Gadget week #2: Crumpler “Luncheon” computer bag

Buying a new computer naturally made me think about buying a new computer bag to put it in, even though I don’t do the amount of travel that I used to do. My old Kensington backpack-style bag has travelled a few hundred thousand miles with me and is showing its age; plus, I wanted to lend out my (still usable) older laptop and it was more convenient to put everthing in the old bag.

Originally designed and made in Australia, although now manufactured in China, I’ve heard good things about Crumpler bags and liked what I saw on their website so went searching for their computer bags in Toronto. I thought that my new laptop would fit in the smaller “Breakfast Buffet” bag, but it was just a bit too tight due to the thickness of the machine, and didn’t leave enough room for the paperwork that I inevitably end up carrying along: the Luncheon bag is a few inches larger and gave me the room that I needed for everything. The bag appears to be pretty much indestructible, although time will tell, and definitely fashionable. I bought the olive green one with an electric orange interior (I figured that the orange exterior wasn’t quite corporate enough), and I can’t imagine that I’ll see very many the same in my travels, which means that no one is going to pick up my bag by mistake. I had to venture into foreign territory to find it: Carbon Computing, a store that caters to those of the Apple persuasion. A very different experience from the usual PC store, where the (invariably male) sales clerk wants to talk about bus speeds regardless of what you’re buying; I was helped by a waif-like young woman whose regular job is in the arts, and she waxed poetic about the bags and how much she loves hers, even though she puts an iMac in it.

The down side: there’s no outside pocket for holding boarding passes and the like while dashing through airports, requiring me to open the front flap completely and dig inside for things that won’t fit in my tiny handbag. That front flap has the stickiest Velcro on it that I have ever seen — I think that you could stick yourself to the ceiling with a small patch of this stuff — so opening the bag is a noisy and slightly energetic activity.

Also on the down side: that Velcro is quite rough, and I managed to abrade one knuckle while digging into an inside pocket that also fastens shut with Velcro.

Gadget week #1: HP/Compaq tc4200 convertible laptop/tablet

I adore this machine. I come from the good old days of presentations done on overhead projectors with transparencies, and there was never a time when my transparencies weren’t covered with ink by the time that I finished a presentation. Then, along came PowerPoint and I was forced to gesture wildly at the screen instead, which is amazingly unsatisfactory. The tc4200 works like a regular laptop, but the screen swivels around and folds down flat, covering the keyboard, allowing me to write directly on the screen with the provided stylus. Now, I do my presentations on the tablet and am able to write and highlight all over the slides again. I’ve used this for several days of training plus some casual presentations that I’ve done in the past few months, and it works like a charm. I’ve had several favourable comments and envious glances about it from the attendees, as well. It’s also great for curling up in an easy chair and poking through my feeds in the web version of Bloglines, which is mostly a point-and-click activity that can easily be done with the stylus. The handwriting recognition is quite good, although my typing speed is fast enough that I don’t use that a lot — I’d rather convert back to keyboard mode and do 60 wpm.

The down side: it runs XP, which is a pig compared to Windows 2000, my previous operating system. On my old machine, which was less than half the speed, the same amount of memory (0.5GB) was plenty for Windows 2000, but I had to drop another 1GB into this for a total of 1.5GB before XP started behaving tolerably when I’m running multiple applications simultaneously. As far as I know, Windows 2000 doesn’t support tablets so I’m stuck with XP, and now I’m mostly used to the user interface, so I guess that I’ll just have to live with the crappy multitasking.

Also on the down side is the lack of a firewire port, and I haven’t been able to get my PCMCIA firewire card working properly with it: my Canon Elura 50 digital camcorder is not recognized, although the same card and camcorder work fine together on other machines. HP support claims that no one has tested a firewire card on this machine, so can’t even recommend a different card to buy. I’m suspecting that it has something to do with power to the PCMCIA slot, and that an externally-powered card might do the trick, which will require making a trip to a computer store with my laptop and camera to try said card before I buy. Troubleshooting three devices from different manufacturers is always a hassle, since none of the vendors will provide anything that resembles technical support.

My own personal gadget week

In the spirit of blogging about something a big lighter over the holiday week, I’m going to talk about my latest gadgets and their quirks next week, possibly sprinkled with some of my usual BPM-related fare. Due to some long-overdue upgrades, the past few months have been one big gadget-buying spree for me, so there’s lots to talk about.

Also check out my new Squidoo BPM lens, and sign yourself up at my Frappr map.

Integration Trends 2006 webinar

Catching up on a few webinars that I missed live, I just reviewed the replay of ebizQ’s Integration Trends 2006. There’s a nice summary slide up front by David Kelly, an ebizQ analyst, where he talks about the current focus of most businesses (reducing costs, increasing flexibilty, becoming process-driven) and most IT departments (composite applications, modernizing legacy systems, moving to SOA and event-driven architecture). Certainly true for all of my customers.

The webinar was sponsored by PolarLake, makers of an ESB product, and it turns out that the CEO, Ronan Bradley, has a blog that includes some interesting stuff, such as his recent post that “exposes the myth” of run-time discovery of web services (he quotes and comments on a post on the same subject by Brenda Michelson). Alas, I’m unlikely to read his blog much since he chooses not to publish full feeds, and I find it too much of a hassle to click through to every blog on my list of daily reads.

Anyway, back in the webinar, Ronan Bradley made a huge point about how ESB is not EAI, but I’m not sure that the lines are that clearly drawn. David Kelly later asked how he made that distinction, and it seems to be based on attributes such as “distributed, standards-based, extensible” and providing “productivity and agility”, but I don’t think that the lines are that clearly drawn between ESB and EAI: it’s more of a spectrum of capabilities than the black-and-white picture that Ronan puts forward. He depicts EAI as having functionality without these attributes, “lightweight ESB” as having the attributes but little functionality, and (of course) PolarLake as having both the functionality and the attributes.

Of course, what vendor doesn’t find a graph to publish where they’re in the upper-right quadrant? Gartner probably just calls it all integration-focused BPM anyway.

Regardless of any distinction between EAI and ESB, he does make an interesting point about how orchestration isn’t so simple as it is often portrayed, but requires “mediation” around the orchestration that may be many times larger and more complex than the orchestration itself: things such as complex data manipulation and translation beyond simple XSLT transformation, interaction with existing infrastructure and applications, and complex and recursive data transformation, enrichment and management.

Squidoo BPM portal

I grabbed an invitation a few months back to participate in the beta for Squidoo, the latest Seth Godin project. I haven’t had much time to do anything with it, but a few things prompted me to go back and fiddle with the BPM “lens” (portal) that I created on Squidoo: first, there was an email that came out from some anonymous prat on the Squidoo beta team that threatened to nuke my lens if I didn’t do something with it, which was promptly retracted in a second email from Seth himself — that at least had me think about it again (which may have been the carefully crafted intent…hmmm). Second, I was playing around with moving my bookmarks into del.icio.us, and after adding a number of BPM-related links to my list, I linked through to other people’s lists with the same links to see what else that they had of interest and found that David Ogren’s list had a link to my Squidoo BPM lens on his list. Yikes! There’s nothing that kicks me into action faster than having someone watching me.

I’m not sure what direction that I’m taking it in, but for now, my BPM lens is a variety of information related to BPM that I use as a reference, and may be of use to you as well. Click here to check it out; I’ve organized the following modules so far:

  • An RSS feed of all blog posts with the Technorati tag “BPM”. I check this daily, since the explicit tagging means that it filters out all of the music and prenatal references where bpm=beats per minute, hence much more valuable than a regular automated search.
  • An RSS feed of this blog. In general, I likely won’t put other blog feeds on the lens since I link to them on my blogroll.
  • A set of links to BPM standards-related sites.
  • A set of links to BPM informational and reference sites.
  • A list of BPM and re-engineering books on Amazon, most of which are in my personal library. I’ll try to add more descriptive information about the books in the future.

If you’d like to suggest something to add to it, just drop a comment or email.

Integrating Information into the Process

How much information and how it is used is a fundamental issue that I always deal with when designing processes: the usual tendency is to put too much information into the process itself (typically because the line-of-business system is so ugly that no one wants to deal with it directly), but that over-replication of data causes problems with synchronization and potentially performance. I’m a big fan of keeping the data in a process to the minimum as long as those other systems can be accessed in some way, and replicating data into the process for three reasons only:

  • Data elements that link this process instance to other systems, e.g., an account number. If you want other information about the account, I’d recommend that it come from the system of record, not be replicated into the BPM system.
  • Data elements that are passed or displayed to the agent executing a specific step in the process flow, whether a human user or another process/system, that allow them to execute the task at hand. This may be the same information as in the previous case, such as an account number, but may also be instructions such as “call the customer for the missing data on their application form”.
  • Data elements that are used to control process flow. For example, if transactions of greater than $1000 in value follow one path in the process flow, and those less than that follow another path, then you need to have a “transaction value” data element in your process.

As Value Wizard points out in Process/information integration, too much information can be just as bad as too little, and can lead to delays and inefficiences while a human operator sorts through a mass of data to find the one piece that they need to execute the task at hand. He points out that we need to be mapping information architecture right along with the process and business architecture, and points out the value of an enterprise architect in ensuring that the information (data) architecture is aligned with everything else.

Gartner’s BPM Suite Selection Criteria

Appian has a link to Gartner’s newly-published report on BPMS selection criteria here (free registration required). Gartner has the 10 major areas of functionality used to develop the criteria listed as following:

  • Human task support: Executing human-focused process steps
  • Business process/policy modeling and simulation environment
  • Pre-built frameworks, models, flows, rules and services
  • Human interface support and content management
  • Collaboration anywhere support
  • System task and integration support
  • Business activity monitoring (BAM)
  • Runtime simulation, optimization and predictive modeling
  • Business policy/rule management support
  • Real-time agility infrastructure supports

For each of these, the report provides a description of the functionality and why it’s important, then provides a list of what to look for when you’re evaluating that particular functionality. For example, they have this to say about real-time agility:

We believe that making changes to process flows in real time is less important than making changes at the correct or relevant time.

A sentiment that I wholeheartedly agree with — in fact, I think that I said pretty much those exact words during my course earlier this week. They proceed on with several paragraphs of explanation about the factors involved and what to look for, then the dish up their “factors to seek out” list, which includes things such as BPEL support, and early warning through rules and complex event pattern matching.

Excellent reading, and a very practical checklist for anyone evaluating BPMS.

iPod in the Great White North

Completely unrelated to BPM, EA, or anything else that I usually blog about, I have a great idea for one of those iPod silhouette ads for Canadian viewers (readers from Michigan, Wisconsin and Switzerland will also appreciate). This came to me last week after I received a video iPod as an early Christmas gift, then had to travel halfway across the city to see a client on the day of a 3-4″ snowfall. Picture a long parka with a snorkel hood (something like this, if you’re having trouble imagining it), with the white headset cables emerging from inside the hood, then trailing into an inside pocket of the coat where the iPod is, of course, out of sight so that it doesn’t freeze over. By now, you shouldn’t have to see the actual iPod to know what’s connected to those white cables.

This would be funnier if it weren’t quite so true.

Face-to-face bloggers

I had the unique experience of meeting two other BPM bloggers this week for the first time, one unexpected and one planned.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I was in Dallas to deliver my Making BPM Mean Business course for Imagine Solutions, and was pleasantly surprised when George Dearing of the ECM Blog walked into my classroom at the end of the first day to introduce himself. I link to his blog on my blogroll, so I knew that he works for Imagine, but I had totally forgotten about that in all of the activities around preparing for the course. He read my blog post from Sunday night (in which I didn’t mention that Imagine was my client), and thought that this was too much of a coincidence that I was in Dallas so went scouting around his office to find out if I was there.

On a more planned note, I met up with Ethan Johnson of The Vision Thing for dinner; Ethan and I have been trading blog comments for months, and he interviewed me for one of his Sound of Vision podcasts, so when I knew that I was coming to Dallas, we made the arrangements to connect. I didn’t wear my Process For The People tank top (too cold!), but we still managed to identify each other. We had our own little geek dinner, and as he pointed out, it was unusual because we had equal gender representation, which likely doesn’t happen much at geek dinners. I also noted that we had equal representation from Canada and the U.S.: sort of a NAFTA geek dinner, if you will.

Great to finally meet both of you guys face to face!