conferences – Page 9

Appian World Cloud Case Studies: Clayton Holdings

Next up was John Cowles from Clayton Holdings, which does risk analysis for the mortgage industry.

Clayton has 240 users across 5 business units on Appian Cloud BPM, and they have only 5 primary resources for building and maintaining the 100+ processes that they have in production. They had limited IT resources and limited budget, and found that software-as-a-service fit their budget and resources well. Initially, they had no IT involvement at all: it was all operations, business analysts and process efficiency people. They found that Appian was easy enough to build applications without IT support, although now that they are undergoing some large back-end system changes, they do have a bit more technical input. They’ve seen an improvement in their BPM cultural maturity, and an increase in adoption rates as well as demand for new applications. Cowles now wants to do everything with Appian: he sees it as a general-purpose application assembly tool, not just a BPM tool. Interestingly, they did what I always recommend: limited or no system integration for the first implementations, then add that later on once they figure out what they really need, and start to see some process efficiencies. This lines up with their Agile philosophy of prototyping everything, and having frequent releases with incremental new functionality.

They have experienced huge efficiency gains due to their BPM implementation and other process efficiency efforts: 38% reduction in headcount in spite of a 6% increase in workload, time saved not doing manual gathering of user performance data, and process improvements in moving from email and Excel to BPM. The focus on change management and process management early on were important for their success. He also recommended collecting the reporting requirements up front to ensure that the necessary data are being collected by the process. Good points, and a nice success story for cloud BPM.

CME Case Study at Appian World

Who knew that the venerable Chicago Mercantile Exchange had rebranded themselves as the CME Group? Not me, so when I sat at the Appian dinner yesterday with John Verburgt, their Director of BPM, I probably sounded like a bit of a newb. Verburgt was joined on stage this afternoon by Brian Toba, their Director of Software Engineering, to talk about how they launched their BPM program. They were looking for BPM in the holistic sense – both methodology and execution – ranging from just wanting to get a better handle on how some of their processes work to supporting mobile workers.

They talked about their vendor selection process (without naming the other two vendors involved, although they did mention that they consider the leaders as specified by Gartner and Forrester), including a proof of concept installation and prototype. They did their pilot with Appian’s cloud BPM, and had the satisfying experience of going out for a couple of days training and coming back to a completely operational system – I really think that even for traditional on-premise vendors, cloud support for development and test is really critical for customer quick starts.

They had a really interesting chart showing their “collaboration meter”, indicating how much business and technology involvement was required for each of the project activities; the only thing that was purely on the technology side was architecture implementation (around shifting from cloud development to on-premise production), whereas all other activities were a blend. Process design, for example, was shown as 2/3 business and 1/3 technology.

They went live in January 2011 with more than 100 users, and are on track to deliver their third application in May. So far, they’ve implemented a new product launch process and an employee on-boarding process, and May’s release will be a co-location portal. They’re also using Tempo for mobile access.

Some good points on what – and who – it takes to get a BPM initiative up and running, and to sustain it as it moves from that first project into a multi-project program.

Malcolm Ross With Appian Product Update

Malcolm Ross was up next at Appian World to give an update on the entire product portfolio: not an easy task in 30 minutes. He had some updates on their on-premise solution, and some good information on their Appian BPM cloud platform; interestingly, they no longer seem to use the name Appian Anywhere for the cloud platform, but just position it as another deployment option for their BPM platform. To begin with, he shared a few statistics for their cloud BPM:

99.99% up time in 2010 (can you say the same for your enterprise systems?)
> 30,000 unique logins per day
> 40% of Appian’s software revenue
integrated cloud/support team

They’ve beefed up the security in response to customer requirements, including encrypted HTTPS traffic, and even providing a secure VPN connection between their environment and your enterprise, if you need a highly secure environment.

Also interesting is some new packaging and pricing with their cloud starter edition, which combines cloud and on-premise deployments; I see this as a good fit for organizations that need to have their production system on premise due to security concerns, but want to use the cloud for development and testing in order to reduce costs and speed the time to get started. It uses a month-to-month subscription model, although I’m not sure if that includes the on-premise licenses as well, and the ability to quickly set up environments in the cloud with instant on and off control in order to control costs. For some time now, they’ve allowed a process application created in the cloud to be exported and moved over to an on-premise server (or vice versa), allowing developers and testers to use the cloud, then quickly deploy within the enterprise.

He spent some amount of time doing a live iPad demo of Tempo, showing how you can not only consume information, but spawn new activities and interact with events from a variety of systems, including Appian BPM, Salesforce.com and Twitter. As we heard from Matt Calkins earlier today, the Appian app can now be branded by any partner or customer; Malcolm gave us a bit more detail such as how they handle all the admin around things such as submitting it to the Apple app store. He also demoed some of the features that take advantage of the platform, such as use of embedded cameras to take a photo as an attachment.

Matt Calkins Keynote at Appian World

Matt Calkins, CEO of Appian, provided us with some vision around how BPM is changing, and how Appian is delivering on that. They’ve experienced significant growth in sales in the past year, and more than 40% of their business is on their cloud platform.

Their big news, of course, is Tempo: their process event streaming interface that integrates closely with their BPM platform as an alternative interface, and also allows inclusion of events from a variety of sources such as Salesforce.com or pretty much anything with an RSS feed. There are two significant things going on here: one is the ease of use of the interface, and the other is the enablement of mobile. This fundamentally changes how work can get done; I spoke with an Appian customer last night (who will be presenting later today on a panel) about how they will be using Tempo to enable fuel tank inspection operators to update a Tempo-based compliance checklist on their mobile device instead of using paper clipboards, then having to spend additional time back at an office filling out a spreadsheet and emailing it to someone. As we know, in regulated industries, it’s not enough to be compliant, you have to be seen to be compliant; providing this sort of immediate update of compliance data helps with the latter at the same time as you’re doing the former.

In their latest release happening now, you can brand your own application based on Tempo, so that the iPhone app uses your logo and title bar rather than being branded as Appian.

He poked a bit of fun at how some other vendors are presenting their social business offerings as more about social interaction than getting business done: social may be the delivery mechanism, but the payload is business. Their social platform is focused on integration so that you don’t have your interaction in one system, then login to the “real” system to record what happened; integrating with their own process management plus many other systems means that Tempo is the real system, just an alternative, cooler interface to it.

He moved on to talk about the nature of work, that is, the spectrum between structured and ad hoc work, especially within the same process. I’ve talked a lot about this requirement to have completely unstructured portions within a structured process, and see it in almost every business process that I work on with enterprise clients. He sees this as something that is handled by social business; I see a distinction between dynamic and social, although there’s a correlation.

He did a good overview of the type of people in enterprise today relative to their mobile usage: executives (approvals, reports), headquarters workers (keep in touch), road warriors (initiate tasks, remote collaboration) and mobile task workers (execute tasks, access data). Enterprise applications provide varying levels of support for current business functions, by providing modern interfaces, making business events visible, having native mobile processes and data, and integrating social functionality. For those applications that don’t provide some of the more advanced levels of support, Appian is providing ways to add Tempo as an interface to bring them up to scratch. He sees BPM in 2013 as being focused on the mobile process enterprise: it’s more than just having organizations become process enterprises (which is enough a challenge on its own), but that these processes can be accessed from anywhere. Ambitious, but not undoable.

Gartner Keynote at Appian World: From Operational Excellence To Operational Resilience

The analysts are on the move this week: earlier in the week, we were all in Las Vegas for IBM Impact, now we’re all in DC for Appian World. I presented a BPM 101 session yesterday in the workshop day, and this morning Janelle Hill of Gartner is giving the opening keynote. I’ll be at the Gartner BPM Summit in Baltimore in a few weeks, so I might be seeing this talk again soon.

She’s talking about an upcoming BPM revolution (although it seems more evolutionary than revolutionary, but the R word allowed her to invoke some nice Egypt images) where we move towards resilient processes. By 2020, we’ll see more and more of unstructured processes, dynamic BPM, social BPM, context-aware processes and intelligent operations.

BPM is raising the bar for operational excellence; their basic definition “BPM is a management discipline that treats processes as assets that directly contribute to enterprise performance by driving operational excellence and agility” points to the required attributes of visibility, accountability and adaptability. Gartner predicts that by 2014, business process defects will topple 10 Global 2000 companies; these seems a bit too much like end-of-time predictions, but if you cast the net wide enough, there will sure to be some business failures that can be attributed in part to defective processes. What I do whole-heartedly agree with is that the biggest opportunity for improvements and differentiation are in unstructured processes: these are the ones currently live in email and spreadsheets, and contribute to non-compliance.

There are a number of factors that contribute to operational resilience:

Visibility into the pipeline of work allows a front-line worker to dynamically reroute work in order to achieve service goals. I would argue that some of this could be done with automated load balancing, not just manual rerouting, although the concept of visibility would cover that as well.
Dynamic BPM allows workers to change or create the process required in order to achieve a goal in a manner that was not envisioned by the process designer. This allows us to consider eliminating requirements (I could so get on board with that) since the creation, prototyping and productionizing of processes can happen so quickly; if this approach scares you, consider that the requirements and design can be a much more collaborative process that allows for continuous change. In fact, she characterizes the requirements-less approach as “fantasy”, whereas I characterize it as “Agile”. I don’t think that Gartner goes far enough here: fully dynamic BPM is possible in some scenarios (excuse me while I dig out my “Process for the People” t-shirt); Phil Gilbert of IBM/Lombardi has stated that we should just put process design in everyone’s hands. Obviously, this is going to be dependent on the types of processes and your corporate culture.
Social BPM, including both design-time and runtime, which is something that I’ve been writing and presenting on for 5 years now, brings enterprise social software concepts to BPM – good to see Gartner finally recognizing these ideas front and center. I think that they formerly had a lot of social collaboration ideas tied up in dynamic BPM, which are adjacent but slightly different concepts, but now seem to have split this out.

Her focus is really on challenging the audience on how they define BPM, and how they use it within their own organizations. This means building in resiliency, embracing dynamic processes, figuring out cloud strategy, and harnessing the social interaction that is already going on between people. To quote her closing point, “acceptance of the collective will determine your future”.

SAP Run Better Tour: Business Analytics Overview

Dan Kearnan, senior director of marketing for business analytics, provided a overview of SAP’s business analytics in the short breakout sessions following the keynote. Their “run smarter” strategy is based on three pillars of knowing your business, deciding with confidence and acting boldly; his discussion of the “act boldly” part seemed to indicate that the round-tripping from data to events back to processes is more prevalent than I would have thought based on my previous observations.

We covered a lot of this material in the bloggers briefing a couple of weeks ago with Steve Lucas; he delved into the strategy for specific customers, that is, whether you’re starting with SAP ERP, SAP NetWeaver BW or non-SAP applications as input into your analytics.

He briefly addressed the events/process side of things – I think that they finally realized that when they bought Sybase, they picked up Aleri CEP with it – and their Event Insight solution is how they’re starting to deliver on this. They could do such a kick-ass demo using all of their own products here: data generated from SAP ERP, analyzed with BusinessObjects, events generated with Event Insight, and exception processes instantiated in NetWeaver BPM. NW BPM, however, seems to be completely absent from any of the discussions today.

He went through a number of the improvements in the new BI releases, including a common (and easier to use) user interface across all of the analytics products, and deep integration with the ERP and BW environments; there is a more detailed session this afternoon to drill into some of these.

I’m going to stick around to chat with a few people, but won’t be staying for the afternoon, so my coverage of the SAP Run Better Tour ends here. Watch the Twitter stream for information from others onsite today and at the RBT events in other cities in the days to come, although expect Twitter to crash spectacularly today at 1pm ET/10am PT when the iPad announcement starts.

Blogger/Analyst Session with Mark Aboud at SAP Run Better Tour

We had the chance for a small group of bloggers and analysts (okay, I was probably the only one with “blogger” on my name tag) with Mark Aboud, Managing Director of SAP Canada, and Margaret Stuart, VP for the Canadian BusinessObjects division. Since this was a roundtable Q&A, I’ll just list some of the discussion points.

50% of SAP Canadian customers are small and medium businesses, sold through their partner network. ERP sales tend to be made through larger partners, whereas analytics are handled by a larger number of smaller partners as well.
Business ByDesign has only been launched in Canada within the past 60 days, making it difficult to tell much about the uptake here. There is one live production customer in Canada now, although they were not able to name names. Pricing and minimum number of users is similar to the US offering.
It sounds like HANA is a focus in Canada, but nothing concrete to talk about yet – seems like the analytics sales team is being focused on it and has built a good pipeline. Maple Leaf Foods, who spoke at the keynote, is considering it. The use cases exist, but the customer may not realize that the solutions to big data analytics are within their reach.
StreamWork is pretty much a big zero in Canada right now: they’re starting to talk to customers, but it sounds like very early days here. I was promised a follow-up on this question.
They’re putting a lot of weight on mobile apps for the future, particularly in industries that have remote users. I’m envisioning an underground miner with an iPad.
The use of analytics such as BusinessObjects has become much more agile: it’s not taking 6 months to create an analytical view any more, the end users have the expectation that this can be done in a much shorter time.
I posed the question about how (or whether) all these great analytics are being used to generate events that feed back automatically into business processes; although there was recognition that there’s some interesting potential, it was a bit of a blank. This is the same question that I posed at last year’s SAPPHIRE about creating a link between their sustainability initiatives and BPM – I’m seeing this as a critical missing link from analytics through events back to processes.

A good opportunity for Q&A with Aboud and Stuart about what’s happening with SAP in Canada. Since most of my focus with SAP has been through the US conferences, it was nice to see what’s happening closer to home.

SAP Run Better Tour Toronto

SAP is holding a Run Better Tour to highlight some of their new releases and customer success stories, and today it’s in Toronto which allows me to check it out without having to get on an airplane. I attended the Women’s Leadership Forum breakfast this morning, featuring Amanda Lang of CBC News, and she’s speaking again in the general keynote, along with Mark Aboud, Managing Director of SAP Canada.

To go off on a tangent for a moment, Lang had an interesting anecdote at breakfast from an interview that she did with the ambassador from Norway. Apparently, Norway mandated that there be equal representation of women in senior government and corporate board positions; all of the cries of “but there are no women to take these roles” turned out to be completely untrue once they were actually required to look for them. Very reminiscent of the brouhaha around women speakers at tech conferences that inevitably arises several times per year.

In her general keynote, Lang focused on the economy and market forces (after making a quick joke about economists getting laid), and the factors that could impact a return to prosperity: world instability, a repeat of the financial crisis due to mismanagement, and a decrease in productivity. In the relatively small Canadian market, we have no control over the first two of these – a financial crisis that impacts us is unlikely to come from our conservatively-run banks, but from US or European financial institutions – but we can be more productive. However, our productivity has declined in the past 20-30 years, and we are at risk of leaving our children worse off than we are. This started when our currency was so cheap, and our exports were selling at $0.60 on the dollar: no need to increase productivity when you can keep doing the same old thing and still make money at it. However, the past 8 years or so have seen an exchange increase such that our dollar sits near par with the US, which makes our exports much less competitive. Since we haven’t increased productivity, we don’t have better widgets to sell for less in spite of the exchange leveling. Productivity and innovation, although not identical, are highly correlated: we need to have more people inside organizations who challenge the status quo and bring forward better ideas for how to do things.

Mark Aboud started his presentation with the idea that you can’t just get better, you have to get better faster than your competition. Some of this is based on taming the explosion of data that is resulting from the digitalization of human culture: all that needs to be gathering and analyzed, then made available to a variety of constituents via a number of different channels. Another contributor is social media, both in terms of the power that it has a platform, but also in raising the expectations for user experience: the consumer experience is very powerful, but the typical employee experience is pretty lame. He moved on to talk about SAP, and particularly SAP Canada, where only 40% of their business is based on ERP: much of the rest is business analytics. This stress on analytics became obvious as he talked about one of their customers, Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario, and how they’re using a graphical real-time dashboard as their key interface in the emergency department to indicate how well they’re operating, and highlighting problem areas: a great analytics-in-action example, although it’s not clear where the underlying data is coming from. He also talked about CN Railways, and how they’re using Business Objects analytics to reduce their fuel costs.

Last up in the keynote was someone from Maple Leaf Foods (missed the name) talking about their ERP implementation, and how they use it to manage a company that has grown by acquisition and has very different types of operations in different regions, with 200 different systems and islands of data. They are trying to standardize their business processes across these units at some level, and started rolling out SAP in all of the business units early in 2011, with a planned completion date of early 2013. They’ve done 35 go-lives already, which necessitates a minimum of customization and, sometimes, changing their business processes to match out-of-the-box SAP rather than spending the time to customize SAP.

Good balance of keynotes; I’m now off to a bloggers’ briefing with Mark Aboud.

What Price Integrity?

As an interesting follow on to the previous session on blog monetization, I attended a panel on maintaining integrity on blogs when you do advertising or promotions on your site, featuring Danny Brown, Gini Dietrich and Eden Spodek. A lot of this is about transparency and disclosure; one audience member said that she writes paid reviews on her blog but that although you can buy her review, you can’t buy her opinion: there’s a fine line here. This is particularly an issue for lifestyle bloggers, since they often receive offers of free product in exchange for a review; this might be seen as being less of a “payment” than cash, although it still constitutes payment.

When I write a product review here, I am never compensated for that, although arguably it can impact my relationship with the vendor and can lead to other things, including paid engagements and conference trips. That’s quite different from being paid to blog about something, which I don’t do; I’ve had offers of payment from vendors to blog about them, and they don’t really understand when I tell them that I just don’t do that. Of course, you might say that when I’m at a vendor’s conference where they paid my travel expenses and I’m blogging about it, that’s paid blogging, but if you’ve ever spent much time at these conferences, you know that’s not much of a perq after a while. In fact, I’m giving up potential paid time in order to spend my time unpaid at the conference, so it ends up costing me in order to stay up to date on the products and customer experiences.

By the way, my “no compensation for blogging” doesn’t go for book reviews: it is almost 100% guaranteed that if I write a book review, the author or publisher sent me a free copy (either paper or electronic) since I just don’t buy a lot of books. I currently have a backlog of books to be read and reviewed since that’s not my main focus, so this isn’t such a great deal for either party.

The key advice of the panel is that if you do accept free product or some other payment in exchange for a product review, make sure that you remain authentic with your review, and disclose your relationship with the product vendor. In some countries, such as the US and the UK, this is now required; in places where it isn’t, it’s just good practice.

I was going to stay on for a session on webinars but the speaker seems to be a no-show, so this may be it for me and PodCamp Toronto 2011. Glad that I stopped by for the afternoon, definitely some worthwhile material and some food for thought on monetization and integrity.

Blog Monetization

The next session that I attended was Andrea Tomkins talking about how to make money through advertising on your blog. She started with ways that blogs can pay off without direct monetization, such as driving other sorts of business (just as this blog often drives first contacts for my consulting business) and leveraging free trips to conferences, but her main focus was on how she sells ads on her blog.

She believes that selling your own ad space results in higher quality advertising by allowing you to select the advertisers who you want on your site and control many of the design aspects. Plus, you get to keep all the cash. She believes in charging a flat monthly rate rather than by impressions or clicks, and to set the rates, she looked at the rates for local newspapers; however, newspapers are very broad-based whereas blog audiences are much more narrowly focused, meaning that the people reading your blog come from a specific demographic that certain advertisers would really like to have access to. Andrea’s blog is a “parenting lifestyle” blog – a.k.a. “mommyblogger” – and she has 1,300-1,400 daily views, many of whom are local to her Ottawa area.

She started out charging $50/month/ad, and bumped it for new clients as well as an annual increase until she reached a sweet spot in the pricing (which she didn’t disclose). She doesn’t sell anything less than a 3-month term, and some advertisers have signed up for a 12-month spot. Her first advertiser, who is still with her, is a local candy store that she and her family frequented weekly – she felt that if she loved it so much, then her readers would probably enjoy it as well. She approached the store directly to solicit the ad, although now many of her new advertisers come to her when they see her blog and how it might reach their potential audience.

She controls the overall ad design: the ad space is a 140×140 image with a link to their website, with the images being updated as often as the advertisers wish. New ads are added to the bottom of the list, so advertisers are incented to maintain their relationship with her in order to maintain their placement on the site.

She also writes a welcome post for each advertiser; she writes this as her authentic opinion, and doesn’t just publish some PR from the advertiser since she doesn’t want to alienate her readers. Each advertiser has the opportunity to host a giveaway or contest for each 3-month term, although she doesn’t want to turn her blog into a giveaway blog because that doesn’t match her blogging style. She also uses her social network to promote her advertisers in various ways, whether through personal recommendations, on her Facebook page or Twitter; because she only takes advertisers that she believes in, she can really give a personal recommendation for any of them.

Before you call a potential advertiser, she recommends understanding your traffic, figuring out an ad design and placement, and coming up with a rate sheet. Don’t inflate your traffic numbers: you’ll be found out and look like an idiot, and most advertisers are more interested in quality engagement than raw numbers anyway. Everyone pays the same rate on Andrea’s blog; she doesn’t charge more for “above the fold” ads or use a placement randomizer, so sometimes has some new advertisers (who are added to the bottom) complain about placement.

A rate sheet should be presented as a professionally-prepared piece of collateral coordinated with your business cards, blog style and other marketing pieces. It needs to include something about you, the deal you’re offering, your blog, your audience and traffic, and optionally some testimonials from other advertisers.

Handling your own ads does create work. You need to handle contacts regarding ads (she doesn’t publish her rates), invoice and accept payments, track which ads need to run when, set up contracts, and provide some reporting to the advertisers. Obviously, there has to be a better way to manage this without resorting to giving away some big percentage to an ad network. She also writes personal notes to advertisers about when their ad might have been noticed in something that Andrea did (like a TV appearance) or when she is speaking and hence might have their ads be more noticed. She does not publish ads in her feed, but publishes partial feeds so readers are driven to her site to read the full posts, and therefore see the ads. She has started sending out a newsletter and may be selling advertising separately for that.

This started a lot of ideas in my head about advertising. I used to have Google ads in my sidebar, which pretty much just paid my hosting fees, but I took them out when it started to feel a bit…petty. As long as I get a good part of my revenue from end-customer organizations to help them with their BPM implementations, it would be difficult to accept ads here and maintain the appearance of independence. Although I do work for vendors as an analyst and keep those parts of my business completely separate, with appropriate disclosure to clients, it is just as important to have the public appearance of impartiality as well as actually be impartial. An ongoing dilemma.