The Other Four Misperceptions of Outsourcing

Almost six months later, part 2 of this Gartner podcast arrives. Linda Cohen talks about the second four of the eight myths:

  • the myth of sourcing independence;
  • the myth of service autonomy;
  • the myth of economies of scale;
  • the myth of service management as self-management;
  • the myth of the enemy (i.e., setting up the vendor as an adversary);
  • the myth of procurement;
  • the myth of steady state; and
  • the myth of sourcing competency.

Good discussion, especially on how procurement needs to get a better handle on how to negotiate long-running services contracts in a non-adversarial way (myths 5 & 6). As a long-time service provider, I know how important it is that you start a contract with both parties not feeling like they just got screwed, because that can damage the relationship for months or years to come. Organizations that are used to using a heavy-handed approach with product vendors might want to consider that they’re now negotiating with another company that is going to become an integral part of their operations for a long time — the mentality needs to be more like hiring an employee than buying a product.

Myth 7 (steady state) is also interesting, although pretty obvious: business changes, and the relationship between an organization and its outsourcer needs to be able to adjust accordingly on a fairly regular basis.

It’s probably worth going back to the podcast covering the first four myths and listening to them together.

Enterprise 2.0 meeting tonight in Toronto

There’s an Enterprise 2.0 session tonight at Rowers Pub in Toronto:

Inspired by the success of everything Camp in Toronto comes one more event for your pleasure. Enterprise2.0 is about the business world applications of “Web 2.0” and “Social Media”. The idea for Enterprise 2.0 is built on the hypothesis that the real killer app for the next generation of web and collaborative media technologies is in the enterprise. How can we take our learnings from the recent boom in the consumer internet and apply them to boosting employee productivity, enabling new ways of working and doing business.

Free, although you have to buy your own beer. Sign up on the wiki if you plan to attend.

Paul Harmon on BPM state and trends

I’m in a webinar (sponsored by Proforma) with BPTrends‘ Paul Harmon discussing their recent survey of business process trends. I expect to meet Paul face-to-face next week at the ABPMP chapter meeting in San Francisco, where he’ll be speaking on “Business Process Today and Tomorrow”.

The first part of the webinar is pretty much just a review of the report itself, with a minor degree of added value, although it’s good for those who find it hard to plough through a 54-page report and find the high points without nodding off. He highlighted that most people are still doing their process modelling in Visio or PowerPoint (see page 29 of the report), although sees that as an indicator that an organization isn’t yet fully serious about their process modelling efforts because of the lack of an enterprise view that you can get with a repository-based tool such as Proforma’s. He sees many of the survey results as indicators that the BPM market that is still developing, not yet mature, and calls the market for tools “confusing” as he discusses the diagram on page 45. Considering that analysts tend to redefine “BPM” every couple of years, causing a vendor feature catch-up scramble, neither of these points is surprising and I agree with him. Furthermore, I think that the large percentage of Visio modelling is also an indicator of an immature market as much as it is of immature BPM initiatives within an organization.

He went through some results that I don’t recall seeing in the report that summarized what people would be doing less, the same, or more of in 2006 (the survey was taken in February), grouped into enterprise, process level and implementation activities as per their pyramid (page 41-42 in the report). He sees most of these trends as further proof that we’re still in a developing market for BPM, such as the large number of companies that are planning more of BPM systems, major process redesign and automation projects, and process analysis and design training in 2006 than they’ve done previously, as well as developing an enterprise architecture and enterprise performance management. I like the fact that he doesn’t show any bogus hockey stick projections for BPM growth; those of us in the BPM business have been seeing those for many years now and are understandably wary.

The webinar will be available for replay at some point; check the original registration link or the Proforma website to find it in a few days.

Slightly off topic, I appreciate the collaborative spirit of many recent webinars that I’ve attended of opening up the dial-in line so that any of the attendees can speak up with their questions (rather than using a chat window), but it doesn’t work so well in practice due to the large number of people who can’t find the mute button on their phone or just don’t consider the listening experience of others on the call. I can hear background conversations, papers rustling, computer noises of all sorts, and even a dog barking, all in spite of the speaker’s repeated request for people to mute their phones. Even on an online demo that I attended the other day with only two other attendees besides myself, one of those two put his phone on hold during half of the demo which treated the rest of us to the periodic “beep-beep” that most phone systems emit to the party on hold (and gave the speaker a pretty good indication of just how unimportant the material was to that attendee, since we could easily identify who had hit the hold button).

ABPMP in San Francisco

A couple of weeks ago, I blogged about our startup meeting of the Toronto chapter of the ABPMP. I checked around for the other North American chapters and have now found myself invited to the inaugural meeting of the San Francisco chapter next Thursday evening. Paul Harmon of BPTrends will be speaking, which should be interesting; I always enjoy his online writing.

Before you surmise that I’m a complete travel junkie (which I am), I had already planned to be in San Jose next weekend for BlogHer and fly in mid-week to spend a couple of extra days in San Francisco (one of my favourite cities), making the timing perfect for the ABPMP meeting. Time and place as provided to me by the chapter organizer are here on Upcoming.org; note that the address on the ABPMP website is incorrect.

If you’re in the Bay area and are interested in business process improvement or business process management, you should consider dropping in for the meeting — it’s free and open to all. You can also check out the chapter’s Yahoo Group, although it doesn’t appear to be very active yet.

RedMonk Radio on SOA and mashups

Catching up on some podcasts today while walking around Toronto, and listened to the June 30th RedMonk Radio that included a section on SOA and mashups. Favourite quotes: “Describing SOA as mashups is insulting to mashups” (Steve O’Grady), plus Coté’s analogy “SOA is like religion, and mashups are like science”.

As always, worth listening.

Firefox 2.0 beta

Last month, I tried out the Flock browser beta for a few days, but ended up abandoning it because their “cool” features weren’t things that I could use, and it was just too much of a memory hog. This week, I’m trying out the Firefox 2.0 beta. Aside from being able to make it crash within 5 minutes (I have a talent for that, as many developers who have worked with me in the past can attest to) by copying and pasting some HTML around between sites, it seems to be pretty stable. Four things that I’ve noticed so far:

  • The close buttons for the tabs are situated on the tabs themselves (like Flock), rather than a single close button at the right-hand side. I’ve had a few mistakes with that by closing the right-most tab rather than the one that I’m viewing, but I can get used to that. The nice thing about it is that you can close a tab without viewing the tab.
  • When the browser crashes, it has the decency to ask on restart if I want to reopen all the same windows, which it does — including any text that I had keyed into text fields before the crash. Handy, although wouldn’t be necessary if it didn’t crash. 😉
  • I can subscribe to a site directly in Bloglines and other feed readers by clicking on the feed icon that appears in the right side of the address bar (the feed icon was there before, but wasn’t an active control). Sweet.
  • As I type in any text field in the browser, such as the one that I’m typing in now to create this blog entry, it spell-checks my text, underlines unknown words with a dotted red line, and allows me to add them to the dictionary or replace them with a known word from a (right-click) context menu. I’m totally in love, just for this feature alone.

Definitely enough good stuff to make it worth the upgrade, although you may want to wait until the final release if you’re not into the occasional crash.

Bluespring webinar

True to my expectations from our earlier interaction, I received an email today from Bluepring:

As well as reminding me about the webinar today, it gave me a link to the in-flight process, which now showed that the reminder had been sent. Unfortunately, a second (manual ) email was required to send out the Microsoft Live Meeting invitation instead of that being embedded in the email auto-sent by the process, so the process reminder served little actual purpose aside from reminding me how cool it was to see my webinar registration process online.

I’ve never spent any time with the Bluespring BPM suite before — it’s at the lower end of the range, and most of my clients are financial services and other large organizations that tend to buy big — so today’s webinar was a “first look” for me. The PowerPoint presentation at the beginning was thankfully short, but, predictably, included the same list of key differentiators as every other BPM vendor lists (ease of use, deployment speed, zero-code design, web services enabled), which leads me to think that someone is secretly telling vendors that the word “differentiator” is synonymous with “feature”.

The Bluespring product looks a lot like most of the other lower-end BPM products that I’ve seen, so I’ll just touch on the things that I liked and didn’t like about it. Keep in mind that I had a 20-minute demo, so this is not a formal review:

The integration with desktop applications, including email and Excel, looked good. For example, emailing to a pre-determined email address could instantiate a process that included the email attachment (an Excel spreadsheet, in the case of the demo) as an attachment to the process. I know that many of the other vendors could do that as well, but many of them would have to write a bit of code to do so. I also liked the Excel integration: an activity in the process could read data directly out of a spreadsheet attachment, then use that as a data parameter in the process. In the demo, which was (of course) an expense report approval, the process sucked the expense report total directly out of a specific cell in the spreadsheet and used it to decide if a second level of approval was required for the expenses. Very clean and easy integration.

In spite of the nice integration of the spreadsheet data, I wasn’t really happy with the explanation that I heard for how the attachments are handled. It appears that they are saved to the local drive of the BPM process engine server with no specific security beyond just not creating a drive mapping to that location. Presumably, an admin on that server could browse the disk and open the CEO’s expense report, or any other documents that were used as attachments. There should be a way to have the attachments in a secure repository, but still allow the level of integration that truly differentiates Bluespring.

The sales engineer who did the demo didn’t know about any plans for BPMN (in fact, it wasn’t clear that she even knew what BPMN is), and was totally derailed when I asked if they were using XPDL for moving process maps from Visio to their process designer. They need to not only get on the standards bandwagon, but educate their sales teams about it as well — there were two customers on the line in addition to me, although most likely the BPMN/XPDL conversation went right by them.

The last issue that I have is that the process designer is a desktop (thick client) application rather than web-based, with no plans to make it web-based. A few of the BPMS vendors have gone to a web process designer already, and I’m convinced that this is the wave of the future.

Process Analysis Models

Also from BPTrends, today’s Email Advisor has an article on Alternative Process Analysis Models (direct link to PDF):

There are a number of process analysis models that are designed to focus on more complex human interactions. One example is the RAD approach of Oulds and Harrison-Broninski and another is the Closed-Loop Business Interaction Model of Winograd and Flores. Both are useful in special circumstances, but neither replaces a basic workflow diagram.

I definitely agree with their premise that a single, common notation should be used for describing business processes for both business and IT.

Wrapping up Mashup Camp 2

David Berlind is wrapping up the whole conference now, and we’re all anxiously awaiting the announcement of the “best mashup” winners. He made a few comments on the wiki and how it will continue to evolve, especially over the next few days while people finish up the last few notes and also continue the discussions in the forums that are linked to each session page. I’ll probably link my blog posts about each of the sessions to the specific session page when I get a chance. If you’re interested in any of the sessions, check out what’s on the wiki pages, including the links to external references and any of the presentation materials (and, in at least one case, an audio recording of the session).

On the first count, there was a tie between WeatherBonk and another mashup that I hadn’t even seen with 26 nickels each, followed by a flurry of people rushing forward with their nickels at the last minute resulting in…. a tie with 28 nickels each. David then made us go to each side of the room to indicate our support, resulting in a slight edge for the winner, WeatherBonk. Handing out of prizes ensued, and we finished the day — and the conference — on that note.

Next Mashup Camp will be on the east coast, I think later this year.

That’s it for Mashup Camp; regular blogging will resume shortly.