Author: sandy

Sometimes, being offline helps me focus

The past few days, I’ve been listening to Cory Doctorow’s Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, as read by Mark “the Brooklyn Bluesman” Forman on his Getting a Leg Up blog. Forman’s not a great reader — or maybe I’m totally spoiled, having just listened to Stephen Fry read the last Harry Potter book — but at least this way I can load it up on my iPod and listen while I’m walking around town or on the subway. If you prefer the printed word, you can also download it in PDF from Doctorow’s site, where he makes some of his writings available for free under a Creative Commons licence.

I was walking and listening today, and heard a bit of prose that describes our current age as seen from the vantage point of people in the future who live with embedded hardware in their brain that provides constant access to their digital environment:

…living like the cavemen of the information age had, surrounded by dead trees and ticking clocks.

I was struck by the imagery that that phrase conjured up for me, of the old days when paper was still a significant budget item, and as a cavewoman of the information age I immediately rushed home and browsed the PDF version to get the full quote. The following line was even better:

Being offline helped me focus.

Oh yeah, I know that feeling. Someone please take away my RSS reader for a day or two?

My 10 geekiest moves so far this month

It’s not even mid-month, and I’ve been a total techno-geek. To wit:

  1. I hooked up my new video iPod to my TV so that I can play video podcasts on the big screen, without using a proprietary Apple cable.

  2. I installed Blackberry Messenger so that I can IM on my Blackberry. As if regular email, PIN messaging and SMS aren’t enough.

  3. I signed up to go to MashupCamp in California next month.

  4. My boyfriend found out that I’m going to California next month because he read it on my blog.

  5. I uttered the phrase “sometimes I think about going back to coding”.

  6. I installed the Firefox X-Ray extension so that I can see the html tags on a page without viewing the source code.

  7. I downloaded ubuntu.

  8. I moved almost all of my bookmarks into del.icio.us.

  9. I loaded Google Local for Mobile onto my Blackberry and I can’t stop grinning and showing people the map directions. Then, within two hours, I convinced three other people to load it on theirs, and gave two of them an in-person tutorial.

  10. I’ve spent the last hour browsing open source shopping cart solutions that I can customize for my wine-tasting club.

Maybe it’s something in the air for 2006?

Who will mash?

Further to my post about enterprise mashup yesterday, I’ve been thinking about who in the BPM space will jump on the enterprise mashup bandwagon first.

In my Making BPM Mean Business course, I discuss the history of BPM, and I’ve noticed that BPM vendors who started on the workflow side of the house typically expand their capabilities through OEM agreements and partnerships (the “United Nations” approach), whereas those who started on the EAI side typically expand by building functionality in-house or buying a small company outright and submerging it into their product (the “world domination” approach). That could be because the pretty UI stuff that is usually developed for the human-facing workflow functionality is perceived as the “personality” of the BPM product, and everyone needs to author their own personality, or at least be perceived as being its author. (Okay, for a comment about technology, that’s pretty philosophical.) There’s lots of exceptions to this, but I find that’s true in many cases.

Does that mean that the BPM vendors with a workflow heritage are more likely to embrace the mashup concepts than their descended-from-EAI competitors? While the old guard thinks it over, the “nouveau BPM” vendors (who are built on web services from the ground up) are probably already demoing the integration of Yahoo Maps with back-office transaction processing, and rewriting their marketing materials to include the word “mashup”.

By the way, I signed up for MashupCamp, so if you’re headed there in February, look me up.

Mashing up the enterprise

I’ve spent the past few days mulling over the differences between mashups and the more traditional integration that’s done with enterprise applications. My initial reaction? There’s a lot more similarities than differences: in both cases, a third party uses published application interfaces to create functionality that integrates the capabilities of two or more applications/services. I know, that’s a bit of a simplification, but how soon will it be before overly complex (and expensive) enterprise integrations start taking advantage of the lessons to be learned from the mashups of web services?

Obviously, I’m not the only one thinking about this: the ZDNet SaaS blog just posted about enterprise mashups, and what’s needed to make them a reality.

Makes me want to go to MashupCamp.

Gartner’s podcasting!

It’s the last company that I expected to be giving it away (for now), but Gartner is publishing podcasts as Gartner Voice. They cover a wide variety of topics so I won’t be listening to them all, but enough of them look interesting for me to add this to my iTunes feed. I also like that they’re short, 10-15 minutes each rather than the hour-long behemoths from other sites that I never find the time to listen to.

There’s an one on BPM as a business catalyst that has some comments on how an organization’s justification for BPM changes from cost savings to agility (both business and IT) as they implement more BPM projects, and also some insights on the coming market convergence.

I’ll also be checking out the one on articulating enterprise architecture in business terms.

Hooked on Analytics

BAM, BI, CEP, analytics: call it what you will. An article by Tom Davenport in HBR, Competing on Analytics (free!), discusses the value of shining a bright light on what’s happening in your business processes:

At a time when firms in many industries offer similar products and use comparable technologies, business processes are among the last remaining points of differentiation. And analytics competitors wring every last drop of value from those processes.

He makes the point that companies that become proficient at analyzing what’s happening with their business processes become the leaders in their field, like Capital One, Marriott and Amazon. These “analytics competitors” have top management buying in to the concept of analytics as a strategic differentiator, have multiple analytics initiatives going on, and are doing it at the enterprise rather than departmental level. I had a question sent to me via my Squidoo BPM lens recently about the BI/analytics marketplace in Toronto, and I had to admit that a lot of my local customers (and not-so-local ones) are still not seeing analytics as a strategic initiative, but are allowing it to languish in departmental applications where it provides ROI but (probably) not much strategic differentiation at an enterprise level. Read Tom’s full article for his full analysis of what the analytics competitors are doing right, and the difference that it’s making for them. He even pooh-poohs the use of the term “business intelligence” as being “the term IT people use for analytics and reporting processes and software”. Ouch!

The linked sub-article, You Know You Compete on Analytics When…, has a summary of the traits of a successful analytics competitor.

Business-driven EA

A thought-provoking post from Brenda Michelson on the Business-Driven Enteprise Architect, including some steps for the CIO to take in order to ensure EA success, such as:

Make Room at the Table for Architecture Leadership. The architecture leader must have a seat at the CIO’s table in IT leadership and business leadership settings. The architecture leader, particularly one with an architecture background, will listen and contribute to the discussions with an enterprise architecture perspective. Don’t filter his/her information through a leader with a non-architecture focus.

Getting — and keeping — your BPM project on track

Derek Miers, who I had the pleasure of meeting at the BPMG conference in London last May, has a recent white paper on the Keys to BPM Project Success on BPTrends. Much of the paper is focussed on a repeatable BPM delivery methodology that is not fundamentally different from the delivery methodology for any IT project, but there are some key BPM-specific points to consider:

Step 5, “Form the BPM Project Team”, highlights the need for a process architect. Not an IT architect, more of business analyst or a hybrid business-systems analyst that will “provide the analytical rigor and techniques” and guide the business users and subject matter experts when identifying improvement opportunities.

Step 6, “Understand the Process”, discusses the need to model the as-is process as a baseline, but not get stuck with the notion that the new process is just the old process with some automated bits. This ties in with (the first) step 7, “Identify Breakthrough Opportunities”, which lists techniques for analyzing a process in order to achieve some degree of process innovation. I use Tom Davenport’s nine areas of process innovation (automational, informational, sequential, tracking, analytical, geographical, integrative, intellectual, disintermediating) as a framework for discussing this topic in my BPM course, and Derek’s list covers some of the same territory.

Overall, some good pointers and a lot of IT project common sense.