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EnterpriseCamp (the unconference edition)

I’m not sure why Bryce Johnson thought that he’d have full turnout at 9:30am on a Saturday, even for something as exciting as EnterpriseCamp, but a few of us managed to make it on time. Of course, my brain is still in a time zone some where east of here and I’m waking up at 5am so it’s easier for me this week.

We kicked off a bit late and the attendance was lower than the signups, but there were some great sessions (and I’m not just talking about mine). Like other unconferences, there was no set agenda, just a blank grid of time slots for sessions and a pad of Post-It notes; those of us interested in leading a talk outlined our topic verbally to the group, then posted it in an open time slot. The schedule was pretty fluid all day long, which fit well with the mood of the group and the small number of simultaneous sessions (3 at most, I think), but we still managed to fit in all the proposed sessions and finish up on time.

One cool thing that the organizers did was create icon stickers that we could put on our nametags to designate our interests: people tagging, if you will. They also provided great food (breakfast and lunch), a huge variety of herbal teas (important for us non-coffee types) and a notebook containing some Enterprise 2.0 articles and the all-important key to the people-tagging icons.

The first session that I attended was Carsten Knoch talking about bringing Web 2.0 features into the enterprise, which was a perfect lead-in to my session on a specific example of this, namely, integrating Web 2.0 functionality into BPM software. Carsten talked more in general terms about what features and techniques could be introduced, techniques for building applications, and why all of this Web 2.0 stuff is scary to the enterprise. He had a pretty comprehensive presentation, a bit unusual for an unconference, and I hope to see it posted somewhere.

I followed immediately after Carsten, and although I had the best intentions to prepare a little presentation the night before (but ended up out for dinner with friends) or at least a few notes on the subway on the way to EnterpriseCamp (but ended up chatting with a South African backpacker on his way around the world), I took the floor with a blank flip-chart and wrote four lines:

tagging
RSS
zero footprint
mashups

I then riffed on each of these, with lots of great input from the audience, with my focus on how they apply in the world of BPM but some expansion into other types of enterprise software. Great discussion: I love it when I can learn something while giving a presentation. I could have gone on for hours, except for the smell of pizza wafting in from the lunch area.

In the afternoon, I sat in on Tom Purves and Jevon MacDonald discussing adoption of Web 2.0 technology (specifically their product, for the most part) within the enterprise. That evolved into a discussion about Consulting 2.0 and a variety of other topics.

I also attended Bryce’s session on tagging, taxonomies and folksonomies, which generated some really interesting discussion. The idea of creating tag relationships rather than tag pruning as applicable to Enterprise 2.0 tagging applications: you want people to be able to add tags that are meaningful to them, but if others are using different tags that mean the same thing, find some way to relate the tags.

Definitely a worthwhile way to spend my Saturday. Many thanks to Navantis and Microsoft for their sponsorship of EnterpriseCamp.

Enterprise 2.0 Camp

Last week, we held a second Enterprise 2.0 Camp here in Toronto. Tom Purves was the organizer and also the first presenter; he has posted his notes and presentation slides and promises to post some follow-ups in the days ahead. (btw, Tom introduced me to slideshare, which I’ve just started using for embedding presentations in my blog posts; it’s like YouTube for presentation slides. Thanks, Tom!)

I enjoyed the three presentations, which I’ll cover in some detail below, but find that many people talking about Enterprise 2.0 are addressing the use of social networking software like blogs and wikis within enterprises, whereas I’m more interested in taking those concepts and integrating them into enterprise software, like BPM. As consumers become exposed to Web 2.0 applications in the wild, and the MySpace generation moves into the workforce, the expectations of enterprise workers will be raised with respect to what they expect from their software. AJAX interfaces for end-users are becoming relatively common in BPM products, but what about user-created content? A cornerstone of Web 2.0 is harnessing collective intelligence, and if you don’t give people a way to do this in enterprise software, they’re going to find ad hoc ways to do it that won’t be captured as part of the corporate memory. I know of one BPM vendor that allows users to tag process instances as favourites, but none are allowing for a more comprehensive public tagging strategy where users can not only build their own folksonomies of tags, but also share them with their colleagues. User-created processes or at least involving more business users in a collaboration to create processes is an idea that’s gaining speed, but in reality, very little of it actually occurs. There’s a number of other Web 2.0 concepts that I feel could greatly benefit BPM and other enterprise software; to me, that’s the second wave of Enterprise 2.0.

Getting back to the presentations, we heard from Tom with an overview of Enterprise 2.0, Greg Van Alstyne of the Beal Institute for Strategic Creativity, OCAD with a theoretical primer for emergent media, and Sacha Chua, a grad student and IBM intern, with a report from the recent CASCON 2006 conference (which I also attended).

Tom’s presentation was a good level-set, since I think that there were a number of different views in the audience about what Enterprise 2.0 is, along with some number of local techies who will attend anything that has “2.0” in the name and serves beer. Tom’s succinct definition “Web 2.0 + solving an actual business problem = Enterprise 2.0” gets very close to the mark, and he goes on to describe some general categories of applications and what this can mean for businesses. He also spoke at length on tacit interactions — that ad hoc stuff that I was referring to earlier — and how Enterprise 2.0 can leverage tacit knowledge to provide competitive advantage.

An interesting issue that came up during the conversation after Tom’s talk is the “blank wiki” problem: how do you get people to start participating in ways that they have never participated before? This is especially true in corporate environments, where there is not (typically) the anonymity of the internet and there are political agendas floating around. There were a number of ideas about seeding a collaboration tool, such as creating some initial wikis that contain obvious but minor errors to encourage people to learn how to edit them in order to fix them, but that begs the question (to me, anyway) of how the seed data impacts the path that emerges.

Greg Van Alstyne was up next, with a presentation discussing how Enterprise 2.0 must emerge from the needs and activities of the users. Emergence, or emergent behaviour, is when new and complex patterns develop from underlying (and sometimes seemingly unrelated) components. It’s really a complement to design: where design is top-down and imposed by the designers, emergence is bottom-up and created by the participants. He gave a great example of this, which I also know because the same technique was used at my university: no pathways were initially built between buildings, but the entire complex was planted with grass; after several months, the common pathways had “emerged” from the grass and were paved. The associated quote was something along the lines of “how do we know where to build the paths until the people show us?” The same is also true for software, enterprise or not.

Sacha Chua finished the evening with a discussion of social networking software in use within IBM. Belying the big blue exterior, IBM appears to have a warm, fuzzy inside, full of employee blogs, wikis and social bookmarking. Who knew? I’ve met Sacha on several occasions, and she’s a very passionate advocate for what social networking tools can do within an organization, such as flattening the hierarchy and providing a sense of knowing the other 325,000 people in your company even if they’re geographically distant. She admits that the active participation rate — those that actually contribute content — is about 1%, but that’s a substantial community when you look at the relative numbers, and as she says, you have to learn to love the 1% that you have rather than worry about the 99% that you don’t. IBM is developing some of their own social networking software, such as Dogear social bookmarking, which is an internal equivalent to del.icio.us. I’d love to find out if they’re planning to roll this out as a customer product, but no one at IBM seems to be able to give me an answer on this.

One final comment that I heard from Bob Logan, a colleague of Greg Van Alstyne’s: “I don’t believe that there’s an inside and outside of an organization any more.” [Someone else in the audience immediately butted in that they thought this was wrong, to which Bob replied “All generalizations are wrong.” 🙂 ] The concept of increasing porosity in corporate boundaries has been happening for years, in part due to technologies like BPM: more outsourcing, integrating suppliers as part of the supply chain, and exposing the progress of internal processes to customers. There’s still a distinction between inside and outside, but it’s getting fuzzier.

Modeling Processes in a Browser with Appian

For those BPM vendors out there who say that you can’t create a fully-featured browser-based process modeling tool: YOU’RE WRONG. Appian does it, they do it well, and if you don’t get moving on this soon, they’ll kick your butt.

I was going to just stop there, but that would be mean, so I’ll continue on with a more complete review of the Appian 1-1/2 hour, open-the-firehose demo that I received last week via Webex, compliments of Phil Larson (director of product marketing) and Malcolm Ross (über demo god) at Appian.

In case this is the first time that you’ve read my blog, let me iterate my view that a browser-based process modeler is the way to go if your goal is to lower the barriers to enabling process modelling and design across an enterprise — this is one of the ways that Web 2.0 is impacting BPM, as I discussed in a presentation at the BPMG conference earlier this year. Appian is the only mainstream BPM vendor that provides a lightweight (dare I say, zero footprint?) browser-based process modeler; the only other mainstream vendor that even has a browser-based process modeler is FileNet, but it’s a rather weighty Java applet that downloads with some degree of trouble, in my experience. [btw, if you want to debate the term “mainstream BPM vendor” with me, first of all check if you’re anywhere in Gartner’s BPMS Magic Quadrant except for the “niche players” quadrant, or anywhere at all in Forrester’s Human-Centric BPMS Wave.]

I’d never had the Appian corporate overview until this session, and I found it quite telling that 3 of the 4 founders were from Microstrategy, a business intelligence vendor. Analytics and reporting are baked into everything in the product, including the user interface: all of the grid-based UI screens such as inbox views are actually report views driven straight out of their own reporting/analytics engine, which makes it easy to do things like switch any view to a chart (if it makes sense to do so). It also means that KPIs and business thresholds can be easily built into a process and seen in a number of different views, not just a siloed BAM dashboard, including viewing process execution stats right in the modeler while you’re viewing the model. This makes for a more seamless integration between design, execution, monitoring and analytics than you’ll find in many vendors’ products, although some customers may find a proprietary reporting and analytics engine, as well as their proprietary and built-in rules engine, to be problematic in the face of corporate standards for these types of platforms.

Although nothing to do with process design, but very cool and Web 2.0-y, is the ability for a user to flag a process instance or a task within a process instance as a favourite. Although this isn’t quite the full process tagging paradigm that I’ve written about previously and talked about in my Web 2.0/BPM presentation, it’s a great start.

I won’t talk too much about the specific functions within the Appian process modeler, except to say that it does everything that I would expect from a process designer, and more: full BPMN-compliant modeling including more complex constructs such as ad hoc activities (i.e., those that aren’t attached to the process flow, see section 5.2.3 of the BPMN spec if you want to understand what this means); the ability to chain activities in a process so that they’re locked to the same user and present them as steps in a wizard-type interface rather than having to reopen each sequentially from a task list; a full forms designer that will be released next month; import/export to XPDL (which allows you to model offline with Zynium’s add-on to Visio and interchange models with the Appian process modeler); different views and capabilities within the process modeler for business analysts and developers; and web services introspection and mapping. And it does it all in a completely AJAX environment, although due to support for VML but not SVG, it’s not supported in Firefox yet. Furthermore, all you need to cross the firewall from the modeler to the server is port 80 (i.e., standard HTTP) or port 443 (for HTTP over SSL).

If Appian really wanted to kick some butt, they’d create the browser-based equivalent of a free process modeler download: a free process modeling site exposed on the internet, available for anyone to sign up and try it out. Who would download and install a process modeling tool to try out if you could have the same functionality available online?

I’ve heard the comment from a couple of BPM vendors that a full AJAX process modeler is “hard”. Duh, of course it’s hard; if it was easy, everyone would do it. Appian started out with a Java applet process modeler, then ended up building their own AJAX library of JAVA Struts objects and moving over to AJAX in 2003 — two years before the term “AJAX” was even coined. They’ve invested a huge amount of time to make their browser-based process modeler every bit as functional and responsive as a desktop application, and it shows. It reminds me of the quote about how Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did, except backwards and in high heels: yeah, it’s hard, but it looks great.

Web 2.0 webinar with Gartner

A great webinar on Web 2.0 just finished on ebizQ, which is not normally the place where you’d see a lot of pure Web 2.0 stuff unrelated to integration technologies. You’ll be able to see the replay within 24 hours at the same link.

David Mitchell Smith from Gartner is giving a great overview of Web 2.0, particularly how it impacts business. Be sure to download the PowerPoint slides, there are great notes attached.

His bottom line: denial is pointless (I would have said “resistance is futile”, but that’s just the geeky me coming out), Web 2.0 is happening and you’d better get on board. He even talks about mashups and lightweight integration protocols, blogs, and other things that I don’t normally hear from the type of Gartner analysts that I deal with.

Christopher Crummey from IBM also spoke, and instead of being the usual vendor product pitch, he had some interesting slides on Web 2.0 for business, and particularly how IBM is using some social networking/Web 2.0 technologies internally, such as blogs and customizable portals. He wove in information about their products that support this, but it was done in a pretty unobtrusive way. I’ve spent a bit of time with some IBM’ers learning about their internal uses of social networking, and it’s pretty progressive stuff — I think that my former colleagues at FileNet may find that their internal collaboration takes a huge leap forward now that they’re part of Big Blue.

The only downside of this webinar is that the two presentations went so long that there were only a few minutes left for questions, then some sort of technical difficulty resulted in total dead air until after the scheduled end time. I bailed at 3 minutes past the hour, and more than 30% of the audience had done so by that time as well; I’m assuming that there was no Q&A after all.