Choosing “same old same old” over “new and exciting”

I met with a friend today who works for a large bank (a former client of mine). That is, he used to work for the bank until his division, which provides institutional financial services through some pretty amazing application of technology, was spun off in a joint venture between the bank and an equally deep-pocketed European firm, in order to provide these services more effectively around the world. We spent much of our time talking about how exciting the new environment is: the head of the new joint venture is doing the whole rock-star/entrepreneur launch thing, with a fancy launch party for the staff, T-shirts and other swag, and various other bits of team-building and corporate culture enhancements. I know, for those of us who lived in technology through the boom, that doesn’t seem like much, but we’re talking about a bunch of conservative banking types here.

Being spun off as a new, smaller company, they can create systems and services in a much more agile way than when they were part of the bank, in part because they don’t need to conform to the bank’s corporate standards any more; from my experience there as a contract architect several days a week for about a year, I can vouch for the fact that these standards were sometimes oppressive since they didn’t account for the needs of this relatively small division.

As our conversation neared a close, I idly asked him if anyone had been spooked by the idea of working for a smaller, more agile company (there are a lot of veterans of 15+ years there), and was shocked to hear that several people had opted to move from this division back to the bank proper before the spin-off. A new company, backed by some very pockets? An agile business and technology environment unchained from irrelevent (to them) corporate IT standards? In other words, new and interesting work with no financial risk? I realize that I’m a bit of an outlier, having worked for only one company larger than 50 people since I graduated from university (and that chafed so bad that I had to leave after 18 months), but I have to ask, what were those people thinking?

Sometimes, being offline helps me focus

The past few days, I’ve been listening to Cory Doctorow’s Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, as read by Mark “the Brooklyn Bluesman” Forman on his Getting a Leg Up blog. Forman’s not a great reader — or maybe I’m totally spoiled, having just listened to Stephen Fry read the last Harry Potter book — but at least this way I can load it up on my iPod and listen while I’m walking around town or on the subway. If you prefer the printed word, you can also download it in PDF from Doctorow’s site, where he makes some of his writings available for free under a Creative Commons licence.

I was walking and listening today, and heard a bit of prose that describes our current age as seen from the vantage point of people in the future who live with embedded hardware in their brain that provides constant access to their digital environment:

…living like the cavemen of the information age had, surrounded by dead trees and ticking clocks.

I was struck by the imagery that that phrase conjured up for me, of the old days when paper was still a significant budget item, and as a cavewoman of the information age I immediately rushed home and browsed the PDF version to get the full quote. The following line was even better:

Being offline helped me focus.

Oh yeah, I know that feeling. Someone please take away my RSS reader for a day or two?

My 10 geekiest moves so far this month

It’s not even mid-month, and I’ve been a total techno-geek. To wit:

  1. I hooked up my new video iPod to my TV so that I can play video podcasts on the big screen, without using a proprietary Apple cable.

  2. I installed Blackberry Messenger so that I can IM on my Blackberry. As if regular email, PIN messaging and SMS aren’t enough.

  3. I signed up to go to MashupCamp in California next month.

  4. My boyfriend found out that I’m going to California next month because he read it on my blog.

  5. I uttered the phrase “sometimes I think about going back to coding”.

  6. I installed the Firefox X-Ray extension so that I can see the html tags on a page without viewing the source code.

  7. I downloaded ubuntu.

  8. I moved almost all of my bookmarks into del.icio.us.

  9. I loaded Google Local for Mobile onto my Blackberry and I can’t stop grinning and showing people the map directions. Then, within two hours, I convinced three other people to load it on theirs, and gave two of them an in-person tutorial.

  10. I’ve spent the last hour browsing open source shopping cart solutions that I can customize for my wine-tasting club.

Maybe it’s something in the air for 2006?

Who will mash?

Further to my post about enterprise mashup yesterday, I’ve been thinking about who in the BPM space will jump on the enterprise mashup bandwagon first.

In my Making BPM Mean Business course, I discuss the history of BPM, and I’ve noticed that BPM vendors who started on the workflow side of the house typically expand their capabilities through OEM agreements and partnerships (the “United Nations” approach), whereas those who started on the EAI side typically expand by building functionality in-house or buying a small company outright and submerging it into their product (the “world domination” approach). That could be because the pretty UI stuff that is usually developed for the human-facing workflow functionality is perceived as the “personality” of the BPM product, and everyone needs to author their own personality, or at least be perceived as being its author. (Okay, for a comment about technology, that’s pretty philosophical.) There’s lots of exceptions to this, but I find that’s true in many cases.

Does that mean that the BPM vendors with a workflow heritage are more likely to embrace the mashup concepts than their descended-from-EAI competitors? While the old guard thinks it over, the “nouveau BPM” vendors (who are built on web services from the ground up) are probably already demoing the integration of Yahoo Maps with back-office transaction processing, and rewriting their marketing materials to include the word “mashup”.

By the way, I signed up for MashupCamp, so if you’re headed there in February, look me up.

Mashing up the enterprise

I’ve spent the past few days mulling over the differences between mashups and the more traditional integration that’s done with enterprise applications. My initial reaction? There’s a lot more similarities than differences: in both cases, a third party uses published application interfaces to create functionality that integrates the capabilities of two or more applications/services. I know, that’s a bit of a simplification, but how soon will it be before overly complex (and expensive) enterprise integrations start taking advantage of the lessons to be learned from the mashups of web services?

Obviously, I’m not the only one thinking about this: the ZDNet SaaS blog just posted about enterprise mashups, and what’s needed to make them a reality.

Makes me want to go to MashupCamp.

Gartner’s podcasting!

It’s the last company that I expected to be giving it away (for now), but Gartner is publishing podcasts as Gartner Voice. They cover a wide variety of topics so I won’t be listening to them all, but enough of them look interesting for me to add this to my iTunes feed. I also like that they’re short, 10-15 minutes each rather than the hour-long behemoths from other sites that I never find the time to listen to.

There’s an one on BPM as a business catalyst that has some comments on how an organization’s justification for BPM changes from cost savings to agility (both business and IT) as they implement more BPM projects, and also some insights on the coming market convergence.

I’ll also be checking out the one on articulating enterprise architecture in business terms.

Hooked on Analytics

BAM, BI, CEP, analytics: call it what you will. An article by Tom Davenport in HBR, Competing on Analytics (free!), discusses the value of shining a bright light on what’s happening in your business processes:

At a time when firms in many industries offer similar products and use comparable technologies, business processes are among the last remaining points of differentiation. And analytics competitors wring every last drop of value from those processes.

He makes the point that companies that become proficient at analyzing what’s happening with their business processes become the leaders in their field, like Capital One, Marriott and Amazon. These “analytics competitors” have top management buying in to the concept of analytics as a strategic differentiator, have multiple analytics initiatives going on, and are doing it at the enterprise rather than departmental level. I had a question sent to me via my Squidoo BPM lens recently about the BI/analytics marketplace in Toronto, and I had to admit that a lot of my local customers (and not-so-local ones) are still not seeing analytics as a strategic initiative, but are allowing it to languish in departmental applications where it provides ROI but (probably) not much strategic differentiation at an enterprise level. Read Tom’s full article for his full analysis of what the analytics competitors are doing right, and the difference that it’s making for them. He even pooh-poohs the use of the term “business intelligence” as being “the term IT people use for analytics and reporting processes and software”. Ouch!

The linked sub-article, You Know You Compete on Analytics When…, has a summary of the traits of a successful analytics competitor.

Business-driven EA

A thought-provoking post from Brenda Michelson on the Business-Driven Enteprise Architect, including some steps for the CIO to take in order to ensure EA success, such as:

Make Room at the Table for Architecture Leadership. The architecture leader must have a seat at the CIO’s table in IT leadership and business leadership settings. The architecture leader, particularly one with an architecture background, will listen and contribute to the discussions with an enterprise architecture perspective. Don’t filter his/her information through a leader with a non-architecture focus.