Category: conferences

Mashup Camp IV Day 1: Opening up the social web

Another vendor-proposed session (Plaxo), but no formal presentation and not at all around Plaxo’s stuff so not really commercial at all.

The issue is all the multiple unlinked social networks to which we all belong, most of which aren’t open to data extraction or mashup in any way. For example, Facebook will link to a couple of different online address books (such as Gmail) to see if any of your contacts are already on Facebook, but there’s no programmatic way to do the same so that you could, for example, check to see if any of your LinkedIn contacts are also on Facebook (something that I’m checking out a lot lately as more business contacts start to find me on Facebook).

Most of the social networks are very much walled gardens, with no way to even get your own information out. LinkedIn allows you to download each individual’s contacts in as a vCard, but doesn’t allow for bulk export or API access to that data.

We listed data that should be opened up (i.e., made more easily accessible) in social networks:

  • My profile
  • Who I know
  • Friends’ content
  • Permissions that I’ve set on people/objects (which might include some implied categorization, like the Flickr family/friends subsets)
  • Attention or activity with contacts

We also discussed some of the problems with social networks, such as how you add people to your network but rarely delete them even if you never interact with them any more because that seems a bit harsh to just dump them from your network.

Getting back to the “set my data free” problem, there’s really a need for standards that would allow data to flow between sites that I allow to communicate. Although Plaxo provides some of that functionality, it’s not an open standard and it doesn’t interact with most of the social network sites; possibly something like Plaxo could be used to broker the data and relationships between these sites. LinkedIn’s toolbar for Outlook does a bit of this too, by allowing you to easily link up what you have in Outlook with what you have in LinkedIn; again, it’s not open and only covers that pair of data sources.

One issue is how to recognize the same person across sites: email address is most commonly used, but not perfect because many people use different email addresses for different sites, like a business email on LinkedIn and a personal email on Facebook.

Mashup Camp IV Day 1: AOL and Feed Mashups

Since sponsors are allowed to propose sessions, AOL proposed a session on feed mashups where they gave a short presentation/demo of their new customizable portal page (comparable to Netvibes or iGoogle) that also includes Mgnet, a way to do what they refer to as mashing up feeds, although it appears to be feed aggregation and filtering. Maybe that’s a good question: when does aggregation and filtering (which are basically functions of a feed reader) become a mashup? It appears that some of the interactive “mix & share” functionality is similar to the “share this” functionality in Google Reader, where you can set certain posts (or even a whole folder/collection of third-party feeds) to become part of a new, customized feed that can be shared with others.

The cool part is a set of APIs (both REST and RPC) that allow this functionality to be accessed programmatically rather than interactively:

  • Manage users’ bookmarks and feed subscriptions, organized by tags or folders
  • Retrieve feed articles
  • Apply chained operations (sort, trim, html) during feed processing

This allows aggregated feeds to be accessed in an application as a URL, create a mixed feed from a folder or tag, or dynamically create a synthetic feed from several feeds. This makes it similar to Yahoo Pipes for feed manipulation, but with a bit more flexibility.

AOL also seems to  be providing the only t-shirts at camp, since there’s no official Mashup Camp t-shirt this time; having scored a t-shirt, I’ve fulfilled my home obligations and can relax. 🙂

The session turned into an interesting discussion about widget standards, including how IBM and BEA are both supporting Google gadgets in their portals, making it somewhat of a de facto standard. Even the AOL guys admit that a standard widget format (even if it’s not theirs) is valuable, and they also support Google gadgets.

We also discussed how the difficulties with authentication for feed subscribers is part of what’s inhibiting adoption by businesses, particularly for delivering any sort of secure information to customers outside the firewall, such as a feed of transactions from your financial institution. AOL is using OpenID as a provider (every AOL username also corresponds to a set of OpenID credentials), but isn’t accepting OpenID — this seems to be the way that a lot of sites are going, which is not going to work until they all start accepting as well as providing credentials: providing OpenID credentials without accepting them is little better, in my opinion, than implementing a proprietary credentials scheme. One attendee pointed out, with some head-nodding around the room, that the dream of OpenID may actually be better than the practice since most people don’t want a single point of failure for their online credentials: you might use OpenID for all the logins that don’t contain any sensitive information so as to have a single signon around the web, but are unlikely to use it for financial and other critical sites.

I think that feeds are becoming more important in general, and also are going to start making some significant inroads within enterprises, as I saw at the recent Enterprise 2.0 conference. Inside the firewall, the credentials issue gets much easier, but there’s a much bigger cultural gap to using feeds as applications.

Mashup Camp IV, Day 1: Opening Session

A slow start, in spite of the announced 8:30am start time, and a smaller crowd than I remember from last year’s Mashup Camps, but a few familiar faces and lots of enthusiasm in a low-key sort of way. Like every unconference that I’ve been to, there’s a few minutes before the grid of sessions starts to fill up when I’m convinced that this is all a great waste of time, then people get up and propose interesting sessions, and I’m hooked.

David Berlin is our able host, as usual, and Kaliya Hamlin is facilitating the Open Space concepts for us, providing a bit of education on how an unconference works and getting people up in front of the room to propose sessions and sign up for speed-geeking.

You can keep an eye on the sessions grid here, which should eventually have links to notes from the individual sessions.

LongJump

I really hate going through a lengthy interview about a hot new product, only to have them tell me at the end that half of what they told me is off the record. Not embargoed until some near-future announcement date, just off the record. Grrr.

Other than that, I had a pretty good demo last week from Pankaj Malviya, CEO of LongJump, who I missed at last week’s Enterprise 2.0 conference. LongJump is the brand for a service provided by Relationals, which has been in business since 2003 with a hosted CRM plaform targetted at media companies. Bonus marks to Pankaj, who starts into the presentation saying that their target users are business managers who organize information and create workflow, then in an aside, says “I see that you’re a business process management expert”, which means that either he’s looked at my blog or his PR person has briefed him well. 🙂

All of their solutions, including both those with the Relationals brand and the new LongJump hosted solutions, are focussed on the small to medium business market. LongJump, in fact, is created on the same underlying platform as the Relationals CRM, including components such as the MySQL database.

LongJump is a platform for creating data-driven, widget-based web applications, as well as offering a shared catalog environment for offering those applications by subscription to other users, including monetization of the applications. The application assembly environment is similar to an iGoogle home page, or other similar portal environments: widgets can be placed on the page, although they can’t exchange data or do other data mashup/filtering functionality like Yahoo Pipes. They have their own widget format, but it’s similar to the Google widget format and they’re working on making it identical so that widget created for Google could be used in LongJump.

LongJump Asset Tracking demo

The demo application was an asset tracking application, and I didn’t see much difference from the seemly endless array of lightweight web-based application development environments until he started showing me how to apply workflow to objects. There’s no graphical process mapper, but you can set states through which an object must pass and the predefined responses at each of those states, which in turn creates a sequence of tasks assigned to specific people or roles. The workflows can be triggered by data events, such as “renewal date less than 30 days”. This is crude from a BPM standpoint — it reminds me a lot of what IBM had in their Content Manager application a couple of years ago to do simple object-based workflow routing — but I haven’t seen anything else like it in this space. They plan to enhance this capability further, and I think that they could have a real competitive differentiator here.

Each application is “packaged” for publication on their catalog; for example, the Asset Tracking application above consists of all of the tabs that you see along the top (Home, Directory, PCs and Servers, Phones, Equipment, Reports, About), where each of those tabs has its own set of widgets and the underlying data sources. The catalog then makes published applications available for subscription by others, and handles the monetization.

LongJump is in an early (closed) beta now, with an open beta expected by end of year — I find this a longish timeline for this sort of application, but it’s coming from a more traditional company so I expect that their internal test and release procedures are different from the usual hair-on-fire Web 2.0 startup. They received 1,800 applicants for the closed beta, and have about 10 customers on there now.

BPMG… I mean, BPEE Conference in London

I received an email this morning about the upcoming Business Process Excellence Exchange (BPEE) conference organized by IQPC in London this October — obviously replacing the BPMG conference that they used to organize. The only problem is the speaker list, which has both Steve Towers and Terry Schurter listed as being with BPMG.

You’d think that the conference organizers would have figured out a bit of what’s happening (or not happening) with BPMG these days, since they had to actually change the name of the conference from last year…

IQPC BPM Summit: David Haigh

Last speaker of the day — and of the conference — was David Haigh, Global Director of Continuous Improvement at W.E.T. Automotive Systems, discussing Lean Product Development. It’s actually refreshing to be at a BPM conference where I’m the only person that I heard (since I missed Jodi Starkman-Mendelsohn’s talk this morning) that talked about the technology.

They previously tried out a lot of different quality programs, including ISO 9000, Six Sigma, Lean, BPR and other techniques, but these were always initiated by the subsidiaries and didn’t really catch on, so in 2006 they started on a global program that included the shop floor, logistics and product creation. Whereas they had always focused on the production/fulfillment value stream previously, they expanded the scope to include the entire order-to-cash cycle, particularly to include the design portion of the cycle that has the smallest cost element but the largest cost influence.

I loved his analogy for hand-offs in the business process: it’s like the telephone game that we played as kids, whispering a message from one person to the next to see how message changes by the time it reaches the end; any hand-off results in a reduction in information clarity, as well as being a big time-waster.

Since he’s in an engineering manufacturing environment, there’s some interesting ideas that at first seem unique, but have value in many other areas: set-based design, for example, where you spend the engineers’ time researching and pushing boundaries on the technology that underlies customer solutions, rather than spending the time building one-off customer solutions. The equivalent in the BPM world would likely be having them focus on building out the service layer, not assembling the services using a BPMS. He also spoke about Toyota’s practice of streaming engineers up to higher levels of engineering rather than “promoting” them to sales or management — I always tried to do that when I ran a company, since there’s always some people who just want to stay technical, and don’t want their career to suffer for it.

They’ve built a “workflow” and project planning tool in Excel that has some interesting concepts: no dependencies between tasks, just points of integration, and the team sets the deadlines (can you say “collaboration”?). This helped them by providing tools for visualizing waste in the process, and driving to reduce the waste, which is the main focus of Lean.

This has been an interesting conference, although the attendance is quite a bit less than I had expected, but that makes for a much better environment for asking questions and networking. And speaking of networking, I think that I just have time to run home before the Girl Geek Dinner tonight…

IQPC BPM Summit: Kirk Gould

Kirk Gould, a performance consultant with Pinnacle West Capital, talked about business processes and metrics. I like his definition of a metric: “A tool created to tie the performance of the organization to the business objectives”, and he had lots of great advice about how to — and how not to — develop metrics that work for your company.

I came right off of my presentation before this one, so I’m a bit too juiced up to focus as well on his presentation as it deserves. However, his slides are great and I’ll be reviewing them later. He also has a good handout that takes us through the 10 steps of metric development:

  1. Plan
  2. Perform
  3. Capture
  4. Analyze
  5. Display
  6. Level
  7. Automate
  8. Adjust
  9. Manage
  10. Achieve

He has a great deal more detail for each of these steps, both on the handout and in his presentation. He discussed critical success factors and performance indicators, and how they fit into a metrics framework, but the best parts were when he described the ways in which you can screw up your metrics programs: there were a lot of sheepish chuckles and head-shaking around the room, so I know that many of these hit home.

He went through the stages of metrics maturity, which I’ll definitely have to check out later since he flew through the too-dense slides pretty quickly. He quotes the oft-used (and very true) line that “what gets measured, gets managed”, a concept that is at the heart of metrics.

IQPC BPM Summit: Manish Mehta

Manish Mehta, a project manager at the government of the Region of Peel (which covers a huge chunk of the bedroom communities north and west of Toronto, about 1.2 million people in urban and rural areas), gave a presentation on implementing process management at Peel.

For them, process management was part of their quality management, which already included ISO and some other quality programs. They wanted to strengthen corporate thinking, reduce their silo departmental focus, increase alignment and connection, and measure employee and client satisfaction.

The steps in their process management project were as follows:

  • Phase 1: develop standard terms, definitions and symbols
  • Phase 2: provide process management training, and develop a process management framework
  • Phase 3: develop their service improvement initiative (SII) to apply process management

As with the previous OPG talk, this was not about a BPM implementation, but about putting standard, optimized processes into place in an organization in order to not only improve service delivery, but measure it as well. Specifically, their three goals were to implement process management across the organization, to implement a consistent approach to client satisfaction measurement and management, and to develop and monitor a corporate client satisfaction rating.

They first applied this to their TransHelp program, which provides transportation for those who are unable to use public transportation, then to their waste management program; in both cases, they found that doing client satisfaction surveys identified factors that clients found important that had not been considered by the inside workers: definitely a good reason to get out there and talk to people rather than sitting in the ivory tower and deciding the best process to implement. They are seeing some measurable improvements: with TransHelp, their no-show/cancel rate has dropped in half, and with waste management, their number of complaints has dropped. For process improvement work that they did with children’s services within their financial assistance area, the time to complete an application and assess eligibility dropped dramatically with the new process. Once they’d done these three pilots, they found that other areas started to come to them to ask for help in process improvement: you really need to show some successes in order to get started in a diverse organization such as a regional government. Measuring client satisfaction for regional governments is still in an early stage, and Mehta said that they were working with other government organizations to develop methods for doing this. He also showed a great public sector reference model that linked resources, processes, services and programs and how they interact with providers and clients.

They used outside facilitation for process redesign, but mostly created their own methodology and guidelines and do have some capacity for the process redesign internally. They’ve developed a fairly structured project management approach in terms of defining scope and schedules. They have discovered, not surprisingly, is that pulling subject matter experts away from their regular jobs for several days in order to do the process redesign is much more effective than trying to have people add this on to their real jobs, in spite of the grumbling that will inevitably occur when you try to get a group of people to a multi-day offsite meeting.

Something I really like about what they’ve done is to split their SII approach into three stages, depending on the state and complexity of the original process: repair (quick fixes to smaller broken processes through understanding customer needs), improvement (considering root cause analysis and piloting a solution), and design/redesign (similar to improvement but with best practices and benchmarks). They see both improvement and redesign projects as requiring a trained facilitator.

Mehta showed some private sector studies that showed that employee satisfaction leads to client satisfaction, which in turn provides even greater employee satisfaction, and client satisfaction also leads to greater profitability. Applied to the public sector, you can replace the profitability part of the equation with trust and confidence: greater customer satisfaction results in more trust in the government body and their ability to execute works on behalf of the citizens.

Off to lunch, then I’m up at the front of the room after that.