New(?) del.icio.us feature

I use del.icio.us for bookmarking sites that I want to remember, and I use a cool feature to post each day’s links as a blog post. A while back, I learned about the “for” tag in del.icio.us, where if you tag an item with “for:username“, that item appears in the “links for you” section for that user on del.icio.us, which they can also subscribe to in their RSS reader. In other words, you can tag a site using del.icio.us specifically for another person to look at.

Today, when I was tagging something, I noticed a new section in the tagging screen: usually there’s just “recommended tags” (how most other people have tagged this link), “your tags” and “popular tags”, but now there’s also “your network”, which lists the for: tag for each of the people who are listed as being in your del.icio.us network.

Stats that never seem to go away

I’ve been watching statistics like this ever since I started in the BPM/document management field over 15 years ago, and they never seem to really go away. These ones were published by AIIM earlier this year:

400 Hours — Number of hours per year the average employee spends searching for paper documents. (Source: Datapro/Gartner Group)

$6 – $12 Million — The amount the typical enterprise with 1,000 knowledge workers wastes per year per year searching for nonexistent information, failing to find existing information, or recreating information that cannot be found. (Source: IDG)

25 Percent — Percentage of enterprise paper documents that are misplaced and will never be located. (Source: Datapro/Gartner Group)

The last one puts me in mind of a contract that I did a few years back for a manufacturing organization. A very old company, they were converting their engineering drawings (some dating back 100 years) and aperature cards [a pre-historic storage medium that consisted of a piece of microfiche embedded in a computer-readable punched card containing the indexing information] to scanned images, eventually to be redrawn as CAD files, and implementing some basic change request and approval workflow. I had an internal company email address, as I often do when working with customers, and one day was copied on the following mass internal email:

Found: an aperture card, reference #xxxxxx, on the road between building A and building B.

You can be pretty sure that this is one of the misplaced ones.

Independent BPM vendors navigating dangerous waters

A recent article in Intelligent Enterprise, Content and BPM Vendors Swim Among the “Whales”, talks about how the independent BPM vendors are faring amongst the big guys like Microsoft and Oracle.

Open Text‘s strategy of using the big guys’ products as infrastructure to build their own products on top of makes a lot of sense, although it will be difficult for some of the other independent vendors to follow suit. There’s always the chance, of course, that the big guy in question will just build their own version of what the independent is doing, but there’s always room in the market for a company that’s nimble and innovative.

The article also mentions the CentraSite community and some of the innovative things that Savvion is doing with their ProcessXchange, both of which I’ve blogged about previously.

Bifurcating BPM, Batman!

My reading is a bit behind due to my recent travel, and with my feed reader sitting at just under 3000 unread items, I tend to ignore the magazine feeds in favour of reading blogs. Today, I went back through the unread Intelligent Enterprise items and found The Bifurcation of Business Process Management, which has very little to do with bifurcation except for one sentence in the summary; probably the editor just likes the word. 😉

I don’t agree with everything in this short report from Ventana Research: they state that BPM is still in its infancy, but suggest creating a 3-year architectural blueprint for BPM; if the technology truly is immature, then a 3-year plan would change so quickly as to be obsolesced within a year, wouldn’t it? Also, the phrase in the recommendations, “BPM technology, by failing to maintain pace with Web services technologies, is not ready for prime-time enterprise SOA applications“ is a generalization that I just don’t believe to be true.

I’m left with the impression that the author is not all that knowledgable about BPM, which doesn’t leave a particularly good impression about Ventana.

Webinar: the business value of BPM standards

Although labelled “The business value of BPM”, this is really a webinar on BPM standards as a wrap-up of the recent OMG BPM Think Tank, which I blogged extensively about.

Since I was at the Think Tank and have a lot of opinions on the subject of BPM standards, I’ll be presenting at this webinar (as opposed to my previous role as moderator) along with Connie Moore from Forrester and Jeanne Baker from OMG and Sterling Commerce. Connie will be covering the business value of standards, Jeanne will be doing a wrapup of the Think Tank, and I’ll be doing an interactive discussion between the three of us on the future of BPM standards.

Being a presenter on this webinar prompted me to finally update my bio on the ebizQ site; a few people who I’ve met lately assume that I work for ebizQ, which I don’t, so this should clear it up.

The webinar is on August 9th at noon Eastern, and you can sign up here.

Pega SmartBPM 5.1

Yesterday’s Intelligent Enterprise included a review by Derek Miers of the new Pegasystems release, which includes an AJAX-based portal for process “development” as well as runtime environments, although the actual process design appears to be done in Visio. Please, all you BPM vendors, just stop telling us that it’s too hard and give us zero-footprint, browser-based process designer!

There’s also a laughable understatement at one point: “Although a business user will probably be unnerved to see the underlying Java code exposed in the configuration dialog…” — no kidding!

Paul Harmon speaks at ABPMP San Francisco chapter meeting

 

Last night I attended the inaugural meeting of the San Francisco chapter of ABPMP, which included a presentation by Paul Harmon of BPTrends.

Paul had some interesting comments about a past attempt to start an ABPMP: a couple of years ago, he and a few others tried to get one started in San Francisco, and only vendors showed up. The challenge for this new attempt, as well as our starting chapter in Toronto, will be to create a critical mass of enough end-customer practitioner involvement to make it relevant.