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The State of BPMN Implementation: Webinar Replay

Here’s the replay of the webinar that I did yesterday with Active Endpoints – it runs almost 90 minutes, because we just kept the Q&A going at the end with all the interesting questions from the audience.

Unfortunately, during Alex Neihaus’ intro to the live presentation, the entire audience may have heard that I forgot to turn my *&$%^ phone off, and it started ringing at just the wrong time: definitely my bad. Then, I was disconnected from GoToMeeting (through no action of mine, just one of those things), which is why I went through a bit of reconnection confusion at the start of my part of the presentation. In spite of these glitches, I was finally reconnected and we got started.

Enjoy the replay.

BPMN In The Real World Slideshow

Webinar done, we’re just on the final Q&A; I saw about 170 people logged in at one point, a pretty good turnout. The replay will be available on the VOSibilities blog or on iTunes.

Here’s my slides, with the “Process Model Hall Of Shame” removed:

As I mentioned in the presentation, there are a lot of great resources on the BPMN standard; my presentation was about how people are actually using it rather than the standard itself.

Webinar Today on the State of BPMN Implementation

I’ll be speaking on a webinar today about how BPMN implementations are happening in the real world of customer process modeling. This is not going to be an update on the BPMN 2.0 standard itself – you can watch the excellent update from last week by Robert Shapiro for that – but rather a review of what I’m seeing in terms of real-world adoption within customer organizations, plus some tips on how to make that adoption happen.

The webinar is from 12-1pm ET on Thursday, February 18th; I’ll be on first, followed by Michael Rowley, CTO of Active Endpoints (who are sponsoring the webinar), who will demo their BPMN 2.0 product. You can sign up here.

Making Social Media Work For Your Business: Radisson Blu Frankfurt

There’s a great social media story as follow-up to my post on Saturday about getting stuck overnight in Frankfurt but getting great customer service from everyone involved.

First, I have to mention that as I left the Radisson Blu in Frankfurt, I complimented the three young staff members who were at the front desk on the great service that they had provided, telling them that I had blogged and tweeted about it, and they actually high-fived each other with huge smiles on their faces. These people aren’t just providing service according to some playbook, they’re going above and beyond wherever possible, and really enjoying it along the way. That speaks very highly about their management as well as the individuals. So I wasn’t completely surprised to see a tweet this morning from Andreas Stöckli, the GM of the hotel, thanking me for my post and saying that they were putting it on their Facebook fan page. On their Facebook page, they not only linked to my post, they called out Nawid, who I had named in my post, for his “excellent Yes I Can Service”, which means that they are actively rewarding people for providing outstanding service.

This is a really great way to use social media in a business: find mentions of your company on Twitter, blogs or Facebook, then promote those on the social media channels that you’re using (Facebook and Twitter, in the case of the Radisson Blu). While you’re at it, mention members of your own team who did a great job as part of that service interaction with the customer: this makes them feel great and builds morale on your team. Of course, not every online mention of your company will be good, and you need to respond appropriately regardless of the content, but when there’s a good one, you want to make sure that it doesn’t go unnoticed.

In my original post, I didn’t mention how nice the rooms are, or the restaurant and other public spaces, but let me state now that they’re great. The location is convenient to the airport and the city center (although requires a taxi ride to each). And, they have free wifi. I rarely travel to Frankfurt these days, but you can be sure that when I have the opportunity to do so again in the future, I’ll be staying at the Radisson Blu, because Andreas and his team really rock.

Bad Processes? Great Service Makes Up For A Lot

Every process blogger loves to write about their own good and bad process experiences, and I’m no exception. This weekend has been a case of incredibly bad processes, but really good customer service that made up for it. I’m stuck in Frankfurt on my way back to Toronto, and I’m actually not unhappy at all, due to the outstanding service that I’ve received all along the way. The short version: my flight out of Oslo was delayed, which caused me to miss my connection in Frankfurt to travel on to Toronto.

Here’s how the process was seriously broken:

An SAS flight from Oslo to Frankfurt was leaving 15 minutes after my originally scheduled Lufthansa flight, but I was not allowed to switch to that flight because the transfer time in Frankfurt would be below their threshold. As it turns out, if I had taken that flight, which left on time, I would have made my connection, which left 30 minutes late. Instead, I had to take my original flight, which left over 2 hours late, and missed my connection.
With no Lufthansa or Air Canada presence in Oslo, SAS (which is a partner airline) services their customers. When the SAS agents were working with Lufthansa on the phone to try and rebook me, Lufthansa claimed that they couldn’t access my ticket since it was booked on Air Canada. I called Air Canada in London, who said that any changes had to be done by Lufthansa since the first leg of the journey was on Lufthansa. SNAFU.
In Frankfurt, it took over 2 hours for the first/business/gold line to process the 6 people ahead of me (luckily I was not in the plebe line, which had 200+ people). When I got up to the agent, I could see how cumbersome her process was: although my flight had already been rebooked, she went through the options for an earlier flight (I would have only been waitlisted, so didn’t bother), had to reprint a new ticket, book me into the hotel, then manually write up hotel and taxi vouchers. Even worse, the taxi voucher was a 4-part carbonless form; she filled it out, then ripped off and discarded 2 of the parts. My time with her, even though I was on a direct flight that had already been rebooked so was presumably the simplest possible case, was more than 20 minutes. People with more complex routing requirements were taking 45-60 minutes each.

I’m pretty sure that SAS/Lufthansa/Air Canada knew that I wasn’t going to make my connection before I left Oslo; they should have just put me up there for the night and flown me out in the morning. It would have taken me about 10 minutes in Olso rather than the 2+ hours in Frankfurt to deal with the rebooking.

There were some successful process bits:

Someone, somewhere, rebooked me on today’s Air Canada flight when I missed yesterday’s flight, ensuring that I have a seat.
In cases like this, Lufthansa just puts everyone in a hotel with meal and taxi vouchers, without questions. I may have had slightly better privileges because of my gold airline status, but it appears that everyone was being housed for the night, at least.

What really made the difference for me, however, was the level of service that I received along the way from people who knew that they worked for companies with stupid processes and policies, and did whatever possible to make things better for me:

The SAS agent in the lounge in Oslo worked diligently on my behalf on the phone for over 30 minutes, and apologized when he couldn’t do more.
The Lufthansa agent in Frankfurt was cheerful, even though she had been dealing with irate customers for several hours, and told me how nice the hotel was that she was sending me to (she was right).
The Radisson Blu Frankfurt, in addition to being a lovely hotel, has excellent staff. In particular, when I slept in this morning and missed the breakfast for which Lufthansa had provided a voucher, Nawid at the front desk had a great solution: he ordered me room service breakfast to eat in lobby, even though I had already checked out, and covered it with the voucher. He even thanked me for being tolerant of their rules about using the voucher (it couldn’t be used for lunch, only breakfast), and cajoled me into a much more extravagant breakfast than I would have ordered – I won’t need to eat all the way to Toronto.

To top it off, I also met Graham, an Australian trying to get home, in the line at the airport; we ended up at the same hotel and had dinner and a really interesting chat together. The whole effect – except for the extra stressful hours spent in the airports – has been to have a good dinner, a long restful night and a great breakfast at a nice hotel in Frankfurt, for free. And since I only had carry-on luggage, I even had clean clothes to put on today. Of course, if I weren’t on my way home to a chore-free Saturday, I might not be so sanguine about all this.

Severe delays due to weather don’t happen that often, so I can understand that the processes around them might be a bit inefficient; however, some of these seemed excessively bad. Some things that could have been improved in the Frankfurt rebooking process:

Email or text customers to tell them when they have been rebooked on a later flight. If I had known that, I would have had much less stress during my long wait. This would also reduce the number of people in the line, and the number that have to be processed manually.
Email or text electronic vouchers or confirmations for the hotel, with an option to accept (and go straight to the hotel) or decline and wait for individual service. That’s harder to do for taxi vouchers, but I would have gladly paid my own taxi fare to avoid the 2+ hour wait in line.
Triage the line so that people who can still get out on a flight that day are handled first. Since it was 7pm by the time that I got into line, there were probably very few people in that situation, but they were a bit desperate. Their rebooking would take much less time with no hotel or taxi vouchers, and they would be on their way much more quickly if just pushed to the front of the line, without risking them being delayed overnight. Or, if my first point was implemented, they wouldn’t even be in the line since they’d be automatically rebooked for their next flight.
Implement a better hotel and taxi voucher system that doesn’t require the agent to write all the information by hand. Once she had booked me at the Radisson online, if the system had printed both the hotel voucher and the taxi vouchers directly, that would have saved 10-15 minutes – it was the single biggest amount of time that I spent with her.

Travel has become so competitive these days that airlines need to make the experience better for their customers. That’s not just the “happy path” experience, when everything goes right, but the exception paths as well. Broken processes will eventually lead to customer attrition, no matter how good your customer service.

Pimping Your Fish at DemoCamp Toronto 25

After we heard from Gurbaksh Chahal, the rest of DemoCamp proceeded as usual. We were in the Ted Rogers School of Management, part of Ryerson University, in a really great lecture hall space that seats a few hundred people; it seemed like most of the seats were filled that night.

First up was Albert Lai of Kontagent. Albert demoed at the first DemoCamp and has appeared at at least one other. He seems to get a bit of a pass from the organizers: this time, as with the last time that I saw him, he had no actual demo – which is typically a requirement – but a lot of slides talking about social games.

After that, it was mostly Facebook night at DemoCamp: four of the five demos that followed were Facebook applications.

Next up was Mark Zohar of Scenecaster, showing the My 3D Cards application on Facebook. It uses the 3D foundation that they’ve built for enterprise projects, and used it to to take Facebook content and other rich content (video, photos, external links) to create a 3D rich media greeting card, displayed in a 3D application running in the browser using a custom Flash viewer. The idea was to show an immersive, engaging presentation of content for a specific purpose. The second app that he showed was Causes, which creates 3D content posted to your Facebook wall related to charitable causes. For causes such as Red Cross and WWF, it shows an “I donated” card with your picture, links to video about the cause, and a link to the donation site. They’re also working on an app for virtual gifts, using animated 3D, supporting multimedia and user-triggered animation; in the future, they’ll be looking at branded virtual gifts, too. In addition to their own apps, they’re syndicating their apps to other developers for other vertical applications; the first of these being developed is a 3D yearbook. These will be premium offerings, directly monetized within Facebook. They have a team of 5-6 dedicated people, using AWS, EC2 and S3 cloud-based content, composited at the client.

The demo that gave me this post’s title was by Greg Thomson of Tall Tree Games, showing their Fish World Facebook app: you can buy, raise and feed fish in a tank. (The friend I was there with turned to me and said “hey, my son plays with that!”) The focus of the demo was on monetization, a key subject for Facebook app developers: in this case, tanks are monetized through a variety of purchases, including fish, themes (including seasonal and holiday themes), plants, music and food. It uses two currencies: Facebook internal “coins” and fishbucks, which are actual purchased currency, at 5 fishbucks per $1. They find that they need to release new content a couple of times per week in order to maximize consumption; this is often done by creating a need (e.g., tank gathers algae, friends can steal fish), then selling a solution (e.g., algae-eater, security fish). They’re using analytics for targeting specific audiences, and in spite of my friend’s comment about how her son (who is under 10) plays with this, Thomson said that their primary demographic (75%) is women 20-35 years old. Huh?

Greg Balajewicz of Realm of Empires was up next, showing their massively multiplayer online strategy game on Facebook: you start with a village, build it up, recruit troops and so on. Everyone in the game is an actual person, with the game ongoing 24×7, and you can collaborate with others to plan battles and other campaigns. They have about 80k monthly active people in the game, 20k active daily, and although the game is free, they monetize with premium features that save you time in the game (e.g., a larger map view), but don’t explicitly advance your position in the game. They also have a standalone app, currently not monetized although they might offer a premium feature like this within the game, that allows any player to get a world view of all villages. They’ve done this with a small team and the three founders, with most people working remotely from each other and communicating using Skype. The game is targeted at men aged 25+; it can be played effectively in as little as 15 minutes per day. About 60% of their current players are in the US, 30% in other western countries, and a significant southeast Asia population at 7%.

Oz Solomon of Social Gaming Studios showed us their two seasonal apps: My Year in Status, and My Year in Photos. My Year in Status allows you to capture your year through your status: select a style, add a caption, and it generates a (text) collage of your status updates from 2009; you can customize and publish it to your news feed. My Year in Photos picks 16 photos from your 2009 photos (you can choose others if desired), then generates a photo collage for your news feed and photo album. Unlike the other apps, which are looking for steadier, constant growth, the seasonal apps had to spring into action for only a short period over the year end. They had 11M people use the app in a three-week period, with over 45 collages generated every second; it was the 3rd fastest-growing Facebook app for the week of Dec 21st after being covered by the mainstream media. About 80% of the users are women. They started work on the app on November 13th, launched it four weeks later, then had to do three server upgrades in a week to keep it up and running: they are using their own dedicated servers rather than cloud infrastructure. They found that seasonal apps are good for capturing viral streaks, but it’s best to build them on frameworks and code that you’ve developed for stable apps (such as their existing Status Shuffle app) in order to allow for fast development. Also, you can typically reuse these apps the following year, with some minimal-cost tweaking to keep them fresh. One interesting thing that he pointed out is that for the My Year in Status app, they fixed their #1 complaint, which was the lack of ability to choose which statuses were used, and found that although it reduced complaints by 80%, it only increased conversion rates by 2%: keep in mind that your most vocal detractors may not be that important to your bottom line.

Last up was Roy Pereira of ShinyAds.com, with the only non-Facebook app of the night. ShinyAds is a self-service advertising platform for web publishers that passes through more of the ad revenue to the publisher than other ad platforms such as Google AdSense. It’s not an ad network, but a tool for the web publishers to interact directly with advertisers. Advertisers can create their own advertising banner using a wizard-like interface: add or create a banner image, set the ad budget, set the click-through destination URL, set start and end dates, and target by geography. Once the ad is approved by the publisher, it’s inserted into the publisher’s ad server, or can use the ShinyAds ad server. Payments are made automatically to the publisher based on actual metrics, with the publisher interface includes a view of metrics and analytics.

All in all, a great DemoCamp, and the venue was excellent. I had stopped attending after a few disastrous nights in too-small venues (usually pubs) with crappy AV and wifi, but this has me back as a convert.

Gurbaksh Chahal at DemoCamp 25

DemoCamp Toronto #25 was held last week, with the usual array of demos and an extra special keynote: Gurbaksh Chahal, the highly-successful serial entrepreneur currently engaged in GWallet, an online payment system. Previously, he sold his first company at the age of 18 for $40M, then built BlueLithium to a point where it was acquired by Yahoo for $300M, and there were a lot of eager people in the audience to hear how they could get replicate that sort of success. Some of them were carrying along copies of his book, The Dream, hoping for an autograph.

He had a great set of points that I tried to capture; with each of these, he included examples from his own life that made them relevant:

The idea is only 1%, the rest is execution.
Don’t get too attached to your ideas. Sometimes that idea that you start a company with is just a starter idea, it’s not the one that you want to take to completion.
The biggest ($) deals happen when a company is bought rather than sold; that is, the buyer seeks out the relatively scarce resource and offers based on the perceived value of that scarcity, rather than the seller putting themselves up for sale.
Hire only rock stars, pay them well, and let them share in the ultimate rewards. Expect long hours, hard work and brilliance from them.
Never leave yourself vulnerable; consider everyone replaceable.
Don’t expect charity or favors, especially your first time around.
Never raise money when you need it: get traction first and wait for the money to come to you.
Bring in venture capital even if you have the means to self-fund, since that brings other ideas and governance.
In budgeting and spending, understand the difference between need and necessity. Money is finite, spend like every dollar is your last. People will only be impressed by your performance, don’t worry about the fancy trappings.
Every entrepreneur needs confidence (or the appearance of it). In any meeting, focus the conversation on the purpose of that moment.
Relationships are everything in life and the business world. Never burn a bridge. They’re not buying a product, they’re buying you.
There are only 5 key decisions that you need to make in order to make or break your company – make them wisely. His example at BlueLithium: hiring dream team, acquiring AdRevolver, raising 11.5M, opening up Europe a year after the US, selling to Yahoo at the right time for 300M although board didn’t want to sell. Knowing which are the key decisions requires instinct.
Surround yourself with people who want to see you successful and who are hungry. You don’t want to reward people who don’t contribute: you need people who will take a risk with you, and get rewarded for it.
Embrace rejection. Everything happens for a reason, it makes you stronger.
Make decisions, even if they may be wrong.
Always negotiate from a position of strength. Perception is reality: show people what they want to see, and tell them what they want to hear. Believe in yourself and sell the dream: no product or sales pitch is perfect.
Grow a thick skin. People will question your ability to succeed.
Do the work. Keep your eye on the tiger. Fight like Hell, defy the odds. It’s worth it. Never compromise your morals.

The gate receipts from that night’s DemoCamp, usually put towards some food or drink for the attendees, were donated to support efforts in Haiti following the earthquake. All of us put in $2,580; Gurbaksh, who had promised to match that, ended up tossing in another $10,000.

CrisisCampTO Planning Meeting

A bit off topic for my usual blogging here, but I spent this afternoon at the initial planning meeting of CrisisCampTO, the Toronto manifestation of Crisis Commons. Although this is happening here and now in response to the earthquake disaster in Haiti 12 days ago, Crisis Commons has a broader mandate:

We are an international volunteer network of professionals drawn together by a call to service. We create technological tools and resources for responders to use in mitigating disasters and crises around the world

We’re here today to work on anything that can be done to help, in collaboration with other Crisis Commons teams all over the world, on the various projects that have been defined by Crisis Commons based on requests from NGOs to fill a need that they have. The bulk of the projects fall under the category of software development, but there are also teams for social media, logistics and more general duties.

Our first goal today is to find a development project for the bulk of the Toronto team to get involved with, and learn how to plug into other Crisis Commons groups around the world. There is quite a bit of infrastructure already in place to connect up, including IRC channels (retro, I will definitely need a refresher course) and voice conference lines, plus a rapidly growing wiki.

I have a pretty broad range of skills to apply here: although I don’t really write code any more – unless I’m really inspired – I can do all the other stuff around development (requirements, testing, documentation). I also do a lot of social media stuff, and have attended more unconferences than you can shake a stick at, so can help with the local social media efforts such as wiki gardening, Facebook and Twitter updates, and more.

The main goal of today is to get ready for next Saturday’s CrisisCampTO (time and venue to be announced shortly), by getting some basic team structure in place and selecting one or more projects to which we will be contributing. That way, when newbies show up next week, they can start contributing immediately.

One of the things that we learned about today is Sahana, an open source disaster management system that was created in response to the Sri Lanka tsunami in 2004. There’s a Sahana instance set up just for Haiti, although it still needs a lot of content added, and possibly some development to add specific requested functionality. We also saw OpenMRS, an open source medical records system, and Ushahidi, an SMS-to-web service that accepts requests for assistance sent by text message to a specific shortcode, and makes them available to aid agencies. If you check the feed from Haiti, you can see requests for food, water and medical assistance that have been received, translated if required, and logged for followup. In summary, there are a ton of free, open source projects that can be applied to the Haiti disaster; some of them as is, others requiring some customization. This is were we all come in.

Giving Technology Back to the Community

I’m a strong believer that technology can be a way up for those in financially disadvantaged circumstances: without some computer skills, kids can’t compete in school, and don’t meet the minimum requirements for many jobs. One way that I can help – and probably many of you reading this – is to donate to programs that provide access to computers and training to people who can’t afford to buy them. There are a number of ways to do this: you can give money, you can give used computer equipment, you can give your time, and you can promote the programs to others who might do the same.

This week, I replaced my mother’s old computer, and was left with a working (although underpowered, by today’s standards) computer with keyboard and mouse. I immediately thought of Little Geeks, a program that refurbishes old computers, provides them for free to kids in need, along with 12 months of internet access and some training on how to use it. They use reBOOT Canada as their drop-off depot; reBOOT is a charitable organization that “provides computer hardware, training and technical service to other charities, non-profit organizations and individuals with limited access to technology”. I headed off to reBOOT yesterday to drop off the computer, and had a chat with Nicholas (I believe this was Nicholas Brinckman, the Executive Director). He mentioned that they’re trying to get funding from the Aviva Community Fund to build 50 learning centres across Canada, in partnership with community centres and schools.

If you support this idea, go to the reBOOT project page on the Aviva Community Fund site and vote for their project (registration required). You can vote once per day until this round of voting ends in 11 days, and I encourage you to drop in there daily to cast your vote if you believe that this is an important initiative. They make it easy to link to the page on Twitter and Facebook, so use your social network for good. You can also help out by dropping off your old computer equipment – and encouraging your employer to do the same when they sunset old computers, printers and other equipment – or volunteering some of your time to help with computer refurbishment.