

So what’s the story here? This is only my hypothesis, but I think that businesses and individuals started lowering their power consumption much earlier in the day (around 3pm, when the usual evening demand would normally start to build) and maintained the lower power levels longer than the designated hour (until 10:30, when the usual evening demand would normally start to drop off) because of the awareness that Earth Hour raised; in other words, Earth Hour actually had an impact seven to eight times longer than planned.

During the actual hour of 8-9pm, a lot of us were sitting around in the dark or out on the street gawking at the lack of lights in some of the buildings, but what were we doing all afternoon until 8pm, and after 9pm, that also made a difference? Obviously, we were all going about our normal Saturday lives, but somehow using much less energy than usual. That gives me hope that this isn’t just a placebo, and we can reduce energy consumption if we take yesterday’s lessons to heart.

Jason Laszlo gives Bell Canada a(nother) black eye

All week, the local tech community has been buzzing around the news that Bell Canada is throttling P2P traffic — specifically the widely-used BitTorrent protocol — for not only their direct Sympatico subscribers, but also for anyone who buys their supposedly unlimited DSL from a Sympatico reseller, such as TekSavvy. For those of you new to the traffic shaping/net neutrality wars that have been going on in North America over the past months, here’s why throttling P2P traffic isn’t good news:

Bell Canada (and our only other “last mile” carrier, Rogers Cable) are violating their role as a common carrier: they’re supposed to deliver the data, regardless of what it is, subject to our individual bandwidth and download caps. As long as I’m not getting a higher bandwidth than I was promised, and don’t go over my monthly volume cap, I should be able to download whatever I want, whenever I want, because the contract that I signed with Bell implied that would be the case. If they can’t deliver that bandwidth, then they shouldn’t be selling it; furthermore, they should have taken the money made by all these years of overselling the same bandwidth and invested in improving the now-outdated infrastructure so that we wouldn’t have these problems now.
The carriers, Bell and Rogers, like to position this as allowing equal access to everyone instead of allowing those evil file-sharing types to hog the bandwidth, but they don’t exactly have altruistic motives: both of them sell services (cable and satellite TV) that compete with downloaded video, and they want you paying $40+ to them each month to watch the TV that they choose rather than be able to select from a wide variety of alternative — and legal — video available on the internet. Furthermore, Rogers wants to use the same bandwidth that you would use for free video downloads to download their pay-per-view movies instead.
Bell and Rogers have targeted the BitTorrent protocol for throttling even though it has many legal uses. Last week, CBC made history by offering a TV program available, DRM-free, for download by BitTorrent. This allowed anyone in the world with broadband access to have access to Canadian programming that might not be available on their local TV stations. By throttling BitTorrent, however, Bell and Rogers are effectively blocking access to that Canadian content within Canada, forcing people to watch it on Bell or Rogers’ TV services. Personally, I use BitTorrent not just for that CBC show, but to download new releases of Ubuntu, and other large open source downloads where the source site provides BitTorrent as an option in order to reduce the bandwidth demands on their servers.

What this all comes down to is a violation of net neutrality: Bell and Rogers are deciding which traffic on the network gets higher priority. They’re doing it now because they’ve failed to make the necessary investments in infrastructure over the years that would allow them to actually deliver what they sell, and coincidentally they choose to throttle traffic that competes with their other business areas.

Suffice it to say that Bell Canada didn’t have a good week because of this — it was all over the news, the DSL resellers are talking about suing, and even the unions are in on the action. Enter Jason Laszlo, a spokesperson (apparently associate director of media relations) for Bell Canada, who was quoted extensively on this issue in the press:

“Regarding customers like Mount Sinai [a major Toronto hospital that was used as an example of how legal file sharing might be used for CAT scans], Laszlo said it’s their own fault for using a notorious application like file-sharing. ‘We’re blind to the content flowing through our pipes,’ he said. ‘Our goal is to ensure maximum efficiency for everyone.'” — Digital Journal, March 25th. [“Notorious”? Oh, puh-leeze. And if they were blind to the content, then they wouldn’t be throttling file sharing.]
“P2P programs are only employed by a small percentage of internet users, but they tend to make use of all the available bandwidth, Laszlo said. Reduced P2P use should provide a better balance between P2P and other users at peak times, he said. ‘I feel we’re on the side of good,’ he said.” — CBC News, March 25th. [Throttling P2P is a good way to make sure that it is only ever employed by a small percentage of users, which is exactly what Bell wants.]
“Bell spokesman Jason Laszlo on Friday reiterated the company’s position —that it was shaping traffic in order to prevent a small portion of bandwidth hogs from slowing speeds down for all customers.” — CBC News, March 28th.
“Jason is throttle-icious.” — Jason Laszlo’s then-publicly-viewable Facebook profile, status update dated March 28th at 4:34pm.
“Jason is realizing how little seperates [sic] most journalists from lemmings.” — Jason Laszlo’s then-publicly-viewable Facebook profile, status update dated evening of March 28th.

Yes, those last two are real; his Facebook profile was posted on a broadband discussion forum yesterday afternoon (you can Digg the story here); he obviously was unaware of the impact of no privacy settings, since I was able to access his profile immediately after that even though we’re not directly connected and have no mutual friends.

My friend Mark Kuznicki channeled his outrage into a great blog post about how this hands the net neutrality advocates a gift, and messaged Laszlo on Facebook to let him know what we all think of his two-faced approach to media relations. Shortly after that, Laszlo’s profile was set to private so that I could no longer view it; this morning, it appears to be completely missing.

So what’s the lesson to be learned from this mess? The public is now aware and mobilized on the impact of traffic shaping on their daily lives, even if they haven’t yet heard the term net neutrality. To paraphrase Peter Finch’s character from Network, we’re mad as hell and we’re not going to take this anymore.

Oh, yeah, lesson #2: don’t entrust media relations for a sensitive subject to an inexperienced junior who doesn’t know well enough not to post inappropriate comments to his publicly-viewable Facebook profile.

WordPress upgrade complete

I’ve upgraded WordPress to version 2.5, and the Barthelme theme to version 4.5 (which is only compatible with WP2.5+). Let me know if you see any problems with the site.

One problem that I had with upgrading: I use widgets in my sidebar, including three text widgets for my feed block, my Google ads, and a hidden one at the end that includes my statistics counter. After upgrading, I went into the Widgets section, set a few parameters (there are some new options, such as being allowed to set a custom title on the Search widget) and saved the changes; this caused all the text widgets to become blank. They were still there, just empty. Luckily, I had seen this when upgrading another site earlier today, and had saved the contents of the widgets to paste back in. I deleted each of the text widgets and recreated them with the saved text that I had, and they seem to work fine now when I make edits to other widgets and re-save.

I’m having a bit of a problem posting from Windows Live Writer; I reset my credentials and tried a couple of times before I could publish this post successfully. Hopefully that’s a temporary glitch.

WordPress upgrade today

WordPress 2.5 has been released, and I’ll be upgrading today, plus upgrading to the latest version of the Barthelme theme that I use on this site. If you see any weirdness on the site, that’s likely the cause, and I’ll get things back to normal as soon as possible.