Category: conferences

Ensuring Flexible Lean Six Sigma Process Improvement Culture

Last session of the day is Jennifer Thompson of Royal Bank of Canada on process improvement culture within an organization: how to maintain a relevant Six Sigma culture in changing economic times, and how to keep people engaged in the program. RBC is Canada’s largest bank, with 80,000 people in 50 countries; they were a customer of mine for a couple of years in the past through a somewhat drawn-out BPM and process improvement project, so it’s good to see them getting a bit more rigor around this. They’ve embraced Kaizen, and the idea that you can make significant change in a short period of time, which created quite a bit of interest from the business, then followed this with a reworking of their Lean Six Sigma program into a business performance excellence program for their operations areas. More recently, they’ve taken these ideas and pushed them beyond the operations areas, deploying Six Sigma in areas across the organization, such as IT and finance. They maintain a small core group of trained LSS people: 3 master black belts and 20 black belts in the center of excellence, and 105 belts across the enterprise; they measured $35M in benefits in 2009, making this a definitely worthwhile undertaking.

Effectiveness of the program is a function of both the quality of what is produced, and the acceptance of the program, or E = f(Q,A). Their real challenge is in acceptance: becoming and staying relevant, especially considering that they’re applying what could be seen as a manufacturing technique within a financial services organization. Project metrics need to be relevant to the business that you’re in; in RBC’s case, that’s profits and savings, not green belt utilization ratios (which I can’t believe that they even considered as a useful metric). You need to engage and partner with the business, and read their feedback properly to fine tune the skills and offerings of your LSS program.

RBC came to the realization that one size does not fit all, and developed a flexible methodology that leads with Lean, then works towards the ideal methodology as the business needs are understood. It’s important to recognize the size and complexity of the project as you get into it, and adjust the governance to match the project effort. They’ve developed a toolbox of training courses for various stakeholders, from executive/champion training to green belt to Kaizen to their internal business performance excellence programs. They no longer have a separate black belt training, but only an upgrade from a green belt due to the high level of overlap in the required skills.

She covered some points on keeping people engaged in the LSS program: a bi-annual LSS forum and monthly lunch-and-learns for the belts; a monthly dashboard for executives for sharing best practices; and a champion roundtable for champions and sponsors. The LSS program at RBC is not driven from the top down; there is no unequivocal, from the top mandate for it, and some of their challenges are to get people to adopt it when they have no management-driven motivation to do so. That has required the LSS program to show value on multiple programs, then use that to motivate interest in other areas by showing it as a way to improve their business, not a corporate directive.

I’m glad that I dropped in on these sessions, and I’ll be back tomorrow to see more of the ones on wrapping this back into automated processes and BPM. The whole conference is really tiny, only about 30-40 attendees, but the quality of the presentations and conversations is really high. With no open wifi (grumble, grumble) but in my home data network area, I promise that I’ll remember my iPhone tether cable tomorrow so that I can post as I go.

TRIZ, Six Sigma and Transactional Processes

Tom Kling, who has the most magnificent mustache this side of the 19th century, talked to us about TRIZ: an acronym that most of us in the room had never heard of, much less used. I confess, I Googled it before the session, so knew that it was related to innovation – it’s also known as “systematic innovation – and is a Romanized acronym of the Russian phrase “Теория решения изобретательских задач”, or “theory of inventive problem solving”. Kling is from Dow Chemical, a company that knows a bit about innovation as well as chemistry. They’ve had a Six Sigma program since 1999, having trained more than 10,000 green and black belts, and having it fully integrated into all major improvement and innovation processes. I sat with him at lunch, and heard more about how Six Sigma can be applied to research and development areas such as his, as well as to more operational and manufacturing areas that are more common applications. This presentation turns that around a bit: taking a technique used primarily for research innovation, and applying it to transactional processes.

This gets past the issue that I referred to in the previous post, where Lean and Six Sigma are seen as only for incremental improvement, not disruptive change: TRIZ starts with a description of a perfect, hypothetical solution state, then applies a number of techniques such as importing solutions from other fields as well as more incremental improvement based on application of technology. Starting by envisioning an ideal solution can result in more out-of-the-box solutions than working forward from the current state; although the perfect solution likely won’t be achieved, at least it opens people’s eyes and gets them thinking about what’s possible. There are sets of TRIZ problems and solutions, with operators to map problems to solutions. This may allow a specific problem to be generalized to a TRIZ problem using contradiction characteristics, operated on to map to a TRIZ solution, then applied back to a specific solution. There are several methods for doing this, such as using contradiction characteristics such as Altshuller’s characteristics or Mann’s business TRIZ features, and examples of problem solving techniques such as Altshuller’s 40 inventive principles.

He used a very funny example of this: he uses a comb on his ‘stache during warmer weather but a brush during dry, cold weather, but doesn’t like that the combination of comb and brush don’t fit well in his pocket; using a contradiction matrix with increased area being a good thing but increased volume being a bad thing, the suggested set of solutions includes nesting, spheroidality or new dimensions, which leads to his actual solution, a folding brush/comb combo. A more realistic example for the rest of us is a survey where more questions increases the amount of information gathered, but worsens communications flow when not all questions are applicable to all respondents; the solution set includes having a dynamic survey that removes irrelevant questions based on earlier responses.

TRIZ, then, is an algorithmic approach to innovation. This departs from our somewhat fantastical notion of a scientist having an “a-ha” moment at some point in every innovation, or an unbounded brainstorming session generating all the new ideas; now, what’s necessary is a skilled facilitator who can explore how the inventive principles apply to the specific problem in order to generate possible solutions. There’s also a lot of skill required to map between the specific and general problem and solution spaces, as well as evaluating potential solutions (and even generating new hybrid solutions) using something like a Pugh concept evaluation matrix.

At Dow, they’ve embedded TRIZ into their Design For Six Sigma (DFSS) processes for designing chemical plants, allowing for better integration across designs of all the other processes surrounding the chemical plant, such as rail shipping. This doesn’t always result in a disruptive change, but sometimes results in a group of interrelated changes that make a big difference: in one case, reducing shipping transit times and costs, thereby increasing customer satisfaction.

There are many other TRIZ-related tools, applicable to both technological and transactional situations. Some of these, such as mind maps, didn’t originate with TRIZ but are commonly used during TRIZ innovation projects; many have been adopted into the TRIZ body of knowledge maintained by the Russian TRIZ group. It’s also possible to mix several of the TRIZ techniques with Six Sigma techniques to good effect.

Applying Lean Six Sigma Methodology to Transactional Processes

Next up was a panel discussion with David Haigh of Johnson & Johnson, Sabrina Lemos of United Airlines, and Gary Kucera of Kaplan Higher Education, moderated by Charles Spina of e-Zsigma.

United Airlines has a unique project going on in one of their freight-related operations: they decided to outsource the operation in order to be able to completely remake the process and have it meet specific KPIs, but also decided to allow the existing people to bid on their own jobs. This would have the effect of shifting them out of their current ways of doing things and proposing the best possible way to do it, since they will be in a competitive bidding situation with outsiders. Lemos also spoke about the importance of getting to the real data. She did an exercise of tracing a particularly biweekly report –which took several hours to compile – up to the VP and what he reports on, then tracked what he actually reports on back down to the reports and metrics that are being gathered at the lower levels. Not surprisingly, she found that there was zero alignment: nothing in the biweekly reports were used by the VP in his report, or anywhere else in the chain of command. She spoke about using gauge R&R, walk the process, and value stream mapping techniques to analyze processes, and the necessity of coming to agreement on the meaning of things such as process start points.

Haigh spoke about accounts payable processes at J&J Canada, and how an in-depth review of those processes was triggered by someone actually forgetting to pay the electricity bill, and showing up at the office one day to find a notice that the power would be cut if the bill weren’t paid immediately: not that they didn’t have the money to pay the bill, just that the process to do so wasn’t working. Accounts payable is often one of those processes in companies that is ignored when looking at major process improvement because it’s not revenue generating, but it’s important to recognize that enormous cost savings can be found through taking advantage of early payment discount levels, and avoiding any late penalties or service disruptions. They have found that doing some amount of the work onsite where the business processes are being done is helpful, since the process participants can see what’s involved in their process overall. They use the same techniques as discussed by Lemos, plus Kaizen Blitz and some activity-based costing.

Kucera spoke about aligning the corporate and executive goals with efforts at all levels, and how Jack Welch suggested making your bonus be some percentage of your process improvement savings in order to incent people to align their behavior and metrics with the ultimate goals. He spoke about some of the modeling and display tools that they use, such as fishbone and Pareto diagrams, and how doing these early and engaging with the business management can greatly speed the process improvement efforts. In many cases, since they’re dealing with simple transactional processes, they can use fairly simple analysis tools, but have some of the more sophisticated tools and techniques available as required.

They all had examples of process improvement efforts that have had a direct customer impact. Lemos had a great example of processing freight insurance claims, where they had a metric of processing five claims per day, resulting in the claims people cherry-picking claims in order to meet their quota; enforcing first-in, first-out claims processing resulted in an immediate and dramatic improvement in customer satisfaction. Listening to her stories of their paper-based inefficiencies, where emails are printed, signed and passed around, reminds me so much of the processes in some of my financial services and insurance customers.

In all cases – and I think that this is a key criticism of Lean and Six Sigma – they’re looking for incremental process improvements, not completely disruptive reengineering that would discover new ways to do business. However, in many of today’s standard transactional processes, incremental improvement is the only alternative.

Lean Six Sigma & Process Improvement: David Brown of Motorola

I missed the first morning of the IQPC Lean Six Sigma & Process Improvement conference in Toronto today, but with my usual impeccable timing, showed up just in time for lunch (where we had to explain the rules of curling to the American attendees). The first session this afternoon is with David Brown, a black belt at Motorola, where the term “Six Sigma” was first coined and is still used to make their processes more effective, efficient, productive, and transparent.

There has been a transformation for them in how they analyze their processes: ranging from just looking at transactions to high-level intelligence including complex simulations and forecasting. Since they run SAP for their ERP, they have a number of SAP business intelligence (Xcelsius and Business Objects) products, although their most complex analysis is done with Oracle Crystal Ball.

Brown’s presentation was short – less than 10 minutes – and the rest of the session was an interactive one-on-one interview with questions from Charles Spina of e-Zsigma, the conference chair. The Q&A explored much more about how Motorola uses business analytics tools, and opened it up to the (small) audience for their experience with analytics. Not surprisingly, there has been quite a bit of success through the introduction of analytics to process improvement teams: sometimes it’s the black belts themselves, sometimes it’s a separate analytics group that works closely to develop the reports, analysis, and more complex intelligence based on the large volumes of data collected as part of any process improvement project.

Reporting tools can be as simple as Excel – for simple needs – through more complex solutions that include ETL from multiple data sources and regularly scheduled reports, such as Crystal Reports and Xcelsius. Legacy systems can make that a bit of a challenge; often these end up as extracts to Excel or Access, which are then remixed with other sources. Extracts such as this can be really problematic, as I’ve seen first-hand with many of my customers, since there’s no way to keep the data completely in sync with the underlying systems, and typically any one legacy system doesn’t have all the relevant data, so there can be a real problem in matching up related data from multiple systems. Brown underlined that the key issue is to get all of your data into a central data warehouse in order to determine if your data is complete and clean, and to facilitate reporting and analytics. This is especially important for process engineers when trying to do time studies over long periods of time: if you don’t have some consistent representation of the processes over the time period in question, then your analysis will suffer.

Motorola is using their data analytics to improve operational processes, such as order shipping, but also what-if scenarios to inform salespeople on the impact of discount levels to the bottom line. In many cases, this is an issue of data integration: Sabrina Lemos from United Airlines (who will be on the panel following) shared what they were able to recover in late container fees just by integrating their container tracking system with a database (Access, alas) that generates their invoices. Interestingly, I wouldn’t have thought of this as a process improvement initiative – although it is – but rather just as an artifact of doing some clever system integration.

They also discussed the challenges with presenting the results of analytics to the less numerically inclined, which often entails rolling data up to some simpler charts that can be drilled into as required, or just presented in a PowerPoint or PDF file. The real ROI may come from more interactive tools, however, such as dashboards that show operational alerts, or real-time what-if analysis to support human and automated decisions. Since Lean and Six Sigma tools are inherently analytical, this isn’t a new problem for the people in this audience; this is a matter of building relationships early with the non-analytical business managers, getting some early successes in projects to encourage adoption, and using different presentation and learning styles to present the information.

Because of the nature of this audience, the analytics that they’re discussing are typically for human consumption; in the BPM world, this is more and more moving to using the analytics to generate events that feed back into processes, or to inform automated decisioning. Either way, it’s all about improving the business processes.

Pimping Your Fish at DemoCamp Toronto 25

After we heard from Gurbaksh Chahal, the rest of DemoCamp proceeded as usual. We were in the Ted Rogers School of Management, part of Ryerson University, in a really great lecture hall space that seats a few hundred people; it seemed like most of the seats were filled that night.

First up was Albert Lai of Kontagent. Albert demoed at the first DemoCamp and has appeared at at least one other. He seems to get a bit of a pass from the organizers: this time, as with the last time that I saw him, he had no actual demo – which is typically a requirement – but a lot of slides talking about social games.

After that, it was mostly Facebook night at DemoCamp: four of the five demos that followed were Facebook applications.

Next up was Mark Zohar of Scenecaster, showing the My 3D Cards application on Facebook. It uses the 3D foundation that they’ve built for enterprise projects, and used it to to take Facebook content and other rich content (video, photos, external links) to create a 3D rich media greeting card, displayed in a 3D application running in the browser using a custom Flash viewer. The idea was to show an immersive, engaging presentation of content for a specific purpose. The second app that he showed was Causes, which creates 3D content posted to your Facebook wall related to charitable causes. For causes such as Red Cross and WWF, it shows an “I donated” card with your picture, links to video about the cause, and a link to the donation site. They’re also working on an app for virtual gifts, using animated 3D, supporting multimedia and user-triggered animation; in the future, they’ll be looking at branded virtual gifts, too. In addition to their own apps, they’re syndicating their apps to other developers for other vertical applications; the first of these being developed is a 3D yearbook. These will be premium offerings, directly monetized within Facebook. They have a team of 5-6 dedicated people, using AWS, EC2 and S3 cloud-based content, composited at the client.

The demo that gave me this post’s title was by Greg Thomson of Tall Tree Games, showing their Fish World Facebook app: you can buy, raise and feed fish in a tank. (The friend I was there with turned to me and said “hey, my son plays with that!”) The focus of the demo was on monetization, a key subject for Facebook app developers: in this case, tanks are monetized through a variety of purchases, including fish, themes (including seasonal and holiday themes), plants, music and food. It uses two currencies: Facebook internal “coins” and fishbucks, which are actual purchased currency, at 5 fishbucks per $1. They find that they need to release new content a couple of times per week in order to maximize consumption; this is often done by creating a need (e.g., tank gathers algae, friends can steal fish), then selling a solution (e.g., algae-eater, security fish). They’re using analytics for targeting specific audiences, and in spite of my friend’s comment about how her son (who is under 10) plays with this, Thomson said that their primary demographic (75%) is women 20-35 years old. Huh?

Greg Balajewicz of Realm of Empires was up next, showing their massively multiplayer online strategy game on Facebook: you start with a village, build it up, recruit troops and so on. Everyone in the game is an actual person, with the game ongoing 24×7, and you can collaborate with others to plan battles and other campaigns. They have about 80k monthly active people in the game, 20k active daily, and although the game is free, they monetize with premium features that save you time in the game (e.g., a larger map view), but don’t explicitly advance your position in the game. They also have a standalone app, currently not monetized although they might offer a premium feature like this within the game, that allows any player to get a world view of all villages. They’ve done this with a small team and the three founders, with most people working remotely from each other and communicating using Skype. The game is targeted at men aged 25+; it can be played effectively in as little as 15 minutes per day. About 60% of their current players are in the US, 30% in other western countries, and a significant southeast Asia population at 7%.

Oz Solomon of Social Gaming Studios showed us their two seasonal apps: My Year in Status, and My Year in Photos. My Year in Status allows you to capture your year through your status: select a style, add a caption, and it generates a (text) collage of your status updates from 2009; you can customize and publish it to your news feed. My Year in Photos picks 16 photos from your 2009  photos (you can choose others if desired), then generates a photo collage for your news feed and photo album. Unlike the other apps, which are looking for steadier, constant growth, the seasonal apps had to spring into action for only a short period over the year end. They had 11M people use the app in a three-week period, with over 45 collages generated every second; it was the 3rd fastest-growing Facebook app for the week of Dec 21st after being covered by the mainstream media. About 80% of the users are women. They started work on the app on November 13th, launched it four weeks later, then had to do three server upgrades in a week to keep it up and running: they are using their own dedicated servers rather than cloud infrastructure. They found that seasonal apps are good for capturing viral streaks, but it’s best to build them on frameworks and code that you’ve developed for stable apps (such as their existing Status Shuffle app) in order to allow for fast development. Also, you can typically reuse these apps the following year, with some minimal-cost tweaking to keep them fresh. One interesting thing that he pointed out is that for the My Year in Status app, they fixed their #1 complaint, which was the lack of ability to choose which statuses were used, and found that although it reduced complaints by 80%, it only increased conversion rates by 2%: keep in mind that your most vocal detractors may not be that important to your bottom line.

Last up was Roy Pereira of ShinyAds.com, with the only non-Facebook app of the night. ShinyAds is a self-service advertising platform for web publishers that passes through more of the ad revenue to the publisher than other ad platforms such as Google AdSense. It’s not an ad network, but a tool for the web publishers to interact directly with advertisers. Advertisers can create their own advertising banner using a wizard-like interface: add or create a banner image, set the ad budget, set the click-through destination URL, set start and end dates, and target by geography. Once the ad is approved by the publisher, it’s inserted into the publisher’s ad server, or can use the ShinyAds ad server. Payments are made automatically to the publisher based on actual metrics, with the publisher interface includes a view of metrics and analytics.

All in all, a great DemoCamp, and the venue was excellent. I had stopped attending after a few disastrous nights in too-small venues (usually pubs) with crappy AV and wifi, but this has me back as a convert.

Gurbaksh Chahal at DemoCamp 25

DemoCamp Toronto #25 was held last week, with the usual array of demos and an extra special keynote: Gurbaksh Chahal, the highly-successful serial entrepreneur currently engaged in GWallet, an online payment system. Previously, he sold his first company at the age of 18 for $40M, then built BlueLithium to a point where it was acquired by Yahoo for $300M, and there were a lot of eager people in the audience to hear how they could get replicate that sort of success. Some of them were carrying along copies of his book, The Dream, hoping for an autograph.

He had a great set of points that I tried to capture; with each of these, he included examples from his own life that made them relevant:

  • The idea is only 1%, the rest is execution.
  • Don’t get too attached to your ideas. Sometimes that idea that you start a company with is just a starter idea, it’s not the one that you want to take to completion.
  • The biggest ($) deals happen when a company is bought rather than sold; that is, the buyer seeks out the relatively scarce resource and offers based on the perceived value of that scarcity, rather than the seller putting themselves up for sale.
  • Hire only rock stars, pay them well, and let them share in the ultimate rewards. Expect long hours, hard work and brilliance from them.
  • Never leave yourself vulnerable; consider everyone replaceable.
  • Don’t expect charity or favors, especially your first time around.
  • Never raise money when you need it: get traction first and wait for the money to come to you.
  • Bring in venture capital even if you have the means to self-fund, since that brings other ideas and governance.
  • In budgeting and spending, understand the difference between need and necessity. Money is finite, spend like every dollar is your last. People will only be impressed by your performance, don’t worry about the fancy trappings.
  • Every entrepreneur needs confidence (or the appearance of it). In any meeting, focus the conversation on the purpose of that moment.
  • Relationships are everything in life and the business world. Never burn a bridge. They’re not buying a product, they’re buying you.
  • There are only 5 key decisions that you need to make in order to make or break your company – make them wisely. His example at BlueLithium: hiring dream team, acquiring AdRevolver, raising 11.5M, opening up Europe a year after the US, selling to Yahoo at the right time for 300M although board didn’t want to sell. Knowing which are the key decisions requires instinct.
  • Surround yourself with people who want to see you successful and who are hungry. You don’t want to reward people who don’t contribute: you need people who will take a risk with you, and get rewarded for it.
  • Embrace rejection. Everything happens for a reason, it makes you stronger.
  • Make decisions, even if they may be wrong.
  • Always negotiate from a position of strength. Perception is reality: show people what they want to see, and tell them what they want to hear. Believe in yourself and sell the dream: no product or sales pitch is perfect.
  • Grow a thick skin. People will question your ability to succeed.
  • Do the work. Keep your eye on the tiger. Fight like Hell, defy the odds. It’s worth it. Never compromise your morals.

The gate receipts from that night’s DemoCamp, usually put towards some food or drink for the attendees, were donated to support efforts in Haiti following the earthquake. All of us put in $2,580; Gurbaksh, who had promised to match that, ended up tossing in another $10,000.

Lean Six Sigma and Process Improvement conference, Toronto

In a nice break from the past two years as a road warrior, I’ve only been on one trip since November. Even better, some conferences are coming to Toronto so that I don’t even need to travel (although not sure that February up here is a big draw if you don’t already live here).

This month, IQPC is hosting a Lean Six Sigma and process improvement conference on February 22-24 at the Westin Harbour Castle, with a focus on achieving a sustainable and transparent Lean Six Sigma and process improvement culture:

    • Increase Organizational Synergies by Applying LSS and Process Re-engineering to Consolidation and Organizational Restructuring
    • Maximize Benefits and Savings of Process Improvement Projects by Identifying and Implementing Low Cost Solutions
    • Bring the Quality of Your Products to a New Level of Efficiency by Applying Innovative Methodologies, such as Triz, to Your Transactional Processes and Engage Your Customers in Transactional Projects
    • Maximize the Efficiency of Internal and External Benchmarking by Expanding the Use of Dashboards

My readers can get 20% off the “All Access” price by using the code LSSCCol2 when you register here.

Disclosure: IQPC is providing me with a free pass to the show.

BPM 2010 Call for Papers: Research, Education and Industry

 

I’ve previously extolled the benefits of attending the annual international research conference on BPM, and for those of you in North America who just weren’t ready to shell out for a trip to Europe, you’re in luck: it’s coming to Stevens Institute in New Jersey in September. Although this has always been an academic research conference, rife with papers full of statistical analysis, this year the organizers are creating an industry track for practitioners to discuss the adoption and use of BPM:

The industry track will provide practitioners with the opportunity to present insight gained through BPM projects. We are particularly interested in case studies from the perspective of user organizations. While contributions from consultants and vendors are appreciated, pure product demonstrations, method tutorials, or vendor showcases will not be accepted in the industry track. All contributions to the industry track have to describe experiences with BPM methods and/or technologies from the viewpoint of the adopting organization.

This is not the usual conference PowerPoint deck: you have to actually write a paper. If you want to present in the industry track, you must submit an abstract by February 15th.

If you’re submitting a paper for the regular research tracks, the paper (not just an abstract) is due by March 14th. You can also submit a paper in the new education track, specifically about education and training methods for the BPM professional, also due by March 14th.

Even if you’re not giving a paper, I highly recommend that BPM vendors send along someone from their design/engineering team. This conference shows BPM research that (in some cases) indicates where product functionality could go in the future; best to get in there and see it first hand.

CrisisCampTO Planning Meeting

A bit off topic for my usual blogging here, but I spent this afternoon at the initial planning meeting of CrisisCampTO, the Toronto manifestation of Crisis Commons. Although this is happening here and now in response to the earthquake disaster in Haiti 12 days ago, Crisis Commons has a broader mandate:

We are an international volunteer network of professionals drawn together by a call to service. We create technological tools and resources for responders to use in mitigating disasters and crises around the world

We’re here today to work on anything that can be done to help, in collaboration with other Crisis Commons teams all over the world, on the various projects that have been defined by Crisis Commons based on requests from NGOs to fill a need that they have. The bulk of the projects fall under the category of software development, but there are also teams for social media, logistics and more general duties.

Our first goal today is to find a development project for the bulk of the Toronto team to get involved with, and learn how to plug into other Crisis Commons groups around the world. There is quite a bit of infrastructure already in place to connect up, including IRC channels (retro, I will definitely need a refresher course) and voice conference lines, plus a rapidly growing wiki.

I have a pretty broad range of skills to apply here: although I don’t really write code any more – unless I’m really inspired – I can do all the other stuff around development (requirements, testing, documentation). I also do a lot of social media stuff, and have attended more unconferences than you can shake a stick at, so can help with the local social media efforts such as wiki gardening, Facebook and Twitter updates, and more.

The main goal of today is to get ready for next Saturday’s CrisisCampTO (time and venue to be announced shortly), by getting some basic team structure in place and selecting one or more projects to which we will be contributing. That way, when newbies show up next week, they can start contributing immediately.

One of the things that we learned about today is Sahana, an open source disaster management system that was created in response to the Sri Lanka tsunami in 2004. There’s a Sahana instance set up just for Haiti, although it still needs a lot of content added, and possibly some development to add specific requested functionality. We also saw OpenMRS, an open source medical records system, and Ushahidi, an SMS-to-web service that accepts requests for assistance sent by text message to a specific shortcode, and makes them available to aid agencies. If you check the feed from Haiti, you can see requests for food, water and medical assistance that have been received, translated if required, and logged for followup. In summary, there are a ton of free, open source projects that can be applied to the Haiti disaster; some of them as is, others requiring some customization. This is were we all come in.

Launching #BPMcamp

Almost four years ago, I wrote a post about how we needed a BPM unconference. Today, Scott Francis of BP3 announced that they’re organizing one, although it’s focused on Lombardi customers and products. As I said on my comment on his post:

I believe that there is a place for a vendor-independent BPM camp, but using a single vendor’s clients to kick things off is a promising start to test the format. The biggest challenges, I believe, will be encouraging people who are accustomed to being spoon-fed at typical conferences to create and facilitate their own sessions, as well as get the corporate approval necessary for attending an unconference.

I’ve attended a lot of unconferences over the past few years, and the format can really work well if the right framework is in place and attendees are willing to participate [note that by “unconference”, I mean the self-organizing type that use something like Open Space as an organizational framework, not the fake unconferences that are actually pre-scheduled webinars].

I’m very excited to see what happens with this; the time could be right for unconferences to make an impact on the enterprise.