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Weekend Process: Conference Tea and Coffee Service

My blogging has been pretty sparse lately, really just conference blogging, although I have a lot of good posts about products and ideas that are half-finished. I also like to occasionally post about some process that I experience that’s either really good or really bad, and will try to get to those on a weekend when I’m feeling a bit more relaxed about writing.

Today, my weekend process is about the tea and coffee service at conferences, as pictured below:

This happened to be at the TIBCO conference at the Aria hotel in Las Vegas, but this same scene is repeated in most places where I see tea and coffee service. I realize that I’m in the minority as a tea drinker, but check out the flow (from right to left) since it has a detrimental impact on you coffee drinkers, too:

First, grab a cup. That makes total sense as the place to start. If it’s a cardboard cup, also grab a cup sleeve so that you don’t burn your fingers. But wait – the lids are also here. What do you do with a lid at this point, when there is nothing in your cup yet? The options include:

Ignore the lids, then backtrack later and cut through the line to get one.
Pick one up and put it in your pocket or bag.
Pick one up, then put it down again every time you need your hand for something else, such as filling your cup or adding condiments.

Coffee and hot water. If you’re a coffee drinker, that’s great. If you’re a tea drinker that likes to add the tea bag first before the water, you’re out of luck, because the tea bags are down the line with the cream and sugar. Tea options include:

Step out of line, find a bag, then return to the line, probably at the beginning again.
Resign yourself to an inferior cup of tea, and fill your cup with hot water with the hope of reaching the tea bags before the water cools too much.
Pull a tea bag out of your pocket or bag and add it to your cup (this is why you will see me at conferences stuffing tea bags into my pocket), although that can get you labeled as a bit of an eccentric.

Cream, sugar and other condiments. Plus the tea bags. By now, if you’re a coffee drinker and have a cardboard cup, you might be realizing that you don’t have a lid. If you’re a tea drinker, not only do you not have a lid, but you’re trying to push a tea bag down into the prefilled cup of hot water. If you carried your cup with you from step 1, it’s likely been put down and picked up several times already to get to this step, or even lost along the way.

This process contains a number of unnecessary interrupting events that cause loopbacks, and doesn’t do much for helping with crowd flow.

I have seen this done once correctly, although I can’t recall the hotel or conference center that did it. Their coffee/tea service was organized as follows:

Cups, cup sleeves and tea bags.
Coffee and hot water urns.
Cream, sugar and other condiments.
Cup lids.

Steps 3 and 4 could be combined, but better left separate for those who take their drink without cream or sugar, and can therefore bypass the usually time-consuming step 3 altogether.

TIBCO TUCON2012 Day 2 Keynotes: Consumerization of IT

We’re on the last of the four themes for TUCON, with Matt Quinn kicking off the session on the consumerization of enterprise IT. It’s a telling sign that many vendors now refer to their products as being like “Facebook/Twitter/iTunes/<insert popular consumer software here> for the enterprise” – enterprise app vendors definitely have consumer app envy, and TIBCO is no exception. As we saw in the earlier keynote session about tibbr, TIBCO is offering a lot of functionality that mimics (and extends) successful consumer software, and their providing Silver Mobile Server as a way to put all of that enterprise functionality that you build using TIBCO products out onto mobile devices. We saw a demo of a app that was built using Silver Mobile Server for submitting and managing auto insurance claims, and it looks like the platform is pretty capable both in terms of using the native device capabilities and linking directly to back-end processes.

They showed some new enhancements to Silver Fabric for private cloud provisioning and management, and discussed their public cloud applications (tibbr, Spotfire, Loyalty Lab) and public Silver Marketplace functionality. Today, they announced Silver Integrator, running on Silver Marketplace, providing enterprise-class integration services on the public cloud. We saw a brief demo of Silver Integrator: it launches a cloud version of the TIBCO Designer with some additional palettes for cloud connectors such as Facebook, Salesforce and REST services.

Being able to extend enterprise applications onto mobile devices and into the cloud are critical capabilities for consumerization of IT, and TIBCO (as well as other vendors) are offering those capabilities. The problem of adoption, however, is usually not about product capabilities, it’s about organizational culture: there is a lot of resistance to this trend not in the user community, but within IT. I saw a graphic and blog post by Dion Hinchcliffe of Dachis Group today about the major shifts happening in IT, and one thing that he wrote was especially impactful:

Never in my two decades of experience in the IT world have I seen such a disparity between where the world is heading as a whole and the technology approach that many companies are using to run their businesses.

<p>Cloud, mobile, social, consumerization and big data: we’re all doing it in the consumer space, but IT departments are continuing to drag their feet at bringing this into the enterprise. The organizations that fail to embrace this are going to fall further behind in their ability to serve customers effectively and to innovate, and will suffer for it.</p>  <p>Quinn wrapped up with a list of their product announcements, including two new policy-driven governance products as part of the ActiveMatrix suite: AMX Service Gateway for providing enterprise services outside the firewall, and AMX Policy Director for managing security, auditing and logging rules for services. He covered their AMX BPM 2.0 release announcement briefly, with new functionality for work assignment and scheduling, case management, and page flow debugging, plus some new capabilities in Nimbus Control and FormVine.</p>  <p>That’s it for the keynotes, since the rest of today and all of tomorrow is breakout sessions where we can dig into the details of the products and how they’re being used by customers. I’ll be heading to the BPM product update this afternoon by Roger King and Justin Brunt, and probably also drop in on the tibbr product strategy to see more details of what we heard this morning.</p>  <p>I’ve been asked to step in for a last-minute cancellation and will be <a href="https://column2.com/2012/09/tibco-tucon2012-you-say-you-want-a-process-revolution/">presenting tomorrow morning at 10am on the process revolution</a> that is moving beyond implementing BPM just for cost savings, but looking at new business process metrics such as maximizing customer satisfaction. If you’re here at TUCON, come on out to the session tomorrow morning.

TIBCO TUCON2012 Day 2 Keynotes: More Big Data and Social Collaboration

Yesterday, the keynotes talked about customer experience management and big data; this morning, we continued on the big data theme with John Shewell of McKesson Enterprise Intelligence talking about the issues in US healthcare: costs are increasing, and are far beyond that of other industrialized countries, yet the US does not have better healthcare than many other countries: it ranks 50th in life expectancy, and 30th in infant mortality rate. Most of the healthcare spending is on a small percentage of the population, often to treat chronic conditions that are preventable and/or treatable. Some portion of the healthcare spend is waste, to the tune of an estimated $700B per year, some of which can be eliminated by ensuring that standard procedures are followed by hospitals, physicians, pharmacies and other healthcare professionals. McKesson, as a provider of healthcare information and systems, has systems in place with hospitals and physicians that can collect information about healthcare procedures as they are executed, but the move to electronic health records is still ongoing and a lot of the data is fairly unstructured, presenting some challenges in mining the data for opportunities to improve procedural compliance and the quality of care.

Historically, healthcare data was in silos, making it difficult to get a holistic view of a patient. In the US, the only place where all the data came together was at the health insurance company (if you had health insurance, of course), and that might be several weeks after the event. If follow-up care was required after a hospital visit, for example, that information didn’t pop up anywhere, since it fell through the cracks in responsibility. One change that can improve this is to align incentives between the provider, payer and patient, so that it’s to everyone’s benefit if the patient is not readmitted due to a missed follow-up appointment. It’s also important to manage patients earlier to detect and avoid problems before they occur. Big data can help with all of these by detecting patterns and ensuring procedural compliance. In closing, he pointed out that this is not a government issue: it needs to be fixed by the industry.

We moved on to the social collaboration theme, with Ram Menon, TIBCO’s president of social computing, talking about tibbr: as an enterprise social networking platform, this is positioned as a “social bus”, much like TIBCO’s earlier technology success is based on the enterprise message bus. In 18 months, tibbr has grown to be used by over a million people – more than half using smartphones – in 104 countries. TIBCO’s heritage with events and messaging is essential to this success, because tibbr isn’t just about following people, it’s also about following physical devices/items, business processes, files and applications. Earlier this year, they launched tibbrGEO, which has physical locations pushing information to people who are nearby, based on their profile.

Menon was joined briefly by Hervé Coureil, CIO of Schneider Electric, then Jay Grant, Secretary General of InterPortPolice to talk about how they are using tibbr for social networking within and across organizations. He then announced tibbr 4, to be released within a few weeks, with a number of new features:

Social Profile – presenting a view of yourself to your colleagues (think LinkedIn)
Peer Influence – the impact that you have on the things with which you interact (think Klout)
tibbr Insights – social analytics, showing a summary of what’s happening in your social network, including both activities and requests waiting for action

We saw a demo of tibbr, which presents a Facebook-like interface for seeing updates from your social graph, but also allows something very similar to Facebook pages for other entities, such as customers. From a CRM standpoint, this allows all information about the customer to be surfaced in one place: a single pane of glass through which to view a customer.

tibbr 4 also provides a social graph API allowing that social graph being collected within tibbr to be accessed from other applications, as well as provide add-on functionality to tibbr, and a marketplace for these applications that allows tibbr users to add them to their own tibbr environment. They have some new partners that are offering applications right now for tibbr: box for cloud content storage and sharing; Wayin for surveys and sentiment analysis; Badgeville for engagement through gamification and incentives; and several others including Whodini, ManyWorlds, BrightIdea, Teamly and FileBoard.

TIBCO TUCON2012 Day 1 Keynotes, Part 2: Big Honking Data

Back from the mid-morning break, CMO Raj Verma shifted gears from customer experience management to look at one of the other factors introduced in the first part of the session: big data.

Matt Quinn was back to talk about big data: in some ways, this isn’t new, since there has been a lot of data within enterprises for many years. What’s changed is that we now have the tools to deal with it, both in place and in motion, to find the patterns hiding within it through cleansing and transformation. He makes a sports analogy, saying that a game is not just about the final score, but about all of the events that happen to make up the entire game; similarly, it is not sufficient any more to just measure outcomes in business transactions, you have to monitor patterns in the event streams and combine that with historical data to make the best possible decisions about what is happening right now. He referred to this combination of event processing and analytics as closing the loop between data in motion and data at rest. TIBCO provides a number of products that combine to handle big data: not just CEP, but ActiveSpaces (the in-memory data grid) to enable realtime processing, Spotfire for visual analytics and integration with Hadoop.

We saw a demo of LogLogic, recently acquired by TIBCO, which provides analytics and event detection on server logs. This might sound like a bit of a boring topic, but I’m totally on with this: too many companies just turn off logging on their servers because it generates too many events that they just can’t do anything with, and it impacts performance since logging is done on the operational server. LogLogic’s appliance can collect enormous amounts of log data, detect unusual events based on various rules, and integrate with Spotfire for visualization of potential security threats.

Mark Lorion, CMO for TIBCO Spotfire, came up to announce Spotfire 5, with a complete overhaul to the analytics engine, and including the industry’s first enterprise runtime for the R statistical language, providing 10 times the performance of the open source R project for predictive analytics. Self-service predictive analytics, ftw. They are also going beyond in-memory, integrating with Teradata, Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server for in-database analysis. With Teradata horsepower behind it – today’s announcement of Spotfire being optimized for in-database computation on Teradata – you can now do near-realtime exploration and visualization of some shocking amounts of data. Brad Hopper gave us a great Spotfire demo, not something that most TUCON attendees are used to seeing on the main stage.

Rob Friel, CEO of PerkinElmer, took the stage to talk about how they are using big data and analytics in their scientific innovations in life sciences: screening patient data, environmental samples, human genomes, and drug trials to detect patterns that can improve quality of life in some way. They screened 31 million babies born last year (one in four around the globe) through the standard heel-prick blood test, and detected 18,000 with otherwise undiagnosed disorders that could be cured or treated. Their instrumentation is key in acquiring all the data, but once it’s there, tools such as Spotfire empower their scientists to discover and act on what they find in the data. Just as MGM Grand is delivering unique experiences to each customer, PerkinElmer is trying to enable personalized health monitoring and care for each patient.

To wrap up the big data section, Denny Page, TIBCO’s VP of Engineering, came on stage with his new hardware babies: a FTL Message switch and an EMS appliance, both to be available by the end of November 2012.

For the final part of the day 1 keynotes, we heard from an innovators’ panel of Scott McNealy (founder of Sun Microsystems, now chairman of Wayin), Tom Siebel (founder of Siebel Systems, now at C3 Energy where they are using TIBCO for energy usage analytics), Vivek Ranadivé, and KR Sridhar (CEO of Bloom Energy), chaired by David Kirkpatrick. Interesting and wide-ranging discussion about big data, analytics, sentiment analysis, enterprise social media, making data actionable, the internet of things and how a low barrier to platform exit drives innovation. The panel thinks that the best things in tech are yet to come, and I’m in agreement, although those who are paranoid about the impact of big data on their privacy should be very, very afraid.

I’ll be blogging from the analyst event for the rest of the day: we have corporate and technology briefings from the TIBCO execs plus some 1:1 sessions. No pool time for me today!

BPM2012: Stephen White Keynote on BPMN

It’s the last day at BPM 2012, and the morning keynote is by Steve White of IBM, a.k.a. “the father of BPMN”, discussing the Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) standard and its future. He went through a quick history of the development of the standard from its beginnings in BPMI (now part of OMG) in 2001, through the release of the 1.0 specification in 2004, the official adoption as an OMG standard in 2006, 1.1 and 1.2 revisions in 2008 and 2009, then BPMN 2.0 in 2011. Although there’s no official plan for BPMN 3.0, he said that he imagined that it might be in the future.

The original drivers for BPMN were to be usable by the business community for process modeling, and be able to generate executable processes, but these turned out to be somewhat conflicting requirements since the full syntax required to support execution ended up making BPMN too complex for non-technical modelers if considered in its entirety. To complicate things further, the business modelers want a simple notation, yet complain when certain behaviors can’t be modeled, meaning that there’s some amount of conflict even within the first of the two requirements. The approach was to use familiar flowchart structures and shapes, have a small set of core elements for simple modeling, then provide variations of the core elements to support the complexity required for execution.

BPMN, as White states, is not equivalent to BPM: it’s a language to define process behavior, but a number of other languages and technologies are also required to implement BPM, such as data, rules, resources and user interfaces. Hence, it’s one tool in the BPM toolbox, to be used at design time or runtime as required. The case management modeling notation (CMMN) is under development, and there are currently mechanisms for a CMMN model to invoke BPMN. Personally, I think that it might make sense to combine the two modeling standards, since I believe that a majority of business processes contain elements of each.

He walked through the diagram types, elements, and the innovations that we’ve seen in modeling through BPMN such as boundary intermediate events, pools/lanes and message flows, and the separation of process and data flows. He also described the conformance levels – descriptive, analytic, common executable, and full – and their role in modeling tools.

He laid out a bit of the vision for BPMN’s future, which is to extend further into uncontrolled and descriptive processes (case management), but also further into controlled and prescriptive processes (service level modeling). He also mentioned the potential to support for element substitution at different levels in order to better support shared models between IT and business – I find this especially interesting, since it would allow different views of the same process model to have some elements hidden or exposed, or even changed to different element types suitable to the viewer.

When BPMN 1.0 was defined, ad hoc processes (really, one in which the activities can occur in any order or frequency) were included but not really well developed, since the BPM systems at the time mostly only supported prescriptive model execution. In considering case management modeling in general, a case may be fairly prescriptive with some runtime variations, or may be completely free form and descriptive; BPMN is known for prescriptive process modeling, but does support descriptive processes via ad hoc subprocesses. Additional process types and behaviors are required to fully support case management such as milestones, new event types and the ability to modify a process at runtime, and he showed some suggestions for what these might look like in an extension BPMN.

Service level modeling, on the other hand, is even more prescriptive than what we see in BPMN today: it’s lower level, more like a screen flow that happens all within a single BPMN task: no lanes, since it’s all within a single task, with gateways allowed but no parallel paths. Think of it as visual pseudo-code, probably not exposed to a business viewer but modeled by IT to effect the actual implementation. I’m seeing these sorts of screen flow models in BPMS products already such as TIBCO’s AMX BPM, as well as similar functionality from Active Endpoints as an add-in to Salesforce, so this isn’t a complete surprise. I saw an paper on client-side service composition at CASCON that could impact on this sort of service level modeling, and it will be interesting to see how this functionality evolves in BPMN and its impact on BPMS products.

This is my last post from BPM 2012: although I would like to attend a few of the other morning sessions, I’ll probably spend the time doing some last minute reviews of the three-hour tutorial on social BPM that I’ll be giving this afternoon.

Getting Girls Interested In Engineering

Go ENG Girl is an event that every school of engineering across Ontario hosts for girls in Grades 7-10 in October of each year to introduce them to engineering as a potential career, and University of Waterloo (my alma mater) has their version on October 13th. I’m completely behind the idea of getting girls interested in engineering at an early age – I was, but I think I was a bit unusual in that regard – and I’m speaking at the Waterloo event to give a perspective to the girls’ parents on what engineering can give to their daughters.

If you have a daughter/granddaughter/sister/niece/friend who falls into that age range, consider suggesting that they attend. Registration is free for girls and a parent/guardian to attend.

Enterprise Social: Beyond The Newsfeed

In a continuation (of sorts) to the previous session on SharePoint here at Microsoft WPC, Jared Spataro discussed more about where Microsoft – specifically SharePoint – is headed with enterprise social. He did repeat some of the information from the last session, since it’s not all the same audience, specifically the discussion around key industry trends (social, consumerization, devices/mobile, cloud, and cross-organization support). The title of the talk is (I think) based on the idea that Microsoft’s previous vision of social was including newsfeeds directly in the Outlook/Exchange client: more of a customized consumption rather than truly social.

He highlighted two main capabilities required for social:

One set of tools to communicate with other people in any way: employees, customers, partners, etc., or what they call “connected experiences”: being able to collaborate with anyone from a single location.
A single platform for managing people and information, or what they call “connected platform”: being able to find anything from a single location.

Obviously, SharePoint gave them a good start on the connected platform, and is something that is more of an IT platform decision, whereas the connected experiences is what they’re hoping to bring in with Yammer with a focus on the business end users choosing to do this. Yammer will capture the organic social need in the same way that the old free version of WSS is used by the business to create their own connections and content. It’s sort of funny that Microsoft brought in SharePoint around 2000 as a free add-on to their server licences with the idea that it provided end-user computing capabilities without IT intervention, then by the time they reached SharePoint 2007, it had migrated to something that was an IT tool rather than a business tool when it came to design and deployment. Then, they spent $1B on Yammer to start the cycle again…

SharePoint is positioned as social networking with a collaboration suite, whereas Yammer is positioned as standalone social networking, although it already integrates with SharePoint. SharePoint 15 will include “new social networking capabilities” (that about all we learned about it), and Yammer will power the social experiences further in the future. The idea is that Yammer will provide a set of social networking services that is used not only by the standalone Yammer interface, but by SharePoint, Office365, Dynamics and other vertical products.

My interpretation (an a fairly common opinion since the Yammer acquisition was announced) is that they built a bunch of social capabilities in SharePoint because they needed it to compete, but realized that it wasn’t quite good enough so bought Yammer to retrofit in. If that’s true, then it would be risky to spend too much time building on the non-Yammer social networking capabilities in Office/SharePoint 15 when they are likely to be replaced over the next two years or so.

He allowed quite a bit of Q&A time in this session as well, and there were some interesting ones, such as how the Skype acquisition fits into the social collaboration spectrum together with Yammer, and the boundary between personal/consumer and enterprise social collaboration. We heard about some of the cultural shifts required for this, which is something that I talk about in my presentations on social BPM; Microsoft punts this squarely into the arms of the partners to carry forward with their customers.

An interesting couple of sessions, and I’ll drop by the reception to meet up with a few people and visit some of the partner booths. Tomorrow, I’ll be back for at least part of the day to see the keynote and check out a bit more about social CRM as well as Azure; the technical content is a bit lightweight, but it’s interesting to see the market positioning.

Best Practices For Modeling Processes And Rules With @Ronald_G_Ross

Ron Ross presented in the first breakout session of the BPM track, discussing best practices for creating better (and fewer) process models by modeling business rules together with processes. I’ve talked on this subjet quite a bit, although I come at it from the process modeling side whereas Ron is from the rules side. His business partner, Gladys Lam, was also in the audience; their book Building Business Solutions: Business Analysis with Business Rules and Ron’s earlier book Business Rule Concepts covers these concepts in much more detail.

I used to joke that process modelers tend to create process models wherein the business rules are just huge networks of flow logic directly in the process, whereas rules modelers create process models with a single task that just calls a rules engine. Ron isn’t going quite that far, but definitely advocates reducing the modeling of rules directly in a process notation (as BPMN gateways, for example) to create more concise and smarter process models. Rules should be expressed in business language; rules models are fundamentally different than process models, although the decisions made in the rules models can then be used within the process model. In his example, an insurance claim process included a conditional flow path when the claim is valid, but doesn’t explicitly show what rules are applied to determine if a claim is valid – that’s a job for the rules model.

He discussed some different patterns for harvesting rules from processes – conditional flows, maximum inter-task timing, and minimum inter-task timing – and introduced their RuleSpeak guidelines for expressing the resultant business rules in concise business language. He made a distinction between behavioral rules and decision rules; the former relies on a governor to watch for the rules being met or violated (often implemented in processes as an interrupting event of some sort), while the latter is about applying a decision at a point in a process. In short, rules are the embodiment of your business policies that ensure that you get consistently achieve the right results; in the rules world, processes are just a way of connecting the rules.

The key is to externalize the rules from the processes, and (primarily) model the high-volume standardized transactions. Low-volume, specialized processes don’t need to be modeled prior to execution, but can be informed and guided by rules: this is the basis of adaptive case management. This moves the need for agility into business rules – which are typically easier to change on the fly – and both simplify and stabilize business models.

Innovating Organizations With @ismiro

Michael Rosemann from Queensland University of Technology gave a joint keynote at IRM BPM/EA. He proposes that current BPM and EA approaches provide only limited support to corporate innovation: as he put it, we just put 100 people in a brainstorming session and hope that one of them has a good idea. Instead, we have to consider having ambitions and plans to achieve innovation, and support a conscious innovation competence and innovation process with the methodologies of BPM and EA. In other words, we need to be aware of how we innovate successfully.

He started with the concept of what drives innovation: first of all, a current problem, and a vision of a goal. This reactive approach is what he calls core innovation, but often represents only incremental innovation; this is often what we see in process improvement techniques such as Lean. His recommendations for problem-driven innovation: capture goals in your enterprise architecture; identify capability gaps; consider processes and problems; and involve all stakeholders in problem identification.

Next, he discussed constraint-driven innovation, with is much more transformational. He discussed some examples, such as the mobile-driven innovations that we’re seeing in several different markets: mobile payments via mobile phones in Kenya, and a virtual grocery store in South Korea that allows shoppers to scan displays in subway stations that look like the grocery shelves and have their shopping cart of products delivered to them at home. Instead of looking at classic process improvement techniques, which tend to be incremental, consider the constraints: in Kenya, there are few banks but many mobile phones; in South Korea, people have no time for shopping but need to pass through the subway station on their way to work. Unfortunately, standard process models don’t model key constraints and context very well, so we need to increase the context-awareness of EA and process models, and understand how contextual changes impact architecture and process in order to address this. When we live in countries that have many fewer constraints, it can be beneficial to do “reverse innovation” where we go offshore to look for constraints in order to drive innovation, then bring that innovation back to locations of fewer constraints, where the competition are likely much less innovative. An interesting way to improve competitive differentiation in a rich market.

Third is opportunity-driven innovation; his example is a crème brulee vendor in San Francisco who tweets his location daily; this idea has caught on like wildfire in Toronto, where I live, with local gourmet food trucks that relocate each day. This type of innovation captures the “affordances”, such as ability to geolocate and publish that information, and are often driven by emerging technology such as social media. Interesting how much mobile phones are part of this type of innovation these days: the other example that he mentioned was an airport using the movement of mobile phone Bluetooth signals to track queuing time in security lines.

Considering both the transactional and transformation innovation, we need to start considering innovation as a process; currently EA and BPM practices don’t support his very well, since we don’t necessarily understand that innovation is a process, or how to go about describing that process, and we don’t model constraints and context very well. If we do understand innovation as a process, it’s often just the transactional, incremental innovation that is problem-driven, not the more transformational constraint or opportunity-driven type.

He described four ways to innovate:

Enhance current practices, by eliminating steps (often wait steps, but sometimes by virtualizing a real-world experience and offering at a lower price), resequencing (e.g., move payment to end of a cycle and move to usage-based pricing), and specializing (e.g., offering higher-priced alternatives that eliminate waiting). Whenever pricing is involved, in fact, you can always start looking at usage-based and time-based pricing innovation patterns; Rosemann has a number of different patterns that can be applied to help drive innovation.
Derive better practices, through learning from others with similar processes, potentially in other industries. By considering who else has the same sort of problems; applying process improvements in mortgage applications to improve job application processes, for example, which applies filtering at the start of the process in order to reduce the number of instances that require more time-intensive consideration later in the process. He listed a number of derivation patterns to consider: pre-approval, triage, usage-based pricing, automation, and brokering.
Utilize potential practices, by considering the unused cycle time for any given resource, and finding a use for it; examples of this are people who offer their home driveway as a parking space for commuters while they’re off at work themselves. There are a lot of idle resources out there at any given time, whether people, vehicles, computing time or physical space; the key is to find the utilization differential in your enterprise architecture, and find ways to use those underused resources. Identifying and using those resources is a big part of becoming consciously competent. In some cases, that means becoming a broker between the underused resources and the potential consumers of that resource.
Create new practices, based on creative lateral thinking, not traditional pattern-based thinking. Consider that creativity is the unconventional generation of new ideas, whereas innovation is the process that carries those ideas through to new products and services.

He ended with a summary of the innovation dimensions and techniques; I believe he has a paper published on this, which I’d love to read. Lots of great ideas here for driving innovation at any level in any type of business.

IRM BPM And EA 2012 Kicks Off With @cybersal and @rogerburlton

I gave my Social BPM session yesterday on the pre-conference workshop day, but today is the official opening of the combined business process management and enterprise architecture conference in London. This is the second year that these two conferences are being held together, with attendees welcome to join either track plus some joint keynotes between them. Lots of great stuff on the agenda.

The day started with a joint keynote by Sally Bean, who runs the EA track, and Roger Burlton for the BPM side. They discussed the overlap between the two areas, and how EA and BPM are collaborative practices that enable business change: EA as more of the strategy and planning, with BPM taking over at the planning, execution then feedback of performance information to close the loop. They went through a diagram of activities across the spectrum, highlighting which were primarily EA or BPM, and which were done in both areas.

Just a quick keynote, ending up with the announcement that Sally Bean is stepping down from the conference chair position, after organizing the EA conference for several years. No word of who will be taking over this role for next year, but hers are big shoes to fill.