Forrester/Bluespring webinar

Bluespring is hosting a webinar, The Characteristics of a Truly Agile BPMS Technology, on June 20th, featuring Colin Teubner of Forrester. It looks interesting, although I will have to miss it since I’ll be at the Enterprise 2.0 conference.

I do think that it’s hilarious that they send out a press release to announce a webinar, however: “Bluespring Software, the Business Process Management Suite (BPMS) software company that puts the power of business process design, execution and management in the hands of business people announces that the company will be hosting a webinar with Forrester Research on process agility.”

Survey on BPMN

You may have seen this announced on other BPM blogs, but there’s currently a survey out on the use of, and satisfaction with, BPMN by process modellers. This is part of a PhD research project by Jan Recker at the Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia (a city that I remember fondly, in spite of the fact that it was pouring rain last time that I was there).

As a perq for completing the survey, you’ll get the summarized results of the survey, plus access to recent studies on BPMN, so it’s worth doing if you’re using BPMN. The details, from Jan’s request to me:

BPMN is gaining huge momentum in practitioner communities, up to a point that even those vendors who were initially reluctant to adopt it, can no longer completely ignore it. But what exactly are the factors that drive this acceptance? How satisfied are end users of BPMN with the notation? Do user experiences on BPMN match those by BPA tool vendors?

Jan Recker from the BPM Research Group at Queensland University of Technology is undertaking a worldwide survey on the use of BPMN by process modellers to shed light into this question. You can help Jan by completing the survey available here:

http://www.bpm.fit.qut.edu.au/projects/acceptance/survey/BPMN/.

The best way to contact Jan is via email: [email protected]

I’m hoping that if I publish his request, maybe they’ll sponsor me to come down and speak at their BPM conference in September 🙂

Software AG and webMethods

The acquisition of webMethods by Software AG that I wrote about in April has finally come to fruition, although the planned press/analyst web conference on Friday somehow managed to crash the hosting provider’s servers so I didn’t get all the gory details. From their press release, however, it appears that the webMethods brand will be retained, and Software AG’s current Crossvision business will be renamed as webMethods.

Another month of travel and presentations

I thought that my heavy travel time was almost over for the summer, but it just refuses to go away. Due to a new client (yes, I do actually do work that I get paid for sometimes, in addition to all this unpaid blogging 🙂 ), I’ll be visiting Chicago and Montreal over the next two weeks before heading off to Boston for the Enterprise 2.0 conference.

Here’s my public speaking and conference schedule for June:

  • June 13th: I’m appearing in the first of a series of three webinars that I’m doing with TIBCO. The first of these is “Process Discovery”, the second (July 11th) is “Process Modelling”, and the third (August 8th) is “Process Design”.
  • June 14th: I’m appearing in a webinar for Savvion entitled “How to Ignite the BPM Spark: Practical Steps You Can Take Today”. 
  • June 18th-21st: I’ll be attending the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston and covering it here in this blog, although I’m not presenting there.
  • June 27th: I’m speaking at the IQPC BPM summit in Toronto on “Enabling BPM Through Technology”.

Interestingly, both TIBCO and Savvion recognize that their customers are interesting in the up-front part of BPM: in the case of Savvion, how to get started on a BPM project, and with TIBCO, how to take a process from discovery through modelling and design. The material will be quite different between the webinars and I’ll blog a bit about each of them separately later this week; I encourage you to listen in on all of them.

Is BPMG imploding?

I’ve attended and spoken at a couple of BPMG conferences, as well as attending the new chapter meetings here in Toronto. I’ve never really understood the organization; some people refer to it as a “buyer’s club”, where membership just gets you discounted on their proprietary training and methods, and I since I’m not interested in their 8 Omega methodology (the name of which still makes me laugh), I haven’t found any reason to pay for a membership since my first time around. The quality of their output can be a bit uneven, and most of it appears to be driven by Steve Towers and Terry Schurter, both of whom I have met at the conferences (in fact, I wrote a review for Terry’s recent book).

This week, some weird things started happening. First, the usual weekly BPM email arrived from Steve Towers, but with a statement “I can’t point you at any articles on the bpmg.org site as it has been down for several days (more on that very soon)” — with no explanation, although the email came from Steve Towers’ address rather than BPMG.

Then, an email from Terry Schurter announcing that he has resigned BPMG, lengthy but no more informative:

Today ends almost 3 years of work with the BPM Group for me and I have many fond memories that I will cherish over the years.

I feel it is important and necessary to share with you a few things about my resignation to help you understand why this change has occurred.

I leave the BPM Group under duress. I will simply say that things have come to the point where what I get from the BPM Group won’t buy any “bread” and I’m not an “open-source” thought leader/CIO.

I retain my positive relationship with Steve Towers and will continue to work with him on the latest hot BPM concepts including CEM, the CEM Method (CEMM), Outside-In, SCOs, etc. CEM, CEMM and much of the other latest insights into the customer focus in BPM are the intellectual property of Bennu Group LLC, Terry Schurter and/or Steve Towers. These resources will no longer be available through the BPM Group but they will remain available…

Because I am not “going away” in fact; I see this as the trigger to take the best concepts forward without the chains of “inside-out” thinking placed on me by some of the directors in the BPM Group (not including Steve Towers of course). The place to visit me and have access to these resources is www.bennugroup.net. I hope you have the chance to stop by and visit.

Of course, I’ll be out there speaking at conferences (visit www.terryschurter.com for more on that) and I will be doing lots of other things as well. Whatever I am up to, you’ll find more about it at the sites listed above.

I hope that during my stay at the BPM Group I have helped to enrich some of your lives in some small way and I hope to have the opportunity to stay in touch with as many of you as possible.

Finally, in closing I wish to apologize for anything that the BPM Group may have promised you that they have failed to deliver on. If I could have left the BPM Group without duress my departure would have been carefully structured to help ensure an orderly exit from the business. Unfortunately that has not turned out to be the case.

As we say on the internet, WTF?

Then yesterday, a missive from BPMG (or what’s left of it):

I am writing to you to inform you of the official company position regarding issues with regard to BPMG and its web site.

I have been a non-executive director, director and shareholder of BPM Ventures Ltd the holding company of BPMG for some years. Recently a dispute has arisen in the company about some invoices and payments that have been claimed to be improper. A board meeting was called to consider the best action for the company until such disputes had been resolved. I have have been appointed managing director and the executive authority of David Lyneham-Brown and Steve Towers have been suspended whilst due enquiries can be made. I must emphasis that there is no implication of wrong doing at this stage by any party but it is normal in these circumstances to suspend individuals until due enquires have been made.

One of the disputes involves a company called Bennu, run by a Mr Terry Schurter. This company had the responsibility, amongst others, of running and maintaining the BPMG web site. One of their invoices has been claimed to be improperly submitted and is in dispute. A matter that I intend to resolve as quickly as possible. However Bennu have taken it upon themselves to re-direct the BPMG web site to their own website. We would like all parties to know that they are improperly doing this and have no grounds or authority for this redirection. We will of course be taking appropriate action but that will take time.

The training that BPMG have so successfully delivered over the past few years has not changed and we intend to continue to honour all training course and responsibilities. To this end David Lyneham-Brown remains involved in the day to day activities of the company and along with our colleague Rose Butler, will remain available for any questions you might have regarding the delivery of BPMG services. In addition both he and Rose will be your contact points for any new bookings. All training materials and IP remain the property of BPMG but customers need to be aware of possible improper use of materials in the future.

It is most regretful that a subcontractor to BPMG has seen fit to take such actions over a minor invoice that has been questioned in its validity and will be resolved in a short time if the submitted invoice is genuine. We apologise to our customers for any inconvenience that this may have caused and we will take all and any actions necessary to protect our customers position and ensure that all services are delivered to the usual high levels of standard that we have always delivered.

Finally, I wish to assure you that the company is solvent (as agreed by the board yesterday) and remains in a position to honor any proper financial commitments made by the company. We will be doing our very best to get normal service resumed as soon as possible.

We will be setting up a web site in the near future where further information will be available.

Stewart Ashton

As a temporary measure you will find us at www.processperformance.com along with details of how to contact us.

The BPMG site is still redirected to Terry Schurter’s Bennu Group website, and Ashton’s letter and the BPMG logos are on the site that Ashton mentions at the end of his letter. The BPMG.org domain registration is private, but presumably Terry has control over it if he was able to redirect to his own site — an action that appears to be in tremendously bad faith, even if not illegal, since I assume that BPMG owns its own trade name and domain name, even if Terry was managing the website and domain records.

Given that the two key visible people at BPMG are no longer on active duty — Terry has resigned and Steve has been suspended by the board — it’s not clear how BPMG can continue to do business.

Enterprise 2.0 Camp: Ryan Coleman

Ryan Coleman, another friend of mine from the TorCamp community, led a discussion on language translation and the impact on the sort of interacting with the global community due to the premise of wikinomics. Although it’s easy (and arrogant) for those of us who are native English speakers to just ignore other languages and pretend that everyone speaks English, the fact is that if you’re message isn’t well-understood, you’ll end up losing business or creating inefficiencies within your organization. At this point, translation services is a $10B business worldwide, and growing.

He gave some examples of evaluating the context and content to determine whether it needs to be translated, and the degree of care that needs to be taken, before going through the different options for translating your business materials.

One option is to crowdsource your documentation: have your user community write the manual for you. This requires a passionate user base, and can be unpredictable in terms of timing and coverage, as well as of inconsistent quality.

Another option is machine translation, but as you’ll know if you’ve ever used Google Translation, the quality can be total crap with low-end solutions. There are high-quality (and higher-priced) professional systems, but these require extensive training and still require review of the output.

Another option is to use internal resources, namely your own staff, who presumably understand your products and services, but who are now diverted from their usual job which tends to create a high cost of lost opportunity. Since these are not professional translators, the quality can also be questionable.

Professional translators are the final option, and best for high-quality, consistent translation. They can use tools to store translated phrases so that there’s a translation memory of a document; when a document changes, only the changed portions required re-translation. The downside, of course, is that this is very expensive, and the initial translations can be time-consuming especially if you have a lot of specialized terminology that the translator needs to learn.

There are a number of hybrid approaches that combine these options; all of them will combine people, process and technology in some proportion, and the ultimate choice will depend on both the content and the context.

Ryan listed a number of other points to consider:

  • Synchronization between versions, including maintaining dependency relationships
  • Location and access to content repository
  • Workflow and time sensitivity of translation, including proofing/review cycle

He had some thoughts on what’s happening between translation systems and content management systems, particularly for large websites that must be maintained in multiple languages. In the past (and likely still a lot currently), a content management system would just spit out a document to be translated, then accept it back in afterwards, without any real sense of how the translated content should be handled. Wikis, of course, are even worse since it’s less mature responsibility and there’s not, in most wikis platforms, any considerations for maintain multi-language versions of a wiki.

Ryan’s company, Clay Tablet, has created a piece of middleware that sits between the different types of translation systems and the content management systems, whether the translation is being done by a machine translation system or a company that provides human translation services.

That’s the end of the formal sessions of Enterprise 2.0 Camp; it’s 2pm and we’re decamping, so to speak, to the bar across the road for lunch and a continuation of the conversations.

Enterprise 2.0 Camp: Mark Kuznicki

My pal Mark Kuznicki is discussing Toronto Transit Camp as a case study on open community innovation that started with the TTC issuing an RFP for a new website and ended up involving the Toronto blogosphere and local transit geeks in an open discussion about what the TTC website should become in order to best serve the community. This all happened in a short time period: the RFP went out in December; the Toronto blogosphere had a call to action on January 1st; two days later Adam Giambrone, the youthful chair of the TTC, signaled that they were open to any ideas generated; within a week Mark and a few others had picked up the flag and started organizing Transit Camp; and Transit Camp happened on February 4th. The way that the Transit Camp organizers communicated this to the TTC is “we’re doing this, and you’re welcome to participate as equals”, although this was likely a bit too radical for the TTC culture since they were more passive listeners than active participants; they’re still pretty hung up on owning their own intellectual property rather than opening up their data and branding for use by the community in some way.

Transit Camp was labelled a “solutions playground” — no complaining allowed — and involved a number of different activities, from BarCamp-type interactive discussions to a design slam, and several TTC execs showed up including Giambrone: a clear indication that TTC was ready to start tapping into the energy and ideas being created in the community. At the end of the day, all parties were seeing the shift from a previous combatitive stance to a collaborative relationship between the TTC and the community, creating an entirely new model for engagement and communication. It resulted in the openTTC.ca open source project, and provided for peer-production involvement in future generations of the website.

Mark uses the term “open creative communities”: barrier-free groups of individuals with a common interest, producing ideas and inventions. He saw a number of factors that contributed to the success of Transit Camp: people attended for both discovery and play; it created an intersection of communities that touch various aspects of TTC and its community; and it gave people like Mark and the other organizers an opportunity to practice community leadership. He had a couple of great references in his presentation, such as Cherkoff and Moore’s CoCreation Rules and Benkler’s commons-based peer-production.

He sees communities as naturally-occurring social systems demonstrating emergent properties, but also points out that you can create an intentional community with the right framework and rules.

Unfortunately, there was no real written record of Transit Camp (obviously, I wasn’t there blogging 🙂 ) so it was difficult to bring the ideas forward in any sort of formal way to the TTC later; this may have impacted their acceptance of the ideas as much as the inherent cultural inertia. However, it’s a great model for allowing a community to engage (particularly) with a government or quasi-government organization. There was a great deal of discussion in today’s session about what would motivate the TTC to get involved in the ideas generated by Transit Camp, particularly those that involved ceding partial control of planning and branding to the community, but a lot of people miss the point of co-creation: remember that the reason that IBM invests in Linux open source development is because it’s way cheaper than developing an equivalent operating system on their own. The real long-term benefit of co-creation is the new possibilities that are generated by including people outside the organization in the innovation process, but it’s often necessary to hook them with the economic arguments first.

Enterprise 2.0 Camp: Sunir Shah

Sunir Shah, formerly of SocialText and now with FreshBooks, led a session on achieving adoption, debunking the “if you build it, they will come” method of customer acquisition and retention. There’s nothing in most of his session particular to Enterprise 2.0 — it’s pretty general marketing 101 for product vendors — although he does touch fleetingly on adoption of social software. His presentation focussed on how to get people and, eventually, companies, adopt (and therefore buy) your commercial software; I was expecting something more along the lines of how to encourage the adoption and usage of social networking software within an enterprise once that platform is already deployed.

An interesting discussion that came up was the difference between customer relations and customer community management, starting with when a group of customers becomes a community. Usually there will be some tools that vendors use to facilitate the formation of a community, but ultimately there needs to be customers who care enough about what they’re doing with the product to form the nucleus. Blogs and forums are good starting points for community, since both allow for content creation by both internal and external participants; blogs typically have the content authored inside the vendor’s company with comments added by customers and other external parties, whereas forums are typically more egalitarian.

I think that Shah really wanted to do an unconference-like session, but came with a full deck of slides. He stopped about 15 minutes in and asked if people wanted to have an open discussion or have him continue the presentation, which (of course) resulted in him continuing his presentation: most people are basically lazy (me too) and will take the default veg-out route rather than rousing themselves to a discussion. Although there’s nothing in the concept of an unconference that specifically bars formal presentations, I always get a lot more out of unconference sessions that have just enough presentation to provide structure, then some format for encouraging audience participation. The idea of BarCamp is that everyone is a participant, and I expected to see more of that in Enterprise 2.0 Camp, too. That could be the ultimate conflict in Enterprise 2.0 Camp: if you get real enterprise people to attend, as opposed to just those of us who live in Echo Chamber 2.0, they’re likely not used to the contributory nature of an unconference and just think of it as a day-long seminar where they’re passive listeners.

What’s really funny is that James Walker’s session on OpenID in the enterprise is going on at the same time in the other corner of the room, and I’ve heard both of the presenters mention Facebook applications within the last 5 minutes: this new developer platform is certainly the focus of a lot of discussion, although it will take a while to see if it really has legs.

Enterprise 2.0 Camp: David Sean Lester

David Sean Lester is leading a session on Communication 2.0 (I think), or the use of digital media as an inherent part of Enterprise 2.0. He has a nicely prepared presentation with lots of lovely graphics, but his presentation is a bit stilted and he tends to read directly from the slides (reducing his own value in the presentation), plus there’s some superfluous video and audio clips interspersed, and I find my attention drifting during a lengthy clip about the alphabet. Aside from the inherent weirdness of someone who entitles himself with three names, Lester doesn’t seem to be at all comfortable leading the session.

This was supposed to be an unconference format, yet we’re all silent gazing up at a multimedia presentation (except for a short hands-on game of scrambled scrabble). And because we only have one room and this is a somewhat noisy multimedia presentation, there was a decision not to run a concurrent session so we’re all here…

Lester’s thesis on the alphabet was thought-provoking: how the alphabet has become embedded firmware rather than software, whether that’s good or bad from a creativity standpoint, and how switching from the printed word to multimedia tends to make us return to the spoken word. [He uses the term “digital media” or “digital bits” instead of multimedia, although technically the electronically printed word is also digital media; what he’s referring to is visual and audio digital media.]

His ending point informs us (no real surprise) that his company can help you to bring this vision to your own company, although it’s completely unclear by the end of the presentation what exactly this vision is. Their website claims that they do things such as “multi-session interactive facilitated learning experiences” and “visual map design of corporate brand activation model” for their clients. This is communication?