My New MOO Cards

Those of you who have met me in person have probably seen my business cards: plain on the front, with the necessary information, and a Hugh MacLeod cartoon on the back.

These StreetCards cards have served me well for a couple of years, but as my current stock declined, I thought it was time for a change. Coincidentally, an invitation from MOO to try out their cards landed in my inbox, and I took advantage of their offer for 50 free business cards.

MOO loves color and images, and of their many options for business cards, I selected to have photographs from my Flickr collection printed on the back (I could have also uploaded the photos directly, or imported from Etsy, Facebook or SmugMug). This meant combing through almost 7,000 photos to find my 50 favorites, probably the most time-consuming part of the process; next time, I’ll probably just select 5-10 faves and have them repeated over the print run. I could have also selected from their patterns (like some amazing ones from the UK Science Museum) or colored text options for the back of the card, but I liked the idea of something that was a bit more personal.

I entered the text for the front of the cards, which allowed me to select a variety of layouts, fonts, alignment and text/background color: completely easy interface, and a preview of the final design. I selected the MOO Green card stock, which is made of 100% recycled post consumer waste, is recyclable and biodegradable, and was manufactured using wind power. I felt virtuous as I clicked the Next button.

The order was pretty fast, they had the printing done within a couple of days, and even though it was shipped from the US to Toronto, it only took about a week via USPS. For those of us in Canada receiving goods from the US, USPS is hugely superior to most courier services since they handle the duty and customs brokerage, so there are no extra fees to pay on receipt.

The unboxing of the cards reminded me of how a playful yet customer-focused organization works: the cards were in a box that included two little dividers labeled “Mine” and “Theirs”, so that I can take the box to a conference, hand out and receive cards, and store them all in the handy box until I am back in my office. They also include a hilarious “Buzzword Challenge” game on a card, inviting you to use such phrases as “data-fluffed” and “future-retroactivate” at your next meeting to see how long it takes before someone asks you what they mean.

The cards themselves are lovely. The recycled paper has a slightly rougher texture than a standard business card, but a fairly clean white look, and holds the colors of the printed photographs well.

The verdict: I’d order MOO cards again. I like the use of color and images, and the ability to customize. At around $0.50 per card, they’re a bit pricey for business cards but about the same as the StreetCards that I was already using; I hand out so few business cards each year that it’s worth it to make each one a bit more memorable. As an independent, I can make my business cards look as I please rather than having to follow corporate guidelines, but I’ve also seen people with social media positions in larger companies use the mini MOO cards for their Twitter, blog and other social info that might not be on their corporate card.

Disclosure: MOO provided me with a free order of 50 business cards. Next time, I’ll be happy to pay for them.

Speaking at Business Process Forum in October

A bit early for this, but maybe you’re already starting to organize your fall calendar. The business process track that was at the Business Rules Forum last year has grown, and become its own Business Process Forum. I believe that we need a good independent BPM conference – the ones run by the large analysts are too focused on their own viewpoints to be considered really independent – and this could be the start of something significant.

I’ll be speaking at the conference, which runs October 17-21 in Washington, DC. Look for me presenting a half-day tutorial on the BPM technology landscape, as well as the facilitator of a peer discussion session on transforming business process models into IT requirements.

Update: Forgot one, I’m also doing a presentation on Social BPM. The full conference agenda is here for all three tracks: business rules, business analysis and business process.

The super early bird registration ends tomorrow, and saves you $300.

Does The Enterprise 2.0 Emperor Have No Clothes?

It’s noon, the keynotes have been going on all morning, and I have only just been inspired to blog. I’m not saying that standalone Enterprise 2.0 initiatives have jumped the shark, but there’s only so much rah-rah about enterprise collaboration that I can take before I fall back on three thoughts:

  1. Collaboration is already going on in enterprises, and always has: all that Enterprise 2.0 does is give us some nicer tools for doing what we’ve already been doing via word of mouth, email, and other methods.
  2. Collaboration is just not that interesting if it doesn’t directly impact the core business processes.
  3. The millennials are not going to save us.

People collaborate inside enterprises when they care about what they do. In other words, if you make someone’s job interesting and something that they have passion about, they will naturally collaborate using whatever tools are at hand in order to do it better. Andy McAfee’s keynote included a point about Enterprise 2.0 cargo cults, where organizations believe that deploying some tools will make the magic happen, without understanding all of the underlying things that need to be in place in order to make benefits happen: I strongly believe that you first have to make people care about their work before they will engage in creative collaboration, regardless of the shiny tools that you give them.

That brings me to the second point, that this has to be about the core business, or it’s just not very interesting at the end of the day. It’s not about providing a platform for some fun Facebook-for-the-enterprise; it’s about providing tools that people need in order to do their job better. In the 90’s, I was often involved in projects where people were using Windows for the first time in order to use the systems that we were creating for them. Some companies thought that the best way to train people on Windows was to have them play Solitaire (seriously); I always found it much more effective to train them on Windows using tools that were applicable to their job so that they could make that connection. We risk the same thing today by teaching people about enterprise social software by performing tasks that are, ultimately, meaningless: not only is there no benefit to the enterprise, but people know that what they’re doing is useless beyond a small amount of UI learning. I’m not saying that all non-core enterprise social functionality is useless: building an enterprise social network is important, but it’s ultimately important for purposes that benefit the enterprise, such as connecting people who might collaborate together on projects.

The millennial argument is, not to put too fine a point on it, bullshit, and I’m tired of hearing it spouted from the stage at conferences. You don’t have to be under 28 to know how to live and breathe social media, or to expect that you should be able to use better-quality consumer tools rather than what a company issues to you, or to find it natural to collaborate online. Many of us who are well north of that age manage it just fine, and I don’t believe that I’m an outlier based on age: I see a large number of under-28’ers who don’t do any of these things, and lots of old fogies like me who do them all the time. It’s more about your attitudes towards contribution and autonomy: I like to give back to the community, I’m an independent thinker, and I work for myself. All of these drive me to contribute widely in social media: here on my business blog (occasionally cross-posted to Intelligent Enterprise and Enterprise Irregulars), my personal blog, on Twitter, on Flickr, on Facebook, on YouTube, on FourSquare… wherever I can either connect with people who I want to be connected with, or where it amuses me to broadcast my thoughts and creations. For those of you who don’t do any of this, wake up! Social networking is your personal brand. You just need to accept that as truth, and take advantage of it. The ones who don’t, and use their age as an excuse for it, just don’t get it, and you shouldn’t be listening to anything that they say about social media.

To wrap it up: enterprise collaboration is good when it has a business purpose, and anyone can do it.

One Last Conference Before Summer: Enterprise 2.0

It’s been quiet on the travel scene since my four-week marathon of conferences in May, and I have just one last one before we hit the summer doldrums: Enterprise 2.0 in Boston this week.

I’m skipping the workshops today and heading down this afternoon – luckily, Toronto-Boston is covered by Porter Airlines, so I can fly without enduring the hassle of Toronto’s bigger airport – and will be there until Thursday midday. I’ll be live blogging as usual, and tweeting using the #e2conf hashtag.

Although standalone collaboration tools can show significant benefits, my interest is in how social features are becoming part of enterprise software, especially BPM and ECM. Consider, for example, tomorrow morning’s keynote at 10:50am (for a too-short 20 minutes) by Franz Aman of SAP:

Standalone collaboration environments and social networks have been the focal point in the market to date, but what is possible when you marry traditional enterprise software with newer enterprise 2.0 thinking? To start, you free people from the struggle to use enterprise systems and you help them find the right information for daily work. You put into their hands powerful, business-relevant content-including business processes, data, events and analytics -that combines structured data and unstructured data from social and online networks to bring together people, information and business methods in a cohesive online working environment.

I’m disappointed that more of the BPM vendors aren’t here to discuss how social features are changing their platforms; not sure that this conference is on their radar yet.

BPM Summer Camp: Business Users and BPMN

I presented today on the second part of Active Endpoints’ BPM Summer Camp, discussing just how much BPMN your business users and analysts need to know. Michael Rowley, CTO of Active Endpoints, gave a demo of BPMN using their system, including illustrating a number of the concepts that I introduced in my presentation.

You can view and download my slides here:

A few other references based on the questions at the end of the presentation:

We have the third and last part of BPM Summer Camp, “Five Things You Should Never, Ever Try in Process Development”, on July 22nd; head over to the landing page to sign up for that, as well as see a replay of the first two parts.

SAPPHIRENOW Photo Caption Challenge

Last night, after a couple of drinks at the SAPPHIRENOW reception, Oliver Marks and I cooked up the idea that it would be fun to make up captions for the huge photos that adorn the Global Communications Center and the rest of the show floor. The photos are really beautifully photographed, but the compositions are a bit weird at times.

Update: a late addition to the caption challenge, which some consider to be the best of all:

TIBCO: Now FTL!

We had a brief comment from Tom Laffey in the general session about TIBCO’s new ultra low latency messaging platform to be released by year end, which breaks the microsecond barrier. They’re calling it FTL, which makes my inner (or not so inner) geek giggle with happiness: for sci-fi fans, that’s the acronym for “Faster Than Light” spaceship drives. I love it when technology companies tip a nod to the geeks who use and write about their products, while remaining on topic.

It’s also new (for TIBCO) since it provides content-based routing and structured data support, which are, apparently, just as important as a cool name.

INTERPOL at TUCON

The special guest speaker at this morning’s keynote was Ronald Noble, Secretary General of INTERPOL, speaking about why speed matters in law enforcement, and using technology to stay a step ahead of the criminals.

He engaged the crowd with very funny and completely deadpan humor, but addressed the very serious topic of how the expedient exchange of information between different countries is a crucial part of law enforcement on an international scale: the two second advantage can mean that an immigration agent has the full background of the person that they’re screening in near real-time, from both local and international databases. I’m not a huge fan of much of the “security theater” that happens in the name of airport security, but having this type of information can make a real difference in terms of identifying people traveling on lost and stolen passports, or tracking the international movements of suspected criminals. How that information is used, however, is where human rights violations can occur (a subject that Noble doesn’t address), since suspicion is not the same as conviction, and not all countries treat those suspected of a crime in a humane manner.

This is one of those areas where technology has moral implications, and the impact of using every bit of data about someone in order to make decisions can be a slippery slope in some cases.

Vivek Ranadivé Opening Keynote at TUCON

We’re done with the analyst day (although I swear that my handler had me RFID-chipped, since she found me with no problem in the large auditorium at the keynote this morning 😉 ), and on to the general conference.

TIBCO skipped their user conference last year, as did many other technology companies, and there are some significant product announcements that they’ve been saving up for us. We started out with Vivek Ranadivé giving us a longer version of the address that he gave to the analysts yesterday, with TIBCO’s vision of what they can do for customers in an event-driven world. Although many of us are making fun of them for referring to this as “Enterprise 3.0”, and stating that “Enterprise 2.0” is the client-server era from the 80’s to today (which is not the generally accepted definition of Enterprise 2.0), the message is about the “Two Second Advantage”: being able to make decisions faster in order to serve customers better.

By having everything as an event on the bus, and analyzing it with in-memory analytics, companies can take advantage of opportunities that they would otherwise miss if they didn’t have a view into not just the event, but what those events mean in the context of their business.

TIBCO’s Recent Acquisitions: DataSynapse, Foresight, Netrics and Spotfire

No rest for the wicked: at the analyst lunch, we had sessions on four of TIBCO’s recent acquisitions while we were eating:

DataSynapse

This is a significant part of TIBCO’s cloud and grid strategy, with a stack of four key products:

  • Grid Server, which allows multiple servers to be pooled and used as a single resource
  • Fabric Server, which is the platform-as-a-service platform on top of Grid Server
  • Federator, a self-service provisioning portal
  • DataSynapse Analytics, providing metering of the grid

The real meat is in the Grid Server, which has been used to create private clouds of over 40,000 connected cores; these can be either internal or externally-facing, so are being used for customer-facing applications as well as internal ones. They position Grid Server for situations where the application and configuration complexity are just beyond the capabilities of a platform like VMWare, and see three main use cases:

  • Dynamic application scalability
  • Server virtualization to improve utilization and reduce deployment times
  • Rolling out new applications quickly

Foresight

A recent acquisition, Foresight is used for transaction modernization and cross-industry EDI, although they have some very strong healthcare solutions. They have several products:

  • Gateway/portal for managing healthcare insurance transactions between parties
  • EDISIM, for EDI authoring, testing and compliance
  • HIPAA Validator, for compliance and validation of HIPAA transactions
  • Instream, for routing, acknowledgement, management and translation of messages and events
  • Community Manager, for mass testing and migration

From cloud to EDI was a bit of a retro comparison, although there’s a lot of need for both.

Netrics

Netrics does data matching of (semi-)structured data, such as name matching in databases, in order to clean up data, reduce errors and repeats, and improve decision-making. They have two products:

  • Matching Engine models human similarity measures for comparing data
  • Machine Learning Engine models human decisions on data

Interesting discussion about some of the algorithms that they’re using, that go far beyond the simple soundex-type calculations that are more commonly available.

Spotfire

Spotfire is the oldest acquisition of the four presented here (three years ago), and was shown as much to show TIBCO’s model for acquisition and assimilation, as it was to talk about Spotfire’s capabilities.

Spotfire, as I’ve written about previously, provides easy-to-use visual analytics, using in-memory data for near-instantaneous results. Since becoming part of TIBCO, they’ve integrated with other TIBCO products to become visualization for a wide range of process and event-driven applications. their integration with iProcess BPM was shown back in 2008, and they’ve developed links with the SOA and CEP products as well.

This acquisition shows how TIBCO’s acquisition process works with these smaller companies – different from either the Borg or death by 1000 cuts methods of their competitors – first of all since they tend to target companies specifically that allow them to leapfrog their competition technologically by buying cool and innovative technology. Once acquired, Spotfire had access to TIBCO’s large base of customers, partners and markets, providing an immediate boost to their sales efforts. As they reorganized, the product group focused on preserving what worked at Spotfire, while optimizing for execution within the larger TIBCO context. Alongside this, the Spotfire product group worked with other TIBCO areas to integrate to other technologies, weaving Spotfire into the TIBCO portfolio.