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Mashing up a new world (dis)order

Now that I’ve been disconnected from the fire hose of information that was Mashup Camp, I’ve had a bit of time to reflect on what I saw there.

Without doubt, this is the future of application integration both on the public internet and inside the enterprise. But — and this is a big but — it’s still very embryonic, and I can’t imagine seriously suggesting much of this to any CIO that I know at this point, since they all work for large and fairly conservative organizations. However, I will be whispering it in their ears (not literally) over the coming months to help prepare them for the new world (dis)order.

From an enterprise application integration perspective, there’s two major lessons to be learned from Mashup Camp.

First, there’s a lot of data sources and services out there that could be effectively combined with enterprise data for consumption both inside and outside the firewall. I saw APIs that wrap various data sources (including very business-focused ones such as Dun + Bradstreet), VOIP, MAPI and CRM as well as the better-known Google, Yahoo! and eBay APIs. The big challenge here is the NIH syndrome: corporate IT departments are notorious for rejecting services and especially data that they don’t own and didn’t create. Get over it, guys. ThereÂs a much bigger world of data and services than you can ever build yourself, and you can do a much better job of building the systems that are actually a competitive differentiator for you rather than wasting your time building your own mapping system so that you can show your customers where your branches are located. Put those suckers on Google maps, pronto. This is no different than 1000’s of other arguments that have occurred on this same subject over the years, such as “donÂt build your own workflow system” (my personal fave), and is no different than using a web service from a trusted service provider. Okay, maybe it’s a bit different than dealing with a trusted service provider, but I’ll get to the details of that in a later post on contracts and SLAs in the world of mashups.

Second, enterprise IT departments should be looking at the mechanics of how this integration takes place. Mashup developers are not spending millions of dollars and multiple years integrating services and data. Of course, theyÂre a bit too cavalier for enterprise development, typically eschewing such niceties as ensuring the legality of using the data sources and enterprise-strength testing, but there’s techniques to be learned that can greatly speed application integration within an organization. To be fair, many IT departments need to put themselves in the position of both the API providers and the developers that I met at MashupCamp, since they need to both wrap some of their own ugly old systems in some nicer interfaces and consume the resulting APIs in their own internal corporate mashups. I’ve been pushing for a few years for my customers to start wrapping their legacy systems in web services APIs for easier consumption, which few have adopted beyond some rudimentary functionality, but consider that some of the mashup developers are providing a PHP interface that wraps around a web service so that you can develop using something even easier: application integration for the people, instead of just for the wizards of IT. IT development has become grossly overcomplicated, and itÂs time to shed a few pounds and find some simpler and faster ways of doing things.

Mashup Camp peek

It’s the second day of Mashup Camp, and I’ve had zero time to blog about what’s going on here — much like everyone else here, so it seems. I’ll be posting my thoughts later this week, but in the meantime you can check out the other blog posts about Mashup Camp and look at the pictures that people are taking here (over 600 at this time).

Steps to BPM Success

I just watched a webinar hosted by BPMinstitute called “Proven Steps to BPM Success”. By the time the webinar started, it was retitled as “Breakaway BPM — Leveraging Business Process Innovation for Strategic Advantage”, although there wasn’t really a lot of content that fit that description. Unfortunately the webinar started with a (short) presentation by the hosting vendor, Metastorm, then proceeded to a presentation by AMTI, one of their partners. Basically, vendor followed by vendor. Whatever happened to having customers talk about their experiences?

A couple of good ideas and graphics from the Metastorm CEO, including this one on the evolution of BPM as driven by complex process initiatives:

However, pretty tame stuff from the “featured speaker” from AMTI talking about their process improvement efforts, like “reward success” and “process should be integral to the way you work”. And he totally didn’t understand why a recent Gartner survey (summarized in InfoWorld) showed that CIOs’ top business priority is improving processes but their top technology priority is business intelligence. Um, BPM and BI are related, dude — that’s what business activity monitoring (BAM) and corporate performance management (CPM) are all about.

You’ll be able to find a replay of the webinar on the BPMinstitute site within a few days, listed under their Round Tables section.

Multi-tasking during the webinar did give me a chance to glance through an interesting article in a recent copy of the Economist, Thinking for a living (paid subscription required), the title of which is based on the book of the same name by Tom Davenport. The article has a great nugget of truth from a consultant at Boston Consulting Group:

Mr. Morieux concludes that companies should concentrate on designing the processes that knowledge workers carry out, rather than measuring their performance.

Rather a different view on the whole BAM/CPM issue.

Tips for vendor showdowns

Phil Gilbert (CTO of Lombardi) posts about how to evaluate vendors, and makes some comments that are likely to cause a few groans from people inside his own sales organization, like the 60-day money-back guarantee.

I’d like to add one more thing to his list: request that one of the references be from within the vendor itself; in other words, how are they using their own product? Every company has processes, and if a BPM vendor can’t show how they’re improving their own processes using their own product, you want to know why. And we’re not just talking their expense report approvals process here; ask to see something that’s critical to the revenue-generation side of their business.

Before you head out to evaluate vendor products, however, you need to have a good understanding of your own processes, or at least the general category and order of complexity; otherwise, the vendors will just show you what they want you to see, not what you need to see in order to evaluate how well the product will serve your needs. Think globally (across your entire organization) even if you’ll initially be acting locally (within a department).

Review a checklist such as the recent Gartner BPM Suite Selection Criteria report and think about which of those capabilities that you require before you start talking to vendors.

Talk to a variety of people inside your organization: not just business users, and not just IT, but a reasonable survey of both viewpoints. Some of the biggest BPM disasters that I’ve seen have been because the product was selected purely on the basis of one of those two viewpoints (business or IT), but not both.

The Vision Thing slowly says goodbye

One of the first BPM-related blogs to be added to my newsreader was The Vision Thing, and today Ethan announced that he’s shutting it down. I had the pleasure of being interviewed by Ethan for one of his Sound of Vision podcasts last May, then meeting him face-to-face at our own little bloggers dinner in Dallas in December.

There’s a few things that you should check out on his site: the flowchart article archive (anyone who can write five articles on the theme of “Visio is Evil” has to have something to say about process mapping!), the rest of the Sound of Vision podcast archive, and the snippets in Process for the People.

This month, Ethan launched Vision Monthly, an online magazine that covers a much wider range of business issues. The first issue included an article by Elisa Camahort (co-founder of BlogHer), one by Paul Gimbel of Razorleaf which led me to his blog on process analysis, and others.

Ethan, we’re sorry to see TVT go, and good luck with Vision Monthly.

BPM emerging from its niche

It’s a good sign when a niche technology starts getting a lot of coverage in mainstream IT press. I don’t consider BPM “niche” any more (okay, maybe “niche-ish”), but it’s still not as widespread as it could be. Judging by the popular press, however, we’re slowly creeping across the chasm.

Case in point: BPM is all over Intelligent Enterprise the past few months. An article by Bruce Silver discusses five reasons to invest in BPM: simplification, efficiency, compliance and control, agility, and continuous improvement (I think that his first two are actually the same, but no matter, the point is the same). Other articles discuss the incredible number of BPM vendors and the inevitable impending consolidation, the move to BPM suites (now that Gartner claims that “pure-play” BPM is dead), and the inclusion of BAM (business activity monitoring) in the BI (business intelligence) space.

As BPM, SOA, mashups and other integration technologies overlap more both from a technology and usage standpoint, it will drive all of them to greater recognition.

BPM for dummies

No, I don’t think any of you are dummies — the title (however appropriate) is in sympathy with a letter received by Jason Calacanis and a follow-up suggestion by Jeff Jarvis. Check for related posts with the fordummies tag on Technorati.

Back to the point of this post: an email that I received eariler this week from the BPM Academy, which is a thinly-veiled marketing site for Appian, although it does contain some interesting links. The email was directing me to a BPM Primer webinar that they’re holding next Wednesday, which probably holds some value for those just starting out with BPM or looking to learn the terminology and concepts. (You can probably find the same information poking around the links on my Squidoo BPM page, but some people prefer the webinar format). The really funny part, however, was the title of email that they sent promoting the event:

Go from BPM Beginner to BPM Brainiac in one short hour

I don’t know what’s funnier: the use of the word “brainiac”, or the idea that someone in their marketing department thinks that people are dumb enough to give credence to their claim. They don’t claim to be the definitive education on BPM, but I’m still laughing.

Blogging evangelist

I’ve written about business blogging in the past, and I firmly believe that it has become an essential tool for small business marketing in any business where the personalities and personal knowledge of the participants form most of the value of the company. As a company of one, I’m all I’ve got, and I blog in part as an online portfolio but also as a way to engage smart people in conversations of mutual interest. Somehow along the way, I became an evangelist for blogging.

For the past couple of years, I’ve been doing some very occasional mentoring for the son of a friend and his two buddies as they start up their company, Trioro. Every time that we have met for the past year, I’ve asked them when they were going to start blogging, and gradually their looks changed from “she’s crazy but we’ll tolerate it” to “hmm, that might be a good idea if I can fit it into my spare time” (Scott, I can read your face like a book). I strongly suggested that all three of them blog, since they are the company, and a few weeks ago they finally came through. I think that they’re still finding their voice, but it’s a great start.

It’s a little strange to have to push this new-fangled technology to people young enough to be my own kids (well, okay, if I had decided to have kids instead of taking grade 11 algebra), but when I think about it, I’m not really pushing the technology, I’m pushing the concept of a blog as marketing. I can’t fault them for not getting it: a huge part of the business world doesn’t get it yet, either.

I have several friends with small businesses, many of them one-person businesses, and very few of them realize the power of blogging for their business. My long-time friend Pat, a very talented photographer, has her first show of photographs for sale hanging at Barrio Lounge (a great local restaurant) this month. She takes beautiful photos of fruit and vegetable arrangements, lit to look like 16th-century Flemish still life paintings, and prints them on large-format canvas. She’d like to eventually quit her job as a technical writer and do this full-time, and this show is her first step towards making that happen. So you think that she’d be blogging about it, right? About the technique in creating and lighting the arrangements. About the settings on the Canon Digital Rebel that she uses. About the difficulties of finding a printer who could print the large canvases. About the technique for stretching and mounting the canvases. About how we scrambled to hang the show in two hours last Saturday afternoon. If you thought that, you’d be wrong. Okay, she’s busy: while preparing for this show, she was also finishing her Master Gardener certification, in addition to holding down that fulltime job. But at some point, she’s going to realize that success at selling her photographs is going to come much more quickly through greater exposure, and that a blog about how she creates these masterpieces is a powerful tool for gaining that exposure. It’s not like she doesn’t have the skills: Pat’s a professional writer with a degree in English, and she writes many emails to me every week about the same stuff that she should be blogging about.

Another friend of many years, Ingrid, is also a writer. She has degrees in law and journalism, and specializes in plain language business writing on a variety of subjects that usually aren’t so understandable, like tax law. She writes a semi-monthly email column, On Being, that I would love to be able to point you to except that she doesn’t post it online. In other words, she’s a wealth of information on topics that many people would be interested in, but very few of us get to see them. Unlike Pat, however, I think her reasons are more around intellectual property than time constraints: during our latest discussion about On Being, she said that she hoped to be able to sell the columns to a magazine, so didn’t want to put them in the public domain. (I blame the legal training.)

Maybe the problem is that when we write for a living, or if we’re used to highly-polished “marketing writing” as being the world-facing view of a company, we think that everything that we publish has to not only contain pearls of wisdom, but be perfectly proofread. Blogs make that untrue. It’s not like you shouldn’t have something to say, and use your spell-checker once in a while, but you’re not writing your Ph.D. thesis, it’s a blog post! The half-life of the interest in any particular post is less than two days, so there’s not much sense in spending more time than that writing each one.

Interestingly, I wrote most of this post yesterday afternoon, then was interrupted to head off for dinner with Ingrid. We discussed blogging again, and she offered up this last concern — that she was a professional writer and that more casual writing in her blog might impact someone’s view of her finished product — but I think that she’s going to come around on this one.

I rarely write about personal blogging, since I read very few purely personal blogs — most of my reads are technology or business-related. One trend that I have noticed in the past year is “elderblogging”, or blogging by seniors. I’m not talking about what baby boomers are doing as they finally start to retire, I’m talking about their (our) parents: the 70+ crowd. Just as businesses started to realize a few years back that “grey power” was a huge market force, mainstream media is finally starting to notice that the geezers are blogging. That made it easier when I was trying to explain blogging to my 82-year-old mother last month: I just showed her a blog written by a woman her age. Two weeks later, the inevitable email from Mom arrived:

I read Millie’s note today wondering why there aren’t senior bloggers and that she’d helped some get started. As you know my computer skills are not too good but thought that learning how to blog might be fun. Can you tell or send something about how to do this? Don’t know what I’ll blog about but it might be fun.

She started blogging last week. No evangelism required.