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Is disruption the new status quo?

I opened my mailbox today to find the current copy of the Economist (yes, I still enjoy a few publications on paper) with the cover story “How the internet killed the phone business” (paid subscription required to read article). It covers eBay’s purchase of Skype, of course, but starts with a great definition of disruptive technology:

The term “disruptive technology” is popular, but is widely misused. It refers not simply to a clever new technology, but to one that undermines an existing technology — and which therefore makes life very difficult for the many businesses which depend on the existing way of doing things.

A term originally coined in The Innovator’s Dilemma, disruptive technology (or what Clayton Christensen later renamed “disruptive innovation”) is becoming increasingly pervasive. What Skype is doing to the traditional phone companies is like what blogs are doing to advertising and PR firms, or what SOA is doing to large systems integrators: forcing them to change or die.

In all three of these examples, and many more, there will be no putting the genie back in the bottle. And except for the traditional companies who are being forced to reinvent themselves, who would want to go back when there are such obvious benefits for the consumer? These days, I make all my international calls via Skype at greatly reduced rates; I use this blog as a my primary marketing medium at practically zero cost and with the added benefit of it being a creative outlet; and I consistently recommend to clients that they consider SOA as a way to avoid spending millions of dollars on custom integration solutions.

Embrace the disruption: resistance is futile.

WCM resurgence

This article in Intelligent Enterprise last week questions why ECM vendors — including Hummingbird, FileNet and Open Text — have been highlighting their WCM products lately, but they miss the mark on the answer:

Is it the fact that online advertising and e-commerce initiatives are back? Is it the prospect of capturing fast growth in the mid-market–the rationale Hummingbird cited for its Red Dot deal? Is it a defensive move in response to Microsoft’s recent signal that it will consolidate the SharePoint Portal and Microsoft Content Manger products? I suspect it’s all of the above, plus a healthy slice of pressure from Wall Street to fuel growth through new license revenue as well as services income.

A big part of the answer should be “compliance”, that is, for companies where their compliance requirements include control of the creation and delivery of content via the web, such as securities. WCM as a part of ECM is key for web compliance requirements, because it allows tight control over the processes of how something is published, and also provides a record of what content was available on what dates.

Why is it that everything that I see these days becomes compliance? 🙂

Compliance fever

Okay, that was a bit longer than two weeks. As well as taking some time off to entertain a friend visiting from Australia, I’ve been immersed in some client work and the development of a BPM course that I can offer on a wider basis, both of which have me looking at BPM, corporate performance management, compliance, enterprise architecture, process modeling, and a host of other things.

Compliance has been of particular interest lately, because every client that I deal with now is focussed on it. There’s a good deal of compliance mania going on, very reminiscent of Y2K mania, where vendors start every presentation with a picture of a CxO doing the perp walk and proceed to scare the bejeezus out of their customers until a blank cheque falls onto the table. I’m not saying that compliance isn’t a serious issue, and that there aren’t cases of non-compliant companies suffering under fines (and worse), but can we ease off a bit here? There’s a lot of other compliance selling points that don’t look like some corporate version of Fear Factor.

I think the worst part is that the vendors selling compliance solutions are not, to use the industry vernacular, eating their own dogfood. Friday’s business news recommended selling Open Text short, in part because of their lack-lustre performance lately, but mostly because they’re seeking an extension on meeting their SOX compliance requirements. As the analyst in the article points out, that’s not a good thing for a company that builds compliance software. Try to imagine, if you will, the hapless Open Text sales force the next time that they try to sell compliance to their customers: “do what we say, not what we do” isn’t a particularly credible marketing slogan.

Open Text is a public example of this, but if you dig into any of the compliance vendor organizations, you will almost certainly find non-compliance: irregularities in contract negotiation and management, failure to implement proper records management (especially email) policies, and countless other infractions. In other words, few (or none) of them are in any position to be taking the high ground when they’re talking about compliance.

A few days off

Between finishing up a time-sensitive customer project and taking a few days off around the long weekend, I’ll be pretty much incommunicado until the end of next week. Having said that, I’m sure that I’ll find something that I absolutely have to post later today, but don’t count on anything regular until September 12th.

Shallow vs. Deep Knowledge

The EDS Fellows’ Next Big Thing blog today discusses how business applications continue moving towards less custom coding and more off-the-shelf reusable vendor components, and the impact that has on an integrator’s knowledge of the vendor components. Interesting that some of the best minds at this large SI are pointing out that their portion of any particular job is likely to continue to shrink, something that I wrote about last week, although they don’t discuss how EDS or other large SIs are going to fill the in gaps in their past business model of “build everything”.

The point of their post is, however, how can someone working on a business application have sufficient knowledge in order to understand the strengths and weaknesses of a given vendor component when they haven’t seen the source code? They go on to provide a scientific method for gaining a deeper knowledge of a component without access to the source code, but their entire argument is based on an old-style mainframe integration (which, to be fair, was/is EDS’ sweet spot) where it was fairly common to have access to vendors’ source code.

I have to say, welcome to the real world: I’ve been doing integration for over 15 years, have a very deep knowledge of a few vendors’ products, plus a shallower knowledge of a bunch of other products, and I’ve never seen a line of vendor source code. Personally, I can’t think of very many cases where access to the source code would have improved the end result; as any good software QA team can tell you, you don’t need to see the code in order to determine the behaviour and boundaries of a component.

Furthermore, their scientific method doesn’t include a vital component: vendor relationships. If you’re building a significant business on a specific vendor’s products, you have to establish and maintain a relationship with them so as to have relatively easy access to their internal technical resources, the people further behind the customer support front line. Having done this with a couple of vendors in the past (and then being accused of being in bed with them for my efforts), I know that this is a key contributor to gaining the requisite deep knowledge for a successful integration.

Visio for BPMN

Another article by Bruce Silver on the value of using Visio for process modelling. His argument is that it’s already a de facto standard, with two-thirds of the world’s existing process models done in Visio, so why not find ways to just make it ready to play in the big leagues?

One way is to allow import of Visio models into enterprise architecture modelling tools such as Popkin, where they would then be “finished” by developers, but I don’t like that method because it takes control of the modelling — includuing ongoing maintenance for the models — out of the hands of non-technical process designers.

The other is to use add-ons to Visio that allow a process designer to create BPMN-compliant process models in place, then generate BPEL or XPDL. ITP-commerce, for one, has a tool to do this, and I think it could be a better solution in many cases, since it allows the process designers to use a familiar tool and easily work from their existing library of models.

Is anyone thinking about the users?

Everyone once in a while (okay, maybe more often than that), I’ll see some piece of crappy user interface design and have a private little rant about it. Since I’ve been designing UI since back before it was called “user experience”, and am a heavy user of a large number of systems with different UI’s, I have some idea of what works and what doesn’t work.

Often, this happens when I’m in a retail environment and the store employee is fighting through a variety of screens to achieve what should be a common and easily-accessible task: I really have the sense that the software designers didn’t bother to consider usability because they knew that the users would be trained on the software, that is, it’s not web-based consumer software that can be abandoned in favour of a different communications channel, it’s a part of the person’s job and they must learn to use it.

Occasionally, this does happen with web-based software that I use as a consumer, such as banking websites. When I used to travel almost full-time for business, I got in the habit of doing everything online: if a supplier (bank, phone, whatever) couldn’t give me a way to check and pay my account online, then I went elsewhere. That philosophy has done well for me over the years, and I still stick by it. I bank with one of the large Canadian banks, and I was commenting yesterday on how there are some really stupid, albeit minor, design flaws in their “account download” screens that make me do a few extra clicks every day when I download my account information. They might think that a few clicks don’t mean much, but I used to design UI for transaction processing staff at financial institutions, and we squeezed every keystroke out in order to maximize the efficiency of that particular factor. Why can’t web UI designers consider that some (many?) of the users are concerned about efficiency, want to use the least possible keystrokes — and even less mouse movements — in order to do “chores” such as online banking. I just want to get in, download the transactions and get out as quickly as possible, I have no desire to linger on their site and check out some fancy UI widget.

Although I’m not picking on this particular bank, because every bank that I have dealt with has similar (or worse) problems, I have a few other bones to pick with their systems people. I applied for a registered investment account online with them recently, but because I was transferring in assets from another institution, I took the completed application form to the bank instead of mailing it in, so that I could get the account number right away and initiate the transfer. Although the application was retrievable by me online with its unique ID, the person at the bank who assisted me had to key in all the information over again because there is no way for him to pull up the already-completed application form from their own systems and complete the account opening. Total waste of my time (if I had know that, I wouldn’t have spent the time online completing the app in the first place, then had to wait while he re-keyed it) and total waste of the bank’s employee’s time, which costs them money and customer goodwill.

The latest in the continuing saga came this morning, in response to my request that they discontinue my monthly brokerage statements by snail mail since I’ve been downloading the PDF versions from their website for more than three years:

Regrettably, due to our current internal platform, we do not offer the option to discontinue paper-based statements. However, this feature is on our agenda for consideration for future system enhancements.

Waste of paper, waste of energy printing the statements, damage to the environment from the trucks used to ship all this paper around, waste of my time opening and shredding the statement, and again, loss of customer goodwill. All this from a bank that rakes in a couple of billion in profits every year.

What is all adds up to is IT departments that are not focussed on their customers’ needs, whether these are internal or external customers. With so many people using the systems created by these IT departments, how can they continue to justify the philosophy that the users will just put up with bad software? Most IT departments don’t even think about the fact that the business side of the organization is their customer, as well as potentially external customers, and if they don’t service those customers adequately then they may find themselves outsourced out of existence.

Off topic

I always thought of J-Walk as a pretty geeky guy, until I saw his results on the Computer Geek test today, then took the test myself. My results:

I blame my score on the fact that I do daily backup. Oh, yeah, there’s the programming in multiple languages factor, too.

Updated to include the J-Walk link experiment.

What’s in a name?

Just discovered mwd blog through their post about BPEL; they believe that the “business process” part of BPEL is a bit of a misnomer, and that “at the very best what vendors are really representing are definitions of integration processing.” I knew that I was in tune with these guys when I read their earlier post on ESB, which tears a strip off technical marketing types that invent new terms for existing concepts in order to attempt to achieve some sort of marketing advantage.

Their BPEL post also includes a link to a Bruce Silver article about BPM standards that’s definitely worth reading.

Non-BPM interests

If you’ve ever checked out my Blogger profile from the sidebar of this blog, you may have noticed that not only was I born in the Year of the Rat, but I write another blog for my wine-tasting club. Because of that one, I’ve been invited to contribute to jZepp, a global group blog project that is building an international community of bloggers with a focus on food, drink, art, and culture.

Enjoy.