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.

Circuit City’s broken sales process

Maybe I’m just ultra-sensitive to particularly stupid business processes that I run across because I spend so much of my time helping customers to fix their processes, but yesterday I ran afoul of a completely inane sales process at Circuit City that probably would have had most people walk away.

I’m in San Francisco for a few days of R&R before BlogHer (although I’ve had both conference calls and business meetings in the past two days so not sure if this really qualifies as vacation). Tuesday, when I arrvied, was great weather and I toured around town, but yesterday was cool and foggy in the morning, and I decided to do a bit of shopping. Clothes, shoes and other bits and pieces later, I hit a “discount” camera store to look at finally acquiring a digital camera. Although I want to replace my old Canon EOS 35mm film camera with a prosumer digital eventually, I was looking for a pocket-sized camera to just carry around with me and snap all the weird things that I see happening. The camera store was offering refurbished Canon Digital Elphs and I decided to check online to see if the prices were reasonable before buying, when I found that Circuit City had better prices on brand new models and offered a discount for ordering on the web. They also offer order for pickup, meaning that you order online to get the web price but can pick it up in a store in less than 30 minutes — perfect, since I don’t live here, and there was a store within walking distance.

I entered my order on the web, camera plus a bigger memory card, selected the store close to where I’m staying, then went to the checkout page. Uh-oh, only U.S. addresses accepted. Okay, I get that they would only deliver to a U.S. address, but I had already indicated that I was going to pick it up, so this was just the address to validate my credit card. I decided to call the 800 number listed on the page — the one that says “Order anytime at 1-800-843-2489” — and had a discussion with a customer service person who told me that it was true, only credit cards with a U.S. address can be used. He suggested that I just go to the store and make the purchase, but said that I wouldn’t get the web discount (about $125). I whined, and he suggested the following workaround: go to the store, buy a gift card for the amount of the order, call the 800 number from the store and place the order using the gift card, then hang around in the store and pick up the order. He said that talking to the manager in the store might help, since they would see that the gift card nonsense was just a time-waster, and give me the web price on the spot.

His suggested workaround seemed completely daft, and I was going to just give up on the whole thing, but thought that I’d try the store first. I called the local store and talked to someone in the camera department and explained the problem. He said that they couldn’t give me the web price, then amended that to say that a manager would have to approve it. I gently urged him to go get a flipping manager already, and a few minutes later I had a committment that they would honour the web price.

I hiked the 10 blocks to the store (the thing that I love about San Francisco is that you can walk from point A to point B and back, and it’s uphill both ways), found the manager, and she filled my order at the web price.

So what’s broken about this business process?

  • First of all, unnecessary restrictions on the customer-facing portion of the web order entry process, such as requiring a credit card with a U.S. address even if the purchaser has indicated that she will pick up the items at a U.S. store. Not only did this frustrate me, and probably caused some other non-Americans to just walk away from purchasing at Circuit City, but it took up the time of a customer service person who had to deal with me on the phone and couldn’t even solve my problem. Cost: some loss of sales with no feedback (i.e., shopping cart abandonment) and/or increased customer service time without added value.
  • Second, a suggested workaround for the process that most potential customers would be unwilling to do, and which causes a significant amount of extra work for the in-store staff. Cost: further loss of sales even after the aforementioned customer service person’s time was spent, since most people wouldn’t be willing to do the gift card/call to order/wait for pickup dance.
  • Lastly, the fact that the entire situation could have been avoided since the in-store manager had full authority to just give me the web price in the first place. Giving people the authority to create process exceptions is practically useless unless you make that exception path easily available during the process.

Definitely an interesting look at a process that is not resiliant to exceptions. Meanwhile, I’m happy snapping away.