business – Page 4

Gartner warns against shelfware-as-a-service

Gartner’s had a good webinar series lately, including one last month with Alexa Bona on software licensing and pricing (link to “roll your own webinar” download of slides in PDF and audio in mp3 separately), as part of their series on IT and the economy. As enterprises look to tighten their belts, software licenses are one place to do that, both on-premise and software-as-a-service, but you need to have flexible terms and conditions in your software contract in order to be able to negotiate a reduction in fees, particularly if there are high switching costs to move to another platform.

For on-premise enterprise software, keep in mind that you don’t own the software, you just have a license to use it. There’s no secondary market for enterprise software: you can’t sell off your Oracle or SAP licenses if you don’t need them any more. Even worse, in many cases, maintenance is from a single source: the original vendor. It’s not that easy to walk away from enterprise software, however, even if you do find a suitable replacement: you’ve probably spent 3-7 times the cost of the licenses on non-reusable external services (customization, training, ongoing services, maintenance), plus the time spent by internal resources and the commitment to build mindshare within the company to support the product. In many cases, changing vendors is not an option and, unfortunately, the vendors know that.

There are a lot of factors in software licensing that can come under dispute:

Oracle’s (and many other vendors’) definition of “named user” includes non-human processes that interact with the database, not just the people who are running applications. This became a huge issue a few years back when enterprise systems started being connected in some way to the internet: is the internet gateway process a single user, or do all potential users have to have individual licenses?
Virtualization and multi-core issues need to be addressed; in many cases, these hardware partitioning is often not adequately covered in license contracts, and you need to ensure that you’re not paying for the maximum potential capacity of the underlying hardware, not what you’re actually using.
Make sure that you have the right to change the platform (including hardware or underlying database) without onerous fees.
Watch out for license minimums embedded within the contract, or cases where upgrading to a larger server will cost you more even if you don’t have any more users. Minimums are for small organizations that barely meet discounting thresholds, not large enterprises. Vendors should not be actively promoting shelfware by enforcing minimums.

Maintenance fees are also on the increase, since vendors are very reliant on the revenue generated from that in the face of decreasing software sales. Customers who have older, stable versions of a product and don’t generate a lot of support issues feel that costs should be decreasing, especially since many vendors are offshoring support so that it is cheaper for vendor to supply it. Of course, it’s not about what the maintenance actually costs, it’s about what the market will bear. Gartner suggests negotiating maintenance caps, the ability to reduce your maintenance if you use less licenses, and the right to switch to a cheaper maintenance offering. Document what you’re entitled to as part of your maintenance, rather than relying on a link to the vendor’s “current maintenance offering”, to ensure that they can’t decrease your benefits. Watch out for what is covered by maintenance upgrades: sometimes the vendor will release what they call a new product but what the customer sees as just a functional upgrade on their existing product. To get around that, you can try licensing the generic functionality rather than the specific products by name (e.g., stating “word processing functionality” rather than “Microsoft Word”).

When polled, 64% of the audience said that they have been approached by a vendor to do a software audit in the past 12 months. In some cases, vendors may be doing this in order to recover license fees if they have lost a sale to the customer and feel that they might find them out of compliance. Be sure to negotiate how the audit is conducted, who pays for it, and what price that you pay for additional licenses if you are found to be out of compliance. Many software vendors are finding it a convenient time to conduct license audits in order to bolster revenues, and for the first time ever, I’ve heard radio advertisements urging people to blow the whistle on their employer if they are aware of pirated or misused software licenses, which is a sort of crowd-sourced software audit.

Software as a service licensing has its pitfalls as well, and they’re quite different from on-premise pricing issues. Many SaaS contracts have minimums or do not allow for reductions in volumes, leading to shelfware-as-a-service – consider it a new business model for wasting your money on software license fees. There is aggressive discounting going on right now – Gartner is seeing some deals at $70/user/month for enterprise-class software – but there may be much higher fees on renewal (when you’re hooked). There are also some unrecognized fees in SaaS contracts: storage (if beyond some minimum that they provide as part of the service, which is often charged at a rate far above cloud storage on the open market), additional costs for a development and test sandbox, premium maintenance that is more aligned with typical on-premise enterprise software support, non-corporate use (e.g., customers/partners accessing the system), integration, and termination fees including the right to get your data out of their system. Make sure that you know what the SaaS provider’s privacy/security policies are, especially related to the location of the data storage. Most of the Canadian financial services firms that I deal with, for example, will not allow their data to be stored in the United States, and many will not allow it to be stored outside Canada.

Furthermore, SaaS vendor SLAs will only cover their uptime, not your connectivity to them, so there are different points of failure than you would have for on-premise software. You can hardly blame the vendor if your internet connectivity fails, but you need to consider all of the points of failure and establishing appropriate SLAs for them.

Bona finished up with some very funny (but true) reinterpretations of clauses in vendor contracts, for example:

What the vendor means: “We are going to send you software that you are not licensed to use. If you use this software in error, you will be out of compliance with this contract, and woe to you if we audit.”
What they actually wrote: “Licensee shall not access or use any portion of the software not expressly licensed and paid for by the licensee.”
What you probably want to change it to: “Licensor shall not ship any software to licensee that licensee is not authorized to use.”

The summary of all this is that it’s not a task for amateurs. Unless you want to just let the vendor have their way with you on a large contract, you should consider engaging professionals to help out with this. Gartner provides this type of service, of course, but there are also high-quality independents (mostly former analysts) such as Vinnie Mirchandani.

Who’s running Pega’s sales and marketing?

I’m starting to feel like the Perez Hilton of BPM with all the corporate gossip this weekend, but I’ve noticed that Pegasystems’ management roster has been a bit sparse for the past few months.

VPs of marketing and sales seem to be missing, and I don’t see a CIO either. It’s important to have strong technical leadership in a technology company, but who’s driving sales and marketing?

Gartner on Emergency IT Cost Cutting

I had a heads up this morning via Shane Schick’s Twitter stream that Gartner was holding a webinar on emergency cost cutting in IT, featuring Kurt Potter, and 20 minutes later I was there.

Gartner’s been talking with a lot of their customers about the impact of the recession, and although most are not in completely dire straits, they are seeing some who are having to deploy emergency measures, and there’s lessons to be learned from the squeezing that is being done.

There are factors in any organization that make it difficult to cut costs:

Too much customization and complexity: I see this a lot, and it’s a huge money drain to maintain overly complex and over-engineered systems. If you go for a fully customized system, it’s going to cost about 10x as much to maintain it over the long term as it was to build it in the first place, since you’re rewriting code for every minor change.
Costs weren’t aligned to business metrics, so money has been spent on something that may not have had an economic benefit.
Difficult to prioritize IT investments properly, so that companies don’t know what to cut first.
No institutional knowledge of what happened in the last recession.

An economic recession creates some particular leadership challenges, but also opportunities: it’s a chance to make some difficult changes and cuts that would never be allowed in fatter times for political reasons. In particular, when a project (like a BPM implementation) calculates its ROI through a reduction in headcount, those staff are rarely actually cut: they’re redeployed to other areas, or the group affected just runs a bit heavier that it needs to. In today’s climate, you should be going back to see if you can harvest those promised productivity improvements now.

It’s difficult for companies to cut costs if they’ve never had to do it before: it’s not in their culture, and the executives may have made rash statements about things that they will “never” do, such as laying off staff or cutting out perqs. Surviving in this environment, however, requires some change in culture, and that includes changes to IT culture. Has your IT organization said that they would never use open source, or outsource storage, or consider SaaS? If you’re in a pinch, then you can be sure that they’re looking at it now, at least for some functions; if they’re not even considering options like this, then they’re not that serious about cutting costs.

Potter came out with one pretty obvious slide that showed that companies that have spent proportionately more on IT in the past five years have more room to cut costs. Well, duh. It’s hardly a big surprise that those that have spent like drunken sailors on leave now have a lot more that can be cut, like selling off that corporate jet (Citigroup, are you listening?). For some, however, cutting costs further gets a bit closer to the bone, requiring business restructuring, process improvement and innovation: this is why BPM projects (but not necessarily additional license acquisitions) can get some additional interest at times like this.

There are some cost-cutting measures that Potter suggested that I really don’t agree with, since I think that they’re penny-wise and pound-foolish. First of all, cancelling all IT training. Although this may result in a higher level of voluntary turnover (as much as 40-60%), thereby reducing headcount without having to do pesky, lawsuit-provoking layoffs, it runs the risk of having the people who understand the current systems bail out, leaving behind no one who is trained to maintain them. Personally, I wouldn’t want an untrained DBA playing around with my production database: the combined cost of a longer time to get things done plus the time required for someone who knows what they’re doing to fix it later is likely to be much higher than any training course.

Secondly, he suggests that IT abandon SLA guarantees to the business, become reactive rather than proactive, and train IT staff to say “no” to the business unless the funding for that level of service is guaranteed. In my opinion, this would be a huge hint to the business to start looking at outsourcing some of that IT, particularly through the adoption of SaaS applications. Lots of money being spent on running your in-house Exchange servers, and now IT wants to cut your SLA? A recent Forrester report shows that cloud-based email is a no-brainer over hosting your own email servers up to 15,000 users, and the price leader (Google Apps, which allows you to host your domain email on Google) is more cost-effective far beyond that size, while providing additional tools such as collaboration sites as part of the same package. More complex applications, such as customer relationship management and even business process management, have a number of successful cloud vendors. My advice to businesses: if IT cuts your SLAs, start looking for alternatives to your current IT offerings.

Potter suggested some good areas for savings, too: lengthen replacement cycles on hardware and software, cancel maintenance and warranty contracts, consolidate data centers and storage, and just buy less stuff. There’s risks to all this austerity, too. In addition to more voluntary turnover (which may or may not be desired), your vendors will smell the blood in the water and start tightening up on credit.

Of the webinar participants, over 80% said that it would be at least Q1 2010 before they return to a growth strategy rather than cost-cutting mode, so this is here to stay for a while.

Gartner has more than 300 pieces of published research on cost optimization, although some of the ones quoted (“Communicating the Value of EA to CFOs”) are arguably not really on topic. There’s a whole section on the Gartner site on IT and the economy that includes previously recorded podcasts, upcoming webinars and links to related research.

IBM “Resource Action” in progress this week

There have been rumors for a few weeks about impending job cuts at IBM, and they’re coming down this week. I’ve heard from people I know within IBM (mostly the old FileNet organization, where I worked in 2000-01) that it’s hitting the software group pretty hard. If you check the Job Cut Status page on a site created by the Communications Workers of America (a part of AFL-CIO that appears to either represent or be trying to unionize IBMers in the US), you’ll see comments like this:

IBM ECM Labs – Costa Mesa, CA – at least 5 that I know of, at all levels. Rumor has it most if not all of the developers will be replaced by India.

Austin Texas, SWG, 28 people out of 45 cut. young and old, top and bottom performers. Never show me great 4Q numbers again. This company doesn’t care about anything anymore.

Got the call today – Mngr said Sales Ops lost 40% of total group.

By my counts about 800 software engineers are selected in the action. 330 Staff, 280 Advisory, 120 senior, and others.

The cuts in SWG are: 25% in Development and 35% in Marketing/ other.

And, most curiously:

my ibm office site is now blocking the alliance web page.

Caveat: most of these comments are made anonymously, so should be considered to be unsubstantiated rumors.

There are two weird things about this. First of all, IBM is completely silent about it so far, although they will have to issue some sort of press release soon as the news is leaking out all over the place. Second, they just announced healthy profits in the software group, which seems to be the group taking the biggest hit.

Microsoft is also starting the cuts: they announced today that they will be laying off up to 5,000 people in the next 18 months.

Grown Up Digital

Don Tapscott is definitely enamored of his kids and their generation: in 1999’s Growing Up Digital: The Rise of the Net Generation, he predicted how their generation would reshape society, and in his latest book, Grown Up Digital: How the Net Generation is Changing Your World, he practically deifies them.

I agree with a lot of what he’s saying, such as the ability of the 11-30 age group — the “Net Generation” — to easily consume information from multiple channels, but I think that he’s ignoring some of the research in this area in order to make his point. He quotes a study from the Oxford Future of the Mind Institute that shows that although Net Geners are better at intensive problem-solving than those 10 years their elders, interruptions such as those from text messages and IM makes the differences in ability disappear. Tapscott pooh-poohs this using the rather unscientific counterpoint of his daughter working on an assignment at the family kitchen table with people and dogs around, multiple windows and chat sessions open, and her iPod playing music. He posits that Net Geners appear to have ADD in class (apparently now a common complaint amongst teachers) because they’re bored. I’m just not sure that I buy that; there’s other factors at work here, many of which have little to do with age, and more with work styles.

From a business standpoint, the real value of Grown Up Digital is the chapter on the Net Generation in the workforce, covering how the expectations of those entering the workforce have changed, and how organizations need to change (in some cases) to accommodate this.

One of the key points is that they expect to be able to work when and where they want, and be quickly rewarded through promotion for their achievements. A year ago, when companies were wailing about how the boomers were all retiring and they didn’t have enough new recruits to replace them, this sense of entitlement may have been a realistic expectation for some people in some job markets; in today’s economy, it seems almost laughable. Reuters recently reported that young graduates are having a hard time finding work in Silicon Valley, and that just any college degree isn’t enough to land them their dream job with a gazillion stock options. Not surprisingly, engineering grads aren’t having that problem, neither are people with some amount of practical experience. Earlier this week, Tom Davenport wrote about whether millennials (another name for the Net Generation) can really change the workplace, echoing similar sentiments. Ron Alsop, in his book The Trophy Kids Grow Up: How the Millennial Generation is Shaking Up the Workplace, quotes a teenage blogger: “We don’t want to work more than 40 hours a week, and we want to wear clothes that are comfortable. We want to be able to spice up the dull workday by listening to our iPods. If corporate America doesn’t like that, too bad.” If the economy stays where it is for the next few years, it might be too bad for the Net Generation.

At some point, however, those 200.5k’s are going to turn back into 401k’s, and the boomers are going to retire, at which time the battle for talent will resume. Banning Facebook — a key networking tool for Net Geners — will no longer be acceptable practice, and companies will have to become more open to the collaborative tools and attitudes that the new workers bring. This isn’t just because that’s the only way to gain those workers, it’s because there’s some valid ideas in there for improving the enterprise by breaking the bonds with traditions of time, place and corporate boundaries. There’s also the issue of customization of tools: the Net Generation expect to be able to configure their working environment the way that they want in order to most effectively complete the tasks at hand, not be forced into someone else’s idea of what might make them productive. There is a lot to be learned from this concept in how we build the user experience for enterprise software in general.

I enjoyed Grown Up Digital, but I took it with a large grain of salt: in part, because economic times have changed dramatically in the few short months between writing and publication, and in part because I think that the average Net Gener may not be as wired as Tapscott’s kids.

Build your social network before you get laid off

I know, that’s completely obvious advice, right? Wrong.

Yesterday, I received an email from a friend who works in telecommunications sales with the subject line “Networking”, informing her list of contacts (I assume; at least she was polite enough to BCC us all) that she had been laid off and was looking for work, and listing her qualifications. I immediately emailed back to ask if she had a profile on LinkedIn or any other sort of online resume that I could look at to see if I knew of anything that might fit, and she responded “What is LinkedIn? Is it similar to Facebook?”. Needless to say, she’s not on either of those two very popular social networking sites.

That prompted me to do my quarterly LinkedIn maintenance: import the email addresses from my contact list, see who’s on LinkedIn that I’m not already connected to (LinkedIn shows you if a person has a profile if you enter their email address), and connect to them — if you just received a LinkedIn invitation from me, that’s why. What amazed me in doing that exercise was how many of my business contacts don’t have a LinkedIn profile, or at least don’t have one linked to their business email address. Do they think that they can never lose their job, or are they just not convinced of the power of online social networks? Both are dangerous opinions to hold in today’s economic climate.

Here’s the reasons that I typically hear for why someone (including my recently laid off friend) is not on a social network:

It’s an invasion of privacy

On any social network, you can reveal as much or as little information about yourself as you’re comfortable with — the only one invading your privacy is yourself, if you choose to do so. On a professional site like LinkedIn, it’s best to reveal everything possible about your work experience, since this acts as an online resume. On Facebook, since the focus is more on personal information, it’s easier to add things that you might regret later; keep in mind that employers, co-workers and business associates might be looking at that profile, and you should manage the content that you put there with that in mind.

Many people fear that their employer will consider their LinkedIn profile as an indication that they’re looking for work, but that’s not necessarily true: you can set your profile to say that you’re not interested in job offers, but just in business networking. Your employer may actually like the fact that you’re being proactive about networking in business, especially if you’re in an outward-facing role.

It takes too much time

The initial setup of a social network can take some time, depending on how you go about it. On LinkedIn, I initially set up my profile by copying and pasting from my resume, then imported my email contact list and checked to see who else was online. This prompted me to clean up my resume and my contact list, two badly-needed activities which took more time than what I spent on LinkedIn itself. Now, I get a weekly update email from LinkedIn with my contacts’ changed information, and I do an email sweep on a regular basis to check for new contacts. If I think of it, I also check for people online right after I meet them for the first time and make the connection then. I list my larger contracts on there as well (once completed), so I add items to my “job” listing once or twice a year. Ongoing time requirement is a couple of hours every couple of months.

Facebook can be a completely different animal, since it encourages you to spend a lot of time on the site. I don’t. I have automated feeds from my Flickr, del.icio.us and blog posts into my Facebook updates, and use a couple of third-party applications to link in my Slideshare presentations and other material, all without me having to visit Facebook. I go there every day or two for a few minutes to check for friends’ upcoming birthdays and scroll through recent feed items, but I miss a lot of the river of information in the feed.

I don’t believe that it will bring value to me

In the case of LinkedIn, it won’t bring value unless you commit to making it a part of your business networking. Not surprisingly, you get out of it what you put into it: if you don’t update your profile and don’t connect to people when you meet them, then your information is not going to be very interesting to anyone. On the other hand, if you keep your profile up to date and complete, recruiters can find you when you’re looking for work, and your contacts will see your change in job status (as in “working for XXX” to “looking for work”) which may prompt them to help you out. You can also send a message to your network of contacts about your job search, making it easy for them to pass it along to anyone who they might know through their network. If you’re not on there or don’t update regularly, they’ll never know.

Even though I’m not looking for a job (having worked for someone else a total of 16 months in the past 21 years, I’m probably unemployable 🙂 ), LinkedIn provides value in keeping up with my business contacts as they move around, and occasionally brings new business my way.

I typically don’t proselytize social networks to those who aren’t already on them, but as my friends start to get hit by job cuts, I feel like they should know what they’re missing. If you know someone who isn’t on LinkedIn and should be, send them a link to this post to make it easy. I’m much more of an ant than a grasshopper, and like to put safety measures in place before I need them. Building your network after you get laid off is a lot tougher than doing it now, especially if you have a mortgage payment due at the end of the month.

The next stage in the BPMG saga

Remember BPMG (later reincarnated as BPTG)? I wrote previously about the original troubles when Steve Towers and Terry Schurter (two of the key people at BPMG) left and started Bennu Group, a competing training organization. If that wasn’t bad enough, they also redirected the BPMG domain to their own website, in what many consider to be an incredible show of bad faith.

That was just over a year ago, and today it appears that Bennu Group is dissolving. From an email sent yesterday from Terry Schurter to a participant registered for an upcoming course:

I must inform you that the Dallas CPP class offered by Bennu Group has been canceled as Bennu Group LLC is now in dissolution.

If you would like to receive a refund of your purchase please let me know and I will process your refund promptly.

Alternatively, if you would like to attend a CPP class on the same day and same location with myself as the instructor I can transfer you over to that course at no additional cost.

Then, in a follow-up email:

It will be announced tomorrow morning that I, Alex Morse and Don Smith [the latter two also from Bennu Group] have formed a new organization – the International Process and Performance Institute (IPAPI). This is a not-for-profit organization formed in the state of Texas and will be carrying forward the CEM vision.

Certification (IPAPI CPPTM) will be granted under the new organization. The material for the course is based on the same fundamentals used in the Bennu Group program, revised to reflect the learning from delivering that program for a bit over a year. The primary revisions include simplification of explanations and context along with discussion on flexibility that can be employed with the techniques presented. We also include additional new resources and templates for class participants to help make using the techniques easier, simpler and more successful. We will be using at least 3 case studies for hands-on activities in the class.

I am personally very excited about the new direction. The movement to a not-for-profit is a very important step (if you decide to attend my class you will be given a free one-year’s membership in IPAPI). You will also receive one year’s access to the online training which is again a revised and updated version of what was offered by Bennu Group.

The IPAPI.org domain was registered by Alex Morse over a month ago, so this has been brewing for a while. If you check LinkedIn, there were only four employees of Bennu Group; after this latest round of musical chairs, Steve Towers is the one left standing on the outside as the other three start a new venture of the backs of the work started by BPMG and continued by Bennu Group.

This raises a number of interested questions, not the least of which is about the value of BPM certification from training organizations like this. To state that they offer certification for their courses seems a bit hollow and self-serving: what sort of accreditation do they have to make a claim for the ability to offer certification? And more importantly, when the music starts again in a year or so, who wants to be holding certification from an organization that no longer exists?

My advice: take training with any organization that appears to offer what you need, but pay little or no attention to claims of certification unless it is a widely-recognized organization (think Microsoft or IEEE here) with a well-established training and certification program.

Note: I’m receiving this information (and the email quoted above) third-hand, so there could, of course, be inaccuracies.

*Personality Not Included

I’ve just finished reading *Personality Not Included by social marketing guru Rohit Bhargava. I don’t know a lot about marketing, but I know what works and doesn’t work when companies try it on me, and I’m increasingly interested in the crossover between social media and marketing.

Bhargava examines the concept of personality as it applies to organizations: why it’s important for an organization — or often a brand produced by that organization — to have a personality at all, and how to use that personality to strengthen customer relationships. The first two chapters are essential reading for any organization that’s still stuck in old-school marketing: first, why being faceless used to work but doesn’t any more, and second, how social media is fundamentally changing how organizations communicate. Much of the rest of the book is some solid advice on how to create and foster the necessary brand personality, but so many companies are still stuck back in the “why should we do this?” phase that the first two chapters are going to be a major eye-opener for them. Also brilliant are the short “sellevator pitches” at the end of each chapter, summarizing the main message.

With the first half of the book covering the theory of brand personality, the second half digs into tools and techniques for making it happen. The book lists 10 major personality-focused marketing techniques — curiosity, karmic, participation, un-whatever, sensory, antimarketer, fallibility, insider, incidental, and useful — then describes each in terms of what it is, why it works, when you should use it, who’s already doing it, and step-by-step instructions. There’s also guides for finding the accidental spokespeople inside or outside your organization, empowering your employees, creating a successful company blog, and hiring employees with personality.

If I can make one complaint about *Personality Not Included, it’s the overwhelming number of gratuitous analogies used in the writing, to the point where I started finding it annoying. I’m not talking about relevant examples, I’m talking about analogies, like the one where he spends half a page talking about Disney’s movie High School Musical — which has nothing to do with anything else in the book — in order to have us understand the concept of being pressured into sticking with the status quo. By the time that I read a number of these, it started to feel like filler. This is purely an issue of style, not content, and you may experience it differently.

Disclosure: this book was provided to me for free by the publisher, McGraw Hill, through a great program called Mini Book Expo for Bloggers, which allows bloggers to claim a book in order to receive a review copy, in exchange for writing a public review of the book. All books can be shipped for free to bloggers within Canada, and some now can be shipped to the US.

Column 2 turns 3

Zoli Erdos and Seth Godin have it right: when it comes to getting hired, you don’t need a resume, you need a blog. A blog that you’ve been writing for a while contains a much more complete picture of you, and forms more than just an online portfolio, it broadcasts your personal brand.

How appropriate to read those posts just as I hit my 3rd anniversary of writing Column 2. From a branding and informational perspective, it works for me: more than half of my new prospects and customers mention that they found me through my blog, or at least read it before contacting me as part of their due diligence. Furthermore, it’s considerably broadened my networking community, allowing me to have interesting conversations with — and sometimes even meet face-to-face — other bloggers who I read and respect.

I’ve done some form of online journaling since around 2000, and Column 2 started as my personal soapbox to talk about business process management and other business/technology subjects, gradually shifting to include Enterprise 2.0 topics. A few logistics and statistics:

I use WordPress as my blogging platform, and have also converted my minimalist corporate site to WordPress since it’s so easy to use to maintain a website.
I use Windows Live Writer for writing almost all of my posts, since I can write offline when there’s no connectivity, and can also easily cross-post to multiple blogs such as I did to the FASTforward blog a few weeks ago.
On average, I have more than 200 unique visitors per day visit my site (300+ page views), plus over 750 reading it via RSS feed.
I’ve written over 1200 posts, which have generated over 1000 comments: a low comment-to-post ratio, likely due to the large number of enterprise-type readers who may not be as comfortable publishing their opinions in response to my posts. In fact, sometimes someone will email me with a comment on a post and I have to encourage them to use the comments so that others can read their opinion.
My most-visited posts (which counts page views, therefore doesn’t include RSS readers) include a link to the Gartner 2007 BPM Magic Quadrant report, a short report on layoffs at Savvion and other vendors, a discussion on policies, procedures, processes and rules, and my link to the Forrester report on human-centric BPM for Microsoft platforms, in which I also listed the vendors in each of their four categories.
The posts for which I receive the most praise are my live-blogging at conferences. I started out by taking notes (on my laptop) at conferences for my own reference, then realized that others might benefit from what I see and hear, and started posting them to my blog. I finish each post during the presentation and post it immediately (wifi permitting), since I realize that there is no way I would ever go back later and finish up all those posts after a day of conference-going. That means that those certainly aren’t my best writing and don’t contain a great deal of analysis, but they’re timely and fairly detailed, providing a view of the conference presentations for those unable to attend.

I started out with Column 2 on my own website, then ebizQ invited me to post on their site, where I stayed for over a year. However, as an independent analyst/consultant, my own brand is critical, and when I found out that many people thought that I worked for ebizQ, I moved back to my own domain. That taught me a valuable lesson about blogging on someone else’s site and the impact on my personal brand, and I’ve turned down a number of offers since that time in favour of some very selective syndication (Intelligent Enterprise republishes a couple of my posts each month, and I cross-posted to the FASTforward blog while at their conference).

Blogging isn’t always easy, and it takes time, making it hard to stick at sometimes. However, the rewards — both professional and personal — have made it all worthwhile. Thanks for reading.

Even public service organizations can ‘camp

Normally I would just provide a link to this in my daily Links post, but this is such a great example of how Open Space technology (e.g., BarCamp, MashupCamp) can be used for more than just holding geeky tech unconferences: last year, three people from the TorCamp community organized TransitCamp to provide a place for the Toronto Transit Commission (North America’s third largest, serving 2.4 million riders each day) and the local community to come together and generate new ideas about how to really make the TTC “the better way”. Today, the story of TransitCamp, “Sick Gloria Transit”, hit the Harvard Business Review as one of their breakthrough ideas for 2008. The article is written by Mark Kuznicki, Jay Goldman and Eli Singer; Mark’s post also contains a number of reference links, including a page of links on the TransitCamp site covering both unconferences and TransitCamp itself.

I’ve attended several unconferences, although I missed TransitCamp last year, and I’ve been promoting the idea of the unconference as a format for business and technology conferences in the BPM space, but it’s a hard sell. One group of conference organizers that I approached with this had many reasons why it wouldn’t work, even though they have never attended an unconference, and most didn’t know what it was before the subject was broached. One response: “hopelessly techie.” I disagree: the unconference format has been used for many non-technical gatherings since Open Space Technology was first defined in 1986; it’s just that the tech community made it popular in the past few years. To quote the Wikipedia article, it “has been used in over 100 countries and in diverse settings, industries, cultures and situations – for program and product design, knowledge exchange, interdisciplinary thinking, conflict resolution and conferences.”

TransitCamp is a great example of how unconferences can be used with a primarily non-technical group of participants to generate ideas for a definitely low-tech endeavour: improving our local transit.