Author: sandy

Keeping busy

I’ve been snowed under with finishing the first version of “Making BPM Mean Business“, to be premiered next month at FileNet’s user conference in Las Vegas, as well as a few other presentations and some coursework for a client on enterprise architecture.

I’ve also been spending some time on my new technology acquisitions: an HP tablet PC and a new Blackberry, replacing some ancient stuff from Nokia, RIM and Compaq that steadfastly refuse to die. The new convertible tablet is great and will be very useful for the BPM course and other presentations: I miss the old days of transparencies when I could write on the slides, and being able to annotate in digital ink is the next best thing. I’ve taken it for a few test drives, but the two-day course will be the real challenge. The new Blackberry is a dream: phone and PDA in one, which reduces the electronic clutter to a minimum, and much better geographic coverage for email. Since I use it primarily for email, and only have the phone functionality because one must have a mobile these days, the PDA format (rather than the phone format that RIM also offers) works best for me. My only beef: the holster that comes with it looks like something that Batman would wear on his belt (not my style), and I need something without a clip to slip into my purse; the simple slipcover with the magnet in the right place to allow the device to register itself as “holstered” set me back $40.

Fractured Language

Yesterday, I was finishing off a presentation for a talk that I’ll be giving next month about corporate performance management, including some of the analytics tools that are used to build things like executive dashboards to display the key performance indicators of a company’s operations as charts and dials. Two tools/metaphors are used a lot: dashboards and scorecards, which both do exactly as they sound. Unfortunately, in my research I found at least one vendor of these products who verbs the nouns, and refers to “dashboarding” and “scorecarding” as the activities of creating these things for a company. Blech.

I felt better after this morning’s daily dose of Savage Chickens.

The disappearing blog

I hate it when a blog that I read semi-regularly just vanishes off the face of the ‘net. I commented back in June about vendors starting to blog, and I had my finger on the RSS pulse of CommerceQuest’s blog in spite of some of the blatant self-promotion. Today, however, Metastorm and CommerceQuest have merged under the Metastorm name, the CommerceQuest site is redirected to Metastorm, and the blog is gone. All that I have left are a few crumbs in Bloglines.

Business discontinuity

I’ve been developing something recently for a customer on business continuity planning, and it put me in mind of how a former customer handled a disaster without the benefit of much BCP.

It was the ice storm of 1998, and this small financial company had their main processing site in downtown Montreal. Although the storm started on Monday (and continued for a week), power didn’t start failing until late in the week, and my customer didn’t lose their power until Friday afternoon. It quickly became obvious that the power was not coming back any time soon, which created a problem of unprocessed transactions: since they process mutual fund trades, many trades were already entered in the system, but would not be priced and processed until the overnight batch run. That weekend, the CIO and VP of IT decided to take action. They sneaked into the building (by now, the city was being patrolled by the military to deter looters), climbed 30 floors to their offices, disconnected the main server, and carried it on their backs down the 30 flights of stairs. They returned to one of their own homes, which still had power and telephone service, downloaded the pricing data and did the overnight batch run to process the trades. They then packed up the server in a van, drove it to Toronto — an interesting drive given that the main highways were all closed by now — and installed it in their small sales office there. They arranged for the toll-free customer service lines to be rerouted from their Montreal office to Toronto, added a few temporary and relocated staff to handle the phones, and were up and running by 6am on Monday. They were missing a few pieces, such as that nice imaging and workflow system that I had put in for them, but they were operational with effectively no interruption to their customers.

I remember laughing about this whole scenario when I heard it from the CIO shortly after that, and I definitely thought that these guys were heroes. In retrospect, if that same scenario had gone down today, someone would have been fired for a serious lack of business continuity planning. They suffered from a very common view of continuity planning that exists widely even today: a fatalistic sense that the risks are so low that it’s not worth planning for such a disaster. Given that the last ice storm of that magnitude to hit Montreal was almost 40 years before that, I can understand that view with regards to weather disasters, but there’s other ways to put your business out of commission; for example, Quebec’s history of domestic terrorism can’t be ignored in this post-9/11 world.

In other words, the potential for business discontinuity exists even if you don’t live on a fault line or in the path of major hurricanes: there are enough man-made disasters to keep us all awake at night. It’s no longer possible to ignore BCP, or claim that you can’t plan for something that might never happen. The question to ask yourself when budgeting for business continuity is “how long can we afford to be down?”

BPM unplugged

I loved Ethan’s podcast (and post) on The Vision Thing on Friday, which included the wise advice:

You don’t need computers to implement a Business Process Management (BPM) strategy.

I’m in the process of finalizing a 2-day seminar on BPM called “Making BPM Mean Business“, which I’ll be presenting for the first time at FileNet’s user conference in November. The most common question that I get about the course: “Is it is a hands-on course?”, and the second-most common, which usually immediately follows that one: “Will you be doing a [software] demonstration?” The answer to both is no, but a lot of people find it hard to believe that there is two days worth of material on BPM that doesn’t require using a computer. In actual fact, there is probably about 100 graduate degrees worth of material to talk about BPM that would never involved turning on a computer, but there always seems to be a rush to buy some hardware and software and implement something — anything — before the larger context is even considered.

It’s a bit ironic (considering that this is being held at a FileNet user conference) that I’ll be spending the first day of the seminar talking about everything except FileNet: enterprise architecture, business intelligence, corporate performance management, quality management, business process outsourcing, BPM standards and the entire process of process modelling. No computers; just ideas and discussion. After all, if you don’t understand the context for BPM in your organizations, and the processes that are eventually to be automated, you’re not ready to put your hands on a computer yet.

Is disruption the new status quo?

I opened my mailbox today to find the current copy of the Economist (yes, I still enjoy a few publications on paper) with the cover story “How the internet killed the phone business” (paid subscription required to read article). It covers eBay’s purchase of Skype, of course, but starts with a great definition of disruptive technology:

The term “disruptive technology” is popular, but is widely misused. It refers not simply to a clever new technology, but to one that undermines an existing technology — and which therefore makes life very difficult for the many businesses which depend on the existing way of doing things.

A term originally coined in The Innovator’s Dilemma, disruptive technology (or what Clayton Christensen later renamed “disruptive innovation”) is becoming increasingly pervasive. What Skype is doing to the traditional phone companies is like what blogs are doing to advertising and PR firms, or what SOA is doing to large systems integrators: forcing them to change or die.

In all three of these examples, and many more, there will be no putting the genie back in the bottle. And except for the traditional companies who are being forced to reinvent themselves, who would want to go back when there are such obvious benefits for the consumer? These days, I make all my international calls via Skype at greatly reduced rates; I use this blog as a my primary marketing medium at practically zero cost and with the added benefit of it being a creative outlet; and I consistently recommend to clients that they consider SOA as a way to avoid spending millions of dollars on custom integration solutions.

Embrace the disruption: resistance is futile.

User-driven design

Kathy Sierra recently posted the following helpful hint on Creating Passionate Users:

Seriously, though, she goes on to say:

Most of us realize that focus groups are notoriously ineffective for many things, but we still assume that listening to real feedback from real users is the best way to drive new products and services, as well as improve on what we have. But there’s a huge problem with that — people don’t necessarily know how to ask for something they’ve never conceived of! Most people make suggestions based entirely around incremental improvements, looking at what exists and thinking about how it could be better. But that’s quite different from having a vision for something profoundly new.

This isn’t a new idea (that users themselves are typically not going to come up with breakthrough innovations), but one that we need to constantly keep in mind. When I’m designing a system, I make a deal with the users who are involved in focus groups, JADs and other interviews: they tell me what they need to accomplish to meet their business goals, and I’ll design the best way to do it. In other words, I’ll treat them as the business subject matter experts, and they’ll treat me as the design expert.

There’s a constant struggle with users who insist on specific features (e.g., “the button has to be blue”, when I’m trying to create something that doesn’t even need a button) because they don’t have the perspective to spontaneously visualize the future that is possible for them. Designing BPM systems is particularly problematic, since manual business processes are part of the folklore of an organization, and changing them causes some amount of cultural disruption. Having users involved in the design process is necessary, but it’s also necessary not to be unduly influenced by protests of “but we’ve always done it this way”.

Strangely enough, I was on Amazon yesterday and under “My Recommendations” it came up with Flatland, a short book of fiction about geometry, published in 1880, that I haven’t read since I was in university:

Flatland…imagines a two-dimensional world inhabited by sentient geometric shapes who think their planar world is all there is. But one Flatlander, a Square, discovers the existence of a third dimension and the limits of his world’s assumptions about reality and comes to understand the confusing problem of higher dimensions.

As a designer, sometimes I just have to think like a Square in a Flatland.

WCM resurgence

This article in Intelligent Enterprise last week questions why ECM vendors — including Hummingbird, FileNet and Open Text — have been highlighting their WCM products lately, but they miss the mark on the answer:

Is it the fact that online advertising and e-commerce initiatives are back? Is it the prospect of capturing fast growth in the mid-market–the rationale Hummingbird cited for its Red Dot deal? Is it a defensive move in response to Microsoft’s recent signal that it will consolidate the SharePoint Portal and Microsoft Content Manger products? I suspect it’s all of the above, plus a healthy slice of pressure from Wall Street to fuel growth through new license revenue as well as services income.

A big part of the answer should be “compliance”, that is, for companies where their compliance requirements include control of the creation and delivery of content via the web, such as securities. WCM as a part of ECM is key for web compliance requirements, because it allows tight control over the processes of how something is published, and also provides a record of what content was available on what dates.

Why is it that everything that I see these days becomes compliance? 🙂