conferences – Page 28

Size does matter: travelling light with netbook and iPhone

I love technology more as it gets smaller. I haven’t been travelling much this year, but the next two months will change that. For the first time in years, however, I’ll be carrying only my suitcase (a roll-aboard that fits in the overhead bin) and my handbag: no computer bag. That’s because I am the proud owner of an HP Mini netbook, which slides right into the back compartment of my smallish purse with room to spare. The screen is a bit small, but adequate – in fact for widescreen video viewing, it’s great – and the keyboard is large enough for comfortable touch typing. Battery life is 6 hours, which rocks. Disk is 160GB, leaving space for me to load it up with e-books and video to entertain me while away from home.

It runs XP, and I’ve loaded the following software:

Chrome as my primary browser – much cleaner and takes up less screen real estate, so good for the smaller screen.
Google mail/calendar with offline synchronization, since my email accounts are all Gmail or Google Apps; this means that my mail and calendar will stay synchronized between this computer, my office computer (which uses Outlook and Google Apps Sync), my iPhone and the web.
It has a trial version of MS-Office included, but I’ve also loaded Open Office and will see if that works for the relatively light editing needs that I’ll have on the road. If so, then I won’t bother to buy the license for Office when the trial expires.
Live Writer for blogging, since I do a lot of that while at conferences.
Dropbox for synchronizing working files to the web for backup, and back to my home machine (use this link to sign up for Dropbox if you’re interested, and we’ll both get an extra 250MB storage).
Tweetdeck for Twittering.
Flickr Uploader for uploading photos.
iTunes, since it’s required in order to use my iPhone for USB cable-based internet tethering.

I’ve been using the netbook instead of my usual computer off and on for the past two weeks, and I’m quite convinced that I’ll be fine for days at a time with this on the road. I’m missing my financial software and a whole raft of utilities, but nothing that I can’t do without for a while.

I also finally broke down and bought an iPhone 3GS, so if you saw me earlier in the year with my iPod Touch and a Nokia flip phone, those two gadgets have now been replaced by one: more room in my purse. There will probably be some short trips where I can make do with just the iPhone, and leave the netbook at home, since it has everything on there, including Dropbox to access documents. It’s not a great blogging platform, however; as a former Blackberry addict, I can authoritatively state that the iPhone keyboard sucks for any large amount of typing.

With my new technology in tow, I leave on Friday for Germany to attend BPM2009 in Ulm next week – watch for the live blogging from there – then spend another week having a bit of a vacation in locations yet to be determined, but likely a couple of days in Zurich and a trip through western Germany back up to Dusseldorf for my flight home. [For those of you who think giving this sort of information provides an opportunity for someone to break into my home and steal all my worldly belongings, rest assured that I leave behind my black belt hubby – and I don’t mean a Six Sigma black belt – and a pretty mean cat.]

My fall BPM conference schedule

This year has been extremely light for conferences, due to some conference cancellations (or conversion to online-only conferences), and reduced PR budgets that meant that vendors didn’t have the means to offer me travel expenses to attend their conference. According to TripIt, I’ve only been to FASTforward, SAPPHIRE and Enterprise 2.0 so far this year, although I also attended the Open Group EA conference here in Toronto for a total of four. Last year by this time, I had attended 10 conferences, and ended up with a total of 19 for the year.

I will have a bit of conference travel this fall, however:

September 7-10, BPM 2009, Ulm, Germany. This is an academic/research BPM conference that draws the best research minds in BPM from all over the world, mostly from universities and corporate research institutes. I attended last year in Milan, and was overwhelmed with the quality and forward-thinking nature of the presentations. This conference gives a glimpse into the future of BPM, and I urge every BPMS vendor to get someone from their architecture/design/engineering group there to absorb some of this.
October 5-7, Gartner BPM summit, Orlando. I skipped the spring BPM summit, but am looking forward to the new material that is on the agenda since last fall.
October 8-9, Forrester Business Technology Forum, Chicago. I haven’t been to a Forrester conference ever since I spoke at the IT Leadership Forum in Carlsbad in 2007, but this one seems to be really focused on lean processes and process improvement.
October 27-28, Appian Forum user conference, Washington DC. I’ll be giving a presentation on BPM centers of excellence, based in part on the webinar series and white paper that I did for Appian’s BPM Basics site.
November 2-5, Business Rules Forum, Las Vegas. I’ll be giving a presentation on BPM, collaboration and social networking, plus facilitating a peer-to-peer workshop on BPM as a service. I’m very excited that BRF now has a separate BPM track, since there’s a lot of overlap both in vendors and in applications. Unfortunately, I have to miss CASCON which is going on in Toronto at the same time.

There are one or two other possibilities, although this is already starting to look pretty busy. If you’re at any of these events, look me up.

Enterprise Architects in the cloud

A couple of weeks ago, I attended the Open Group’s Enterprise Architecture conference in Toronto (my coverage here), and ended up being invited to speak on Dana Gardner’s panel on how the cloud is pushing the enterprise architects’ role beyond IT into business process optimization.

You can now find the podcast here, subscribe to the Briefings Direct podcast series on iTunes here, and read the transcript here.

Gartner webinar on using BPM to survive, thrive and capitalize

Michele Cantara and Janelle Hill hosted a webinar this morning, which will be repeated at 11am ET (I was on the 8am ET version) – not sure if that will be just the recording of this morning’s session, or if they’ll do it all over again.

Cantara started talking about the sorry state of the economy, complete with a picture of an ax-wielding executioner, and how many companies are laying off staff to attempt to balance their budgets. Their premise is that BPM can turn the ax-man into a surgeon: you’ll still have cuts, but they’re more precise and less likely to damage the core of your organization. Pretty grim start, regardless.

They show some quotes from customers, such as “the current economic climate is BPM nirvana” and “BPM is not a luxury”, pointing out that companies are recognizing that BPM can provide the means to do business more efficiently to survive the downturn, and even to grow and transform the organization by being able to outperform their competition. In other words, if a bear (market) is chasing you, you don’t have to outrun the bear, you only have to outrun the person running beside you.

Hill then took over to discuss some of the case studies of companies using BPM to avoid costs and increase the bottom line in order to survive the downturn. These are typical of the types of business cases used to justify implementing a BPMS within conservative organizations in terms of visibility and control over processes, although I found one interesting: a financial services company used process modelling in order to prove business cases, with the result that 33% of projects were not funded since they couldn’t prove their business case. Effectively, this provided a more data-driven approach to setting priorities on project funding, rather than the more common emotional and political decision-making that occurs, but through process modelling rather than automation using a BPMS.

There can be challenges to implementing BPM (as we all know so well), so she recommends a few things to ensure that your BPM efforts are successful: internal communication and education to address the cultural and political issues; establishing a center of excellence; and implementing some quick wins to give some street cred to BPM within your organization.

Cantara came back to discuss growth opportunities, rather than just survival: for organizations that are in reasonably good shape in spite of the economy, BPM can allow them to grow and gain relative market share if their competition is not able to do the same. One example was a hospital that increased surgical capacity by 20%, simply by manually modelling their processes and fixing the gaps and redundancies – like the earlier case of using modelling to set funding priorities, this project wasn’t about deploying a BPMS and automating processes, but just having a better understanding of their current processes so that they can optimize them.

In some cases, cost savings and growth opportunities are just two sides of the same coin, like a pharmaceutical company that used a BPMS to optimize their clinical trials process and grant payments process: this lowered costs per process by reducing the resources required for each, but this in turn increased capacity also allowed them to handle 2.5x more projects than before. A weaker company would have just used the cost saving opportunity to cut headcount and resource usage, but if in a stable financial position, these cost savings allow for revenue growth without headcount increases instead.

In fact, rather than two sides of a coin, cost savings and growth opportunities could be considered two points on a spectrum of benefits. If you push further along the spectrum, as Hill returned to tell us about, you start to approach business transformation, where companies gain market share by offering completely new processes that were identified or facilitated by BPM, such as a rail transport company that leveraged RFID-driven BPM to avoid derailments through early detection of overheating problems on the rail cars.

Hill finished up by reinforcing that BPM is a management discipline, not just technology, as shown by a few of their case studies that had nothing to do with automating processes with a BPMS, but really were about process modelling and optimization – the key is to tie it to corporate performance and continuous improvement, not view BPM as a one-off project. A center of excellence (or competency center, as Gartner calls it) is a necessity, as are explicit process models and metrics that can be shared between business and IT.

If you miss the later broadcast today, Gartner provides their webinars for replay. Worth the time to watch it.

CloudCamp Toronto #cloudcamp #cloudcamptoronto

I attended my first unconference, commonly referred to as “-camps”, almost 2-1/2 years ago, when I went to Mountain View for MashupCamp, and have attended several since then, including more MashupCamps, BarCamp, TransitCamp, ChangeCamp and DemoCamp. I like the unconference format: although I rarely propose and lead a session, I actively participate, and find that this sort of conversational and collaborative discussion provides a lot of value.

We started with an unpanel, a format that I’ve never seen before but really like: the MC has the audience shout out topics of interest, which he writes on a flipchart, then the four panelists each have 60 seconds to pick one of the topics and expand on it.

We then had the usual unconference format where people can step up and propose their own session, although two of the ten slots are prefilled: one with “what is cloud computing” and the other with “cloud computing business scenario workshop”; check the wiki page to see what we came up with for the other sessions, as well as (hopefully) everyone’s notes on the sessions linked from that page.

I’ll be sticking with the #cloudcamp hashtag after this since it leaves more room for chatter 🙂

Dana Gardner’s panel on cloud security #ogtoronto

After a quick meeting down the street, I made it back within a few minutes of the start of Dana Gardner’s panel on cloud security, including Glenn Brunette of Sun, Doug Howard of Perimeter eSecurity, Chris Hoff of Cisco, Richard Reiner of Enomaly and Tim Grant of NIST.

There was a big discussion about what should and shouldn’t be deployed to the cloud, echoing a number of the points made by Martin Harris this morning, but with a strong tendency not to put “mission critical” applications or data in the cloud due to the perceived risk; I think that these guys need to review some of the pain points that we gathered in the business scenario workshop, where at least one person said that their security increased when they moved to the cloud.

One of the key issues around cloud security is risk assessment: someone needs to do an objective comparison of on-premise versus cloud, because it’s not just a slam-dunk that on-premise is more secure than cloud, especially when there needs to be access by customers or partners. It’s hardly fair to hold cloud platforms to a higher level of security standards than on-premise systems: do a fair comparison, then look at the resulting costs and agility.

The panel seems pretty pessimistic about the potential for cloud platforms to outperform on-premise systems: I’m usually the ultra-conservative, risk-averse one in the room, but they’re making me feel like a cowboy. One of them used the example of Gmail – the free version, not the paid Google Apps – stating that it was still in beta (it’s not, as of a week ago) and that it might just disappear someday, and implying that you get what you pay for. No kidding, cheapskate: don’t expect to get enterprise-quality cloud environments for free. Pony up the $50/user/year for the paid version of Google Apps, however, and you get 99.9% availability (less than 9 hours of downtime per year): not sufficient for mission-critical applications, but likely sufficient for your office applications that it would replace.

A lot of other discussion topics, ending with some interesting points on standards and best practices: for interoperability, integration, portability, and even audit practices. You can catch the replay on Dana Gardner’s Briefings Direct in a couple of weeks.

That’s it for the Enterprise Architecture Practitioners Conference. Tonight is CloudCamp, and tomorrow the Security Practitioners Conference continues.

Dana Gardner’s panel on EA skills in a downturn #ogtoronto

I was in a panel here on Monday, hosted by Dana Gardner and also including John Gøtze of the Association of Enterprise Architects, and Tim Westbrock of EAdirections, where we discussed the issues of extending the scope of architecture beyond the enterprise. This was recorded and will be included in Dana’s usual podcast series within a couple of weeks; I’ll post a link to it when I see it, or you can subscribe in iTunes and catch it there..

Today, he’s moderating two more panels, and I sat in on the beginning of the one about which skills and experience differentiate an enterprise architect in a downtown, although I unfortunately had to duck out to a client meeting before the end (the disadvantage of attending a conference in my home city). This one featured James de Raeve and Len Fehskens of The Open Group, David Foote of Foote Partners, and Jason Uppal of QRS. From the conference program description:

As the architect’s role continues to evolve in scope with the increasingly global and distributed enterprise so to do the core skills and experiences required of them. Professional certifications, such as ITAC, ITSC and TOGAF, can be career differentiators at any time, but are particularly crucial during periods of economic downturn such as we’re currently experiencing.

This panel will examine the evolving job requirements of today’s enterprise architect, discuss the value of professional certification programs and how certifications help to not only legitimize and validate the profession, but also provide much-needed demand for the skills, capabilities and experience that certified professionals have within their organizations. The panel will also include perspectives on how certification can affect market demand and salary levels for those certified.

It’s almost impossible to capture everything said on a panel or who said what, so just a few unattributed comments:

A lot of organizations are in panic mode, trying to cut costs but not lose (any more) customers; IT is afraid of being blamed for costs and inefficiencies
There needs to be more coherence around the definition of EA so that this position doesn’t get squeezed out during budget cuts due to lack of common understanding of what EAs do (I’m thinking it’s a bit late for that)
Issues in governance are becoming critical; architects need to have knowledge and skills in governance in order to remain relevant
Architects need to have the low level technical skills, but also have to develop the higher-level strategic and collaborative skills
Many organizations don’t have a career development framework in place to develop an EA team
In many cases, you will need to perform the role of architect before anyone is willing to call you that (that seems obvious to me): it’s as much about experience as about any sort of certification
HR doesn’t, in general, understand what an architect does, but sees it as just a fancy title that you give to someone in IT instead of giving them a raise (much the way that we used to give them the “project manager” title 15 years ago)

I hated to leave mid-session, but I’ll catch the replay on Dana Gardner’s Briefings Direct in a couple of weeks. I’m hoping to be back for at least some of the panel later today on cloud security, and likely stick around for CloudCamp tonight.

Cloud Computing Business Scenario Workshop #ogtoronto

I’ve never attended an Open Group event before, but apparently interactive customer requirements workshops are part of what they do. We’re doing a business scenario workshop to gather requirements for cloud computing, led by Terry Blevins of MITRE, also on the board of the Open Group. The goal is to capture real business requirements, with the desired outcome to have the vendors understand and respond to customers’ needs. The context presented for this is a call to action for cloud vendors to develop and adhere to open standards, and we were tasked with considering the following questions:

What are the pain points and ramifications of not addressing the pain points, relative to cloud computing?
What are the key processes that would take advantage of cloud computing?
What are the desired objectives of handling/addressing the pain points?
Who are the human actors and their roles?
What are the major computer actors and their roles?
What are the known needs that cloud computing must fulfill to help improve the processes?

We started with brainstorming on the pain points: in the context of cloud computing, given my critical use of Google Apps and Amazon S3, I found myself contributing as an end user. My key pain point (or it was, before I solved it) was the risk of losing data in a physical disaster such as fire/flood/theft and the need for offsite backup. There were a ton of other pain points:

Security – one person stated that their security is better since moving to cloud applications
Sizing and capacity
Flexibility in bundling and packaging their own products for selling
Complex development environments
Pressure to reduce capital investments
Operating costs
Ineffective support
Functional alignment to business needs
Need to align IT with business
Cost of physical space and energy (including green concerns)
Cost of failure discourages innovation
Compliance standards
Difficulties in governance and management
Incremental personnel costs as applications are added
Infrastructure startup cost barrier
Time to get solutions to market
Hard to separate concerns
Operational risk of using old equipment
Resource sharing across organizations
No geographic flexibility/location independence
Training cost and time
Loss of control by users provisioning cloud resources on their own
No access to new technology
Dependency on a few key individuals to maintain systems
Being stifled by in-house IT departments
Need to understand the technology in order to use it
Do-it-yourself in-house solutions
Lack of integrated, well-managed infrastructure
Overhead of compliance requirements, particularly in multinational context
Long time to market
Disposal costs of decommissioned systems
Cost of help desk
Legal/goodwill implications of security breaches
Can’t leverage latest ideas

This is a rough list thrown out by audience members, but certainly lots of pain here. This was consolidated into 9 categories:

Resource optimization
Cost
Timeliness
Business continuity (arguably, this is part of risk)
Risk
Security
Inability to innovate
Compliance
Quality of IT

Things then got even more participatory: we all received 9 post-it notes, giving us 9 votes for these categories in order to collaboratively set priorities on them. We could cast all of our votes for one category, vote once for each category, or anything in between; this is intended to be from our own perspective, not our customers or what we feel is best for enterprises in general. For me, the key issues are business continuity and security, so I cast three votes for each. Cost is also important, so I gave it two votes, and timeliness got one vote. I’ve seen this same voting technique used before, but never with so much ensuing confusion over what to do. 🙂 Blevins pointed out that it sometimes works better to hand out (fake) money, since people understand that that they’re assigning value to the ideas if they’re dividing up the money between them.

The three winners were 1, 2, and 3 from the original list, which (no surprise) translate to better, cheaper and fast. The voting fell out as follows:

Category	# of votes
Resource optimization	37
Cost	34
Timeliness	41
Business continuity	8
Risk	20
Security	29
Inability to innovate	29
Compliance	17
Quality of IT	16

Great session, and some really good input gathered.

TOGAF survey results #ogtoronto

Another flashback to Monday, when Jane Varnus of Bank of Montreal and Navdeep Panaich of Capgemini presented the results of a survey about TOGAF 9. They covered a lot of stats about EAs and their organizations, a few of which I found particularly interesting:

Architects form 2-4% of IT staff (the fact that the question was asked this way just reinforces the IT nature of architecture)
Most architecture practices started within the past 4-5 years
65% of architecture initiatives are charged centrally rather than to individual projects
More than 60% of architecture groups are sponsored by the CTO or CIO, and more than 70% report up to the CTO or CIO
EAs have surprisingly low levels of responsibility and authority and decision-making in both enterprise efforts and projects, but are usually involved or consulted
The primary driver for EA, with 44%, is business-IT alignment; better strategic planning and better IT decision-making come in next at 11% each
Business-IT alignment is also one of the key benefits that companies are achieving with EA; when they look at the future desired benefits, this expands to include agility, better strategic planning, and better IT decision-making
32% of organizations have no KPIs for measuring EA effectiveness, and another 34% have 1-5 KPIs
More thought needs to be given to EA metrics: 40% of the KPIs are perception-oriented (e.g., stakeholder satisfaction), 33% are value-oriented (e.g., cost reduction) and 26% are activity-oriented (e.g., number of artifacts created)
EA frameworks are not yet used in a standardized fashion: 27% are using a standard architecture framework in a standardized manner (this is from a survey of Open Group members!), 44% have selected a framework but its use is ad hoc, and 27% select and use frameworks on an ad hoc basis
TOGAF (8 and 9 combined) is the predominant framework, used in more than 50% of organizations, with Zachman coming in second at 24%
Drivers for architect certification are unclear, and many organizations don’t require it

There’s a ton of additional information here; the whole presentation is here (direct PDF link), although it may be taken down after the conference.