social – Page 10

Grown Up Digital

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

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

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

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

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

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

Build your social network before you get laid off

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

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

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

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

It’s an invasion of privacy

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

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

It takes too much time

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

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

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

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

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

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

PegaWorld: Mashups with IAC

I thought that I should attend one technical/product breakout, since I’ve been covering customer case studies so far, and I wanted to get a closer look at Pega’s composite application development environment for internet applications, Internet Application Composer. I had a briefing on this a few months back, so have some notes and screenshots from that time that I’ll incorporate here as well.

IAM embeds PRPC application gadgets — like a worklist — on existing web pages, allowing SmartBPM functionality to be added directly and securely. This is like having PRPC on the web: actually exposing Pega functionality as Javascript gadgets, rather than just a back-end system that supports a website. This is not a limited set of pre-made gadgets, but the ability to turn a UI created in PRPC into a gadget.

IAC has three main components:

Composite Gadget Manager, which is a Javascript file that you load on your web page that implements your Pega gadgets. It controls configuration settings, plus the attributes, actions and events for the gadgets.
An existing PRPC application, running on a web node (behind the firewall); a web node is a separate PRPC node designated specifically for handling IAC requests, where all functionality is disabled by default unless explicit enabled for the web applications. This makes it possible to globally restrict certain types of access and functions on that node, rather than having to build that into the user interface.
IAC Composite Gateway, which is a servlet (in the DMZ) that manages the HTTP traffic between the Pega gadgets and the SmartBPM application on the web node.

As with most web applications that interact with behind-the-firewall systems, it’s a best practice to have the web application authenticate the user, pass on the trusted session to the Composite Gateway, which in turn passes it to behind-the-firewall web node.

Not only can PRPC gadgets be created and exposed, but legacy applications can be wrapped in SmartBPM to expose them to the web more easily. Since the PRPC application controls the view through the gadget as well as the internal view, any changes to the PRPC UI will be reflected both internally and in the gadget, without changing the web page itself: build once, deploy everywhere.

There’s tighter security than in many consumer mashup architectures: parameters are encrypted and obfuscated within URLs, for example.

The interface within the gadgets is rich, e.g., if one parameter is changed, a related parameter may update without a screen refresh. Gadgets on a page can interoperate, so a change within one gadget may cause another gadget’s data to update, such as showing the details for a selected item: this is enabled with some advanced actions and events, and uses JSON.

We looked at the actual HTML required to add a gadget to a web page: there’s a pretty small block of Javascript up front to set the configuration, then a 10-line block in a <div> structure that actually embeds the gadget.

IAC was released earlier this year, but a 2.0 version is available as of the end of September that includes HTTPS support, support for load balanced web node and gateway, tracing tools for debugging, samples and more. If you’re a Pega customer, you can access a number of in-depth technical articles on the Pega Developer Network about IAC.

Appian Forum: Connie Moore keynote

Three days ago, I was in Rome — original home of the Roman Forum and the Appian Way — and now I’m at Appian Forum: Appian‘s first user conference. Samir Gulati, VP of Marketing, delivered some short opening remarks including the “Sandy Kemsley Conference Checklist”, showing how they measured up on my basic requirements for conferences: wifi, online agenda, good content, frequent networking breaks, and other good stuff. They missed on the power plugs at the tables, but other than that, I have to give them full marks.

They had about 150 people sign up for the conference, although I don’t think that were are that many in the room this morning; this was not a paid conference, which tends to result in a higher number of no-shows, but there’s a good cross-section of Appian’s customers and partners, as well as analysts.

After Samir’s short introduction, he turned it over to Connie Moore of Forrester for a keynote on Design for People, Build for Change (wait, this sounds familiar…). She had a great graphic that expand on some of the things that I’ve heard Forrester people talk about in the past, highlighting the “design for people” part of the equation through social networking and other techniques, whereas we’ve often focused (maybe too much) on the “build for change” part of business innovation.

She discussed four factors creating the “perfect storm” that’s led to the current situation:

Design evolution, where more products are being designed for optimal use and customer experience, rather than the conveniences of the manufacturer or based on the preconceived notions of the designer. There are many consumer products that illustrate this, but it holds equally true with business computer systems.
Process evolution, where we do more continuous improvement than big bang reengineering for both technical and cultural reasons. The current range of BPM products, with monitoring and optimization built in, allow for this sort of continuous improvement in ways that were not previously possible, which has helped to facilitate this shift.
Workforce evolution, with the boomers — along with their knowledge of business processes — starting to retire, and the systems developed for those boomers not really suitable for the millenials who grew up digital. This forces the move to different computing paradigms, particularly social networking, as well as different corporate culture in order to attract and retain the talent.
Software evolution, moving from a traditional model to software as a service, Web 2.0, open source and free software in both consumer and enterprise environments.

All of this means that we need to bridge between structured human activities and system-intensive processes that we’ve dealt with in traditional enterprise systems, and the ad hoc, messy, chaotic human activities that we see in the new generation of dynamic business applications. Earning her keep, she highlighted how Appian brings content and collaboration to the usual BPM functionality seen with other vendors, then walked through an example of a dynamic business application.

She discussed the need to forge partnerships between stakeholders, preferably by collocating the business and IT people on a project team so that they create a more seamless project. I’ve seen a lot of projects where there is a serious disconnect between the business and IT participants, and having them sit and work together could only help that situation.

Forrester went out to a number of enterprises to see how they build for change, and saw a few different models:

An IT-focused model where the technical team always makes changes to the process (hopefully based on conversations with the business)
A blended model where the business owners meet with the project team on a regular basis, and the process changes are made by business analysts or technical team members, depending on the requriement

There needs to be a change model that allows for both continuous change — every 1-2 weeks for process tuning — and for new process versions — every 2-6 months for new processes and major changes. This change model needs to be incorporated from the beginning in any process project to allow for continuous improvement, or you’ll end up with inflexible processes; at the very least, plan on a minimum of 3 iterations shortly after implementation before the process is even remotely correct. At the same time, you need to consider forming a process center of excellence to help with overall process improvement, and consider the link to SOA in order to provide a technical framework for dynamic business applications.

When Forrester asked enterprise architects about the primary benefit of BPM, the largest response (24%) was increased productivity, with process visibility (18%) and agility (15%) following. Other benefits included the ability to model processes, consistent processes across business units/geographies, and reduced reliance on IT for process improvement. By looking at the perceived degree of success and the existence of a BPM center of excellence, they found a clear correlation: about half of those who said that BPM was a rousing success had a COE, whereas less than 5% of the failing efforts had a COE.

Her experience — which matches mine — shows that going with a large systems integrator is not a good way to build the necessary skills within an enterprise to achieve ongoing process improvement, and sees direct skills transfer from the BPM vendor has a greater degree of success. Business analysts need to become process analysts, and developers need to become assemblers of dynamic applications. She finished up with several suggestions on how to get started, for business people, IT and executives.

Although there was a lot of repetition from earlier versions of this message that I’ve heard her deliver, I do see some evolution and refinement of the message. Some of the stats and ideas go by pretty fast, however; the audience might benefit from a bit less of a PowerPoint karaoke feeling.

There was an audience question about how Web 2.0 concepts and products — mostly being developed by tiny companies — will be integrated with traditional BPM products from larger companies; Moore didn’t really answer the question, but discussed how the BPM platform vendors are building their own Web 2.0 functionality, and many other BPM vendors are partnering with SharePoint or other collaborative tools. I think that there’s a lot of room for the Enterprise 2.0 vendors and the non-platform BPM vendors to get together to create social networking-enabled processes that are far beyond what’s available from any of the platform vendors (although IBM is doing some pretty innovative stuff), or through SharePoint integration.

BPM Milan: Workflow Enactment in a Social Software Environment

Davide Rossi of Universita di Bologna presented a paper on Workflow Enactment in a Social Software Environment, co-authored with Fabio Vitali. Davide took me to task earlier today for not responding to his comment on post from last month: at least I know that someone here reads my blog. 🙂

He started out discussing why enterprises like social software — ease of use, flexibility — but also some of the problems with acceptance in enterprises, such as traceability and enactment. Furthermore, when you look at a comparison between enterprise software such as BPM, there are some distinct differences in their structure, governance and user interaction. To bring these together, you need to consider the current methods of structured coordination as compared to emergent coordination, where there is no pre-defined process, but the users create their own processes in order to achieve the stated goal. Although there will need to be a few iterations before the process takes shape, eventually this “tools-first”approach can achieve results. There is a problem, however: the BPMS tools themselves, which are not really suited to being put in the hands of end users. Yes, I know that the vendor told you that would work, but you’ve probably already discovered that it doesn’t (usually).

The approach described is not to create a new tool, however, but to create a social layer on top of existing tools: a mashup of data and functions from a number of sources using X-Folders, which handles feed aggregation and filtering, storage management, and a reaction engine for interacting with external web services. This is not intended for transactional structured workflow, of course, but for evolving lightweight workflow processes between peers. The example shown in the paper used Google Calendar to set up events that represent time-based milestones in a business process, then used a feed from the calendar to an X-Folder so that reactions would be fired when the events occur to call web services to update activities in a discussion forum.

BPM Milan: From a social wiki to a social workflow system

Selim Erol of the Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration presented the first paper of the afternoon, co-authored with Gustaf Neumann, on using wikis in an organizational context, in terms of which aspects may have influence on the success of the implementation. They have also developed a prototype of wiki-based editor for workflow definitions, including enacting a web-based workflow based on the workflow definitions.

He gave a summary of wikis — again, likely unnecessary to an audience of academics who are all presenting papers on BPM and social software — and used Wikipedia as an example of how placing content authoring in an open space (public) ensures critical mass of community, which in turn ensures critical mass of content and artifacts; and how mutual control enables content negotiation and self-healing.

He summarized the characteristics of BPM, then looked at applying wiki characteristics to BPM, particularly in process (and rules) design. He sees a number of aspects that determine the degree to which collective intelligence can be used in a wiki environment:

Size of crowd/community participating
Level of crowd/community organization
Degree of objects’ structuredness/specificity
Degree of objects’ completeness

The risks of wiki application are much different in public and enterprise applications, however: in a public domain such as Wikipedia, there are issues such as edit wars and vandalism, whereas in an enterprise environment, the issues are more of lack of subjectivity, domination based on corporate rank, and desertion by the community due to smaller size and more politicized environment.

He gave a brief demonstration of the XoWiki-based workflow system that they have created, providing a wiki environment for specifying process flow collaboratively. It’s still a bit of a code-like interface, although also provides a graphical representation, but it’s great to be seeing process modeling done in a more generalized wiki context. I think that there needs to be more crossover between academia and the vendor world, however: he stated one key differentiator as being that it’s web-based, but a number of BPMS vendors have web-based process modelers now.