Bad analyst blogging technique

In a post about collaboration, of all things, a Gartner analyst shows how not to interact with his blog’s readers. If you’re a frequent reader of Jim Sinur’s blog, you know that in most posts he invites conversation with open-ended questions at the end, e.g., “What is your experience with this issue”, presumably to feed ideas into his research on the topic at hand.

In this post, he refers to the increasing number of BPM vendors that are including collaboration features, and his first commenter asks him to list some of those vendors. Jim’s response? “We will be writing research notes on this topic going forward that will identify those vendors that have unique solutions.” In other words, “I’m happy to collect your ideas for free as part of my research, but you have to pay for the results.”

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.

Contextware for process documentation

I’ve had a look at Contextware previously, but yesterday had a chance to talk in depth with David Austin, the president and COO, and see a demo of their current product. Contextware can be described as a a process documentation tool, although it’s also being used as a process discovery tool, but it’s more than just a static document of your operational procedures: for each step in a process, it displays a narrative that might include context or instructions, plus links to various resources including content, applications, and people. You capture processes in Contextware for the purpose of communication and training, not automation; it doesn’t automate processes in any way, but might be combined with a BPMS in order to provide instructions for complex human steps in the process.

There a couple of key use cases for this sort of process documentation, whether you’re doing it for completely manual processes or for the human steps in a BPMS:

  1. You need to capture information from those aging boomer knowledge workers (who will be retiring as soon as the stock market comes back up), since many of the manual processes exist only in their heads.
  2. You want to standardize processes across the organization, and need to provide operational procedures documentation for those processes.

Contextware - Author Steps and NarrativeThere is no automated capture of information: you have to lay the process out step by step, but it’s done in a simple hierarchical list format where you create a list of the main steps, then can add sub-steps to any step as an indented sub-list, and so on. Then, for each step/sub-step, you add the narrative and link up the assets from the list of available resources. Assets linked to a step are inherited by its sub-steps, and can be kept, discarded or a subtype created during the authoring process.

Assets can be predefined — these are in a common repository that can be reused by any process — or defined and saved to the repository on the fly. Content such as documents are typically not stored in Contextware: the asset is actually metadata pointing to external content via a URL or URI, which allows the author to set a meaningful name for the asset that is shared wherever that asset is used within any process. Although it’s common for organizations to have samples and procedural documentation online somewhere on their intranet, this removes the process of hunting for the file or page since it’s linked directly to the step in the process where it’s required.

The resources are a sort of extended IDEF model with six dimensions, and the author can suppress the display of any of them:

  • Inputs (often suppressed), which may link to content or to a system depending on the context
  • Guidelines: additional procedural documentation
  • Content: typically samples
  • People, which allows for a mailto: link to directly create an email
  • Tools, providing links to invoke systems and executables, or describe offline resources or tools
  • Outputs (often suppressed)

There’s no auto-login or single sign-on for any of the systems that are linked from resources (e.g., content management, email, line of business applications): these are just links to launch the appropriate application or content, and the user is responsible for doing the login themselves on the invoked application if they’re not already logged in.

I’m not sure that I completely understand the role of inputs and outputs in the resource list; it might be stretching the IDEF metaphor a bit too much (and for little purpose these days, when many people don’t know what IDEF is).

An author can clone an existing process to start a new design and there’s some lightweight versioning and roll-back capabilities for managing the processes. It’s also possible to call one process (or subprocess) from another by listing it as an asset in the resources.

Contextware - Step Narrative and ResourcesThe end users select their group/department from a list, then their process, then select the step that they’re working on (or expand the step hierarchy and click on a sub-step) to see the narrative and the list of resources available. Clicking on a resource for that step in the right-hand panel will invoke the URL or URI that’s specified for the resource: it could be a link to a web page or document, an executable desktop application, or a mailto: link for a person. The text in the center panel changes depending on which step or which resource that they’ve selected. Users can also add comments to a step via a context-sensitive “bulletin board” at each step, providing a bit of a wiki-like experience to capture the users’ feedback directly in the context of the process, although they can’t change the main narrative.

Users are not constrained to follow the steps in order; they can see the entire hierarchy and select any step that they need, since this is process documentation and doesn’t actually drive their work. In fact, this could be used as a contextual help system without regard to a process, organizing the help topics in the hierarchy on the left and attaching narrative and assets to each topic and subtopic.

Both authors and end users can search on processes and metadata to locate a specific process or resource.

An audit (management) function shows who has accessed which processes, which allows a manager to tell if someone has accessed a new process after it has been rolled out. Since this can be considered training material, the manager is basically checking to see if everyone did their homework and understands the new process.

Both the authoring and end-user environment are completely web-based with a rich AJAX interface, so no desktop installation. We didn’t talk about what’s lurking on the server side of this, but their website lists the operating systems, database, application servers and web servers supported. Their site also talks about delivering content to mobile devices, but we didn’t discuss that.

There’s an obvious play in the training space and for documentation of manual processes, but Contextware would also like to see how they can put this together with some of the BPMS products in order to provide additional documentation for human-facing steps in cases where it’s difficult to build that into the BPMS user interface itself. I also believe that they need to focus on importing from some of the BPA tools, such as ARIS and Mega: although the process model is only a starting point for Contextware, it would be helpful to have that starting point in the case of large complex processes with a lot of manual steps. Of course, this may start to conflict with what some of the BPA vendors are trying to do in terms of process documentation, but I think that most of them are really focused on showing the business processes rather than providing complete operational procedures. I also see potential for integration with a process discovery tool such as Process Master, although there might be too much overlap in functionality.

There needs to be much better management of screen real estate as well: this product smacks of developers with huge dual monitor setups who don’t realize that the average underwriter in an insurance company works on a single 800×600 15″ screen. I suggested that they be able to minimize to some sort of floating widget (which could be difficult considering that they’re web-based, but hey, that’s what Adobe AIR and Google Gadgets are for, right?) that the user could float their mouse over to pop up the narrative and resources, and click to the next step. Otherwise, you’d be trying to deploy this on a screen where the user has to constantly flip back and forth between Contextware as their procedural guide and their actual applications. Printing would ensue.

They also need to do a bit more with versioning of processes, where a process could be modified and tested by a specific group of people, then promoted to the production version. In the current system, you’d clone the process (and therefore have to use ad hoc naming conventions to indicate that this was a new version of the older process), make the changes, and release selectively by security groups in order to promote through test and production. Contextware - DollyOnce in production, the users of the old process would have to be notified to start using the new process documentation.

One final criticism about the cutesy interface icons: using a graphic of a sheep (think Dolly) to clone a process just doesn’t cut it for me.

You have to focus on vendors even if they are narcissistic or whiny

This post by analyst relations consultant Carter Lusher, entitled You have to focus on influential analysts even if they are negative or unpleasant, totally cracked me up. There are lots of analysts with attitude, but there are also lots of vendors out there who could use some lessons from Miss Manners: in dealing with vendors, I’ve had accusations of bias, suggestions for blog post topics that come straight from the vendor’s press releases, requests to sign a non-disclosure agreement before talking about something that they want me to write about, whiny complaints when I write about another vendor instead of them, and arguments from (always large) vendors why I should pay my own expenses to attend — and blog about — their conference.

These tend to be outliers; most of the people who I deal with at vendors are professional and reasonable, and don’t treat me like the hired help (which is good, because they’re not paying me anything) or like the enemy. Having to occasionally deal with negative and unpleasant people is just part of the job for most of us; for an analyst relations specialist to pretend that all of those negative and unpleasant people are on the analyst side of the vendor-analyst relationship is disingenuous.

Survey on business process modeling

Three universities with BPM programs — Humboldt University, Eindhoven University of Technology and the Queensland University of Technology — are running a survey on how business process models can be improved in terms of understandability. You can take the survey here, although it’s specifically for those who model using event-driven process chains (EPC). As a participant, you’ll have access to the results of the survey, plus the chance to win a recently-released book, Metrics for Process Models.