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Windows 7 launch Toronto #CDNwin7

I was invited to the Windows 7 launch in Toronto today, where Steve Ballmer is here in person. Instead of being in the live presentation, I’m hanging in the press Tweet Lounge with my torcamp peeps @davidcrow and @AccordionGuy, watching it on a big screen; this gives a lot more flexibility in terms of walking around, chatting and getting coffee during the presentation. So far, I’ve had an offer from a Microsoftie to upgrade my HP Mini to Windows 7 on the spot, and I’ve heard that it will extend the battery life by another couple of hours, which is definitely of interest to me.

Ballmer is talking about the need for efficiency in the new economy; I’m thinking that this is a veiled reference to getting past the Vista bloat, especially when he quotes users who claim that it’s simpler and more responsive without actually stating the point of comparison for simplicity and response time. These issues are key for end user efficiency, along with the improvements in handling wireless, but there are also improvements in desktop security that make it more efficient for the IT people who have to manage large installed bases of PCs. There are new versions of the Windows Server (2008 R2) and Exchange Server (2010) products, too, particularly with respect to virtualization, although I try to make everything beyond my own keyboard as virtual as possible so don’t have a lot of interest in the server products: my mail, files and backup are in the cloud, not on a server in my office. That being said, Microsoft is launching a number of cloud-based tools, including the web-based Office suite (still very early and barely functional) and SharePoint Online to complement their Exchange Online offering; although they have some significant clients here, likely the biggest impact is that they are validating the cloud model for email and collaboration, which will benefit their competitors as much or more than themselves.

Windows 7 has had about 8 million beta testers since they released it for download several months ago, and have collected a huge amount of feedback from the early adopters: some are estimating a savings of $100-200 per person per year in reduced support and maintenance costs, although YMMV.

After a brief speech, Ballmer opened it up for questions, and the first one was about upgrading existing hardware to run Windows 7; he responded that any machine that runs Vista well will run Windows 7 (although I thought that the problem was the Vista didn’t run all that well on any platform, hence the crappy adoption rates), but those running XP may require upgrades or replacement. I think that it’s fair to say that a huge part of my customer base – the rather conservative financial services and insurance industries – haven’t even touched Vista, so that could mean some significant hardware investment to support Windows 7; Microsoft can expect to see widespread Windows 7 adoption rates in these industries only when XP support is cut off. Ballmer’s betting on people being excitedly motivated to move to Windows 7, not forced through XP end of life; I think that’s a bit delusional given that he admits that they’re still supporting Windows 2000 for some customers. In the last question, he stated that Windows 7 will not be the last 32-bit OS from Microsoft because of the recent popularity of the Atom processor.

They’ve moved on to the customer videos now, so I’ll wrap this up and wander around the demo stations (and the tea table). In the spirit of full disclosure, Microsoft fed me breakfast this morning but did not otherwise compensate me to be here. I’m still hoping for a free copy of Windows 7.

Update: Scored my free copy of Windows 7 Ultimate on the way out the door. Headed home to install on the netbook.

NetWeaver update #SAPTechEd09

Marge Breya is responsible for a huge portfolio of SAP products, including SOA, BPM and the BusinessObjects BI unit – that is, pretty much all the SAP stuff that I’m interested in. 🙂 At an analyst/blogger roundtable this afternoon, she gave a quick overview of the high-level strategy for NetWeaver, and had Wolfgang Hilpert and Thomas Volmering there to talk more about the BPM side.

From a platform standpoint, they’re trying to do some major renovations to build the best possible platform for SAP to run on. In orchestration, there are new things in master data management as well as business process and the models within them; when I reviewed the NetWeaver BPM platform, I talked about the strong process instance data models that they include, which is critical for appropriate monitoring and management of processes. She also mentioned Gravity, the combination of Google Wave and some SAP process discovery/modeling to allow for collaborative process modeling by what one person at the table called “mere mortals”.

From the Business Objects side of the portfolio, she also mentioned the advances in analytics and end-user experience, and how ideas being generated there are pushing forward the related technologies in other areas of the portfolio. There was a discussion about in-memory analytics; this has obvious implications for complex event processing and BPM as well as just analytics. Creating methods for users to configure their own user interface allows the business to start creating their own experiences rather than waiting for IT to do it for them.

The message that every new user entering the workforce now is a digital native comes through clearly in more than one of the conversations that I’ve heard today. SAP must be feeling the pinch of having some pretty outdated user interfaces in some of their product lines, because they seem to be taking this as a serious threat and addressing it head on.

This was more of a discussion than a presentation, but some good ideas about what’s coming up.

This is my first post from SAP TechEd in Phoenix; SAP has paid my travel expenses to be here, but is not otherwise compensating me and has no editorial control over what I write (in fact, they look downright nervous as I type).

Untamed business processes #BTF09

You know that you’re getting near the end of a conference when the number of people on the panel is almost as many as the number in the audience. The last session of the day is a breakout, and I attended a panel with Craig Le Clair, Chip Gliedman and a third analyst (George) who was substituted in for Paul Hamerman, but for some reason they had not spent the necessary 10 seconds to update the title slide.

They classify processes into “tamed”, meaning those that are so structured, they’re embedded within packaged applications such as ERP and CRM; and “untamed”, including everything else, including all those processes that we implement in BPMS. I’m not sure that I agree that some of their untamed processes are not structured; rather, a packaged app doesn’t provide the right degree of flexibility, or the market for the process is small enough that there isn’t a packaged app to deal with that process.

Forrester has an interesting format for this type of panel, where each of the analysts takes on a persona and a set of opinions that I don’t think necessarily represents their own opinions: although I like the light-hearted back and forth conversational manner, this has too much of the air of a high school debate club where anyone can argue any side as required rather than analysts who actually hold opinions on this subjects. I found this one to be too distracting to focus on the content.

That’s it for the Forrester Business Technology Forum; all in all, a lot of great content in a fast-paced two days. There could have been more on Lean business process improvement rather than Lean software process improvement, especially considering that half of the vendors in the showcase were BPMS vendors, but I still gained a lot of value from the conference.

Social media and business activity monitoring #BTF09

James Kobielus and Natalie Petouhoff presented at a breakout session on social media as a method for gaining visibility into your customer service processes: customers will react on social media channels such as Twitter, Facebook, review and community sites, and blogs if they have either a good or bad customer service experience. I’m not sure that this fits into the classic definition of BAM, but it does provide insight into how well you’re working with your customers.

They referred to the “witness factor” that social media has on business transformation: if people within the company know that they are being watched and commented upon, they often change their behavior in order to make those comments more favorable. Social media provides one window for a company into their customers’ impressions of the company and products; since people are much more likely to comment if they have a bad experience than a good one, those are overwhelmingly negative, but still represent valid complaints.

One problem with many current BAM applications is that they’re trapped within a BPMS framework, and are focused primarily on the data and events generated by that BPMS. Instead, we need to move towards a more comprehensive monitoring environment that can accept information from a number of different sources, including social media channels. Just think of tweets as events that can feed into a monitoring dashboard, allowing a customer service representative to review and respond to those in the context of any other customer-related events and information. Kobielus mentioned that there is little integration of social media into traditional BAM tools, but I think that we’ll see this sort of functionality being offered by other tools, such as more forward-thinking CRM.

This seemed to be a bit of a disjointed presentation, with social media on one side and BAM on the other, but there are ways to bring this together: in advance of this session, I started a discussion with my fellow Enterprise Irregulars about Twitter being used for customer engagement (not just one-way PR blasts), which has resulted in a fascinating stream of messages that weave around these same issues. After I’ve had a chance to digest those a bit more, and think about how this impacts on business processes, I’ll bring some of those ideas forward.

Lean application development strategies #BTF09

Dan Carmel from SpringCM gave the second keynote today, focused on his premise that SaaS = Lean. Although I would agree that many SaaS applications are Lean from a customer’s standpoint, that’s not true with all of them. Yes, using SaaS applications potentially has a much leaner footprint for a customer since there is no hardware or software on their own site, but you also need to consider the efforts to integrate with other systems, including on-premise systems. If the SaaS app (or any on-premise app, for that matter) can be reconfigured and integrated with a minimal effort, then things continue to look Lean; if it’s closed and requires custom kludges to integrate, then not so much.

He went through some good examples of Lean and extensible SaaS environments, such as Salesforce.com and Webex Connect, then pointed out some areas where on-premise systems can be a big challenge, but SaaS can provide sufficient business value even at lower volumes: ECM, for example (no surprise, since that’s what SpringCM sells), where high initial costs tend to keep all but large companies from deploying internally.

He then introduced Joe Graves of Stratus Technologies (a SpringCM customer) about their journey with SaaS. They started using Salesforce.com about five years ago, deploying to 170 users worldwide in a matter of weeks from the start of the project. They use a number of applications integrated with Salesforce.com, and when they needed ECM for contract management, they selected SpringCM because it’s tightly integrated and because they were already sold on the value of SaaS. He outlined their benefits: lower upfront costs with no capital outlay, quicker implementation time, reduced operational issues such as storage management and disaster recovery, and allows IT to focus higher up in the value chain rather that fussing with operational issues that don’t improve competitive differentiation. Although many people have concerns about customization and integration, security, and uptime of SaaS apps, Graves pointed out that there are ways to deal with all of these when you’re working with a properly built app, and that as long as it meets your functional and operational requirements, there isn’t a problem. [As I like to point out to people who use the highly publicized downtime of SaaS apps such as Salesforce.com and Gmail as justification for not using SaaS: your internal systems go down too, it’s just not publicized across the internet; in fact, the level of transparency that a SaaS provider has around their failures can increase customer commitment.]

End of the day, on to the evening #BTF09

Jim Haney, CIO of Harley-Davidson, presented on how they’re taking the Lean principles that they already use in manufacturing, and applying to their IT operations. They’re obviously focused on their customers: he started with a picture of a grey-bearded biker in bandana and shades, and pointed out that they do everything for him. 🙂 However, it was the end of the day and I didn’t find the rest of the talk sufficiently compelling to blog about.

Today’s been a bit of a marathon, especially following on the heels of 2-1/2 days at Gartner in Orlando earlier this week, and it’s not over yet: I’m off to the reception on the vendor show floor, then to a special event for women executives to discuss building personal brand, sponsored by Lombardi. Although I’m typically not a big fan of women-only events because I think that they just emphasize the divide, this looks like it will be an interesting panel and I’m looking forward to add in my two cents worth.

Designing compelling customer-facing user experiences #BTF09

For the last breakout of the day before the final keynote, I attended Mike Gualtieri’s session on designing customer-facing user interfaces. He started with the idea that application developers have to be involved in user experience design, and not just leave it to the designers (which is, of course, exactly what we did in the bad old days of development when there was no such thing as a user experience designer). Forrester defines user experience as “users’ perceptions of the usefulness, usability, and desirability of a Web application based upon the sum of all their direct and indirect interactions with it”, and propose that a great UX is useful, usable and desirable.

User experience impacts how your customers feel about you, and it’s also not just about the interfaces that the customer works with directly: a second-hand interface can also impact the customer experience, as you know if you’ve ever waited ages while a hotel desk clerk clicks their way through a complex interface in order to check you in. A good UX can increase purchases, retain customers and attract more customers; leaving it to chance hurts your conversion rates, alienates customers and increases your development costs due to redesign and redevelopment.

Gualtieri argues that UX design is Lean (although you could argue that only good UX design is Lean), and sets out best practices for good UX design:

Become your users, by listening to their needs, observing them in their natural habitat, creating personas, and empathizing with them. Users typically don’t articulate their needs fully or accurately so it’s not sufficient to just listen to them, but they will demonstrate them if you watch how they do their work. This type of user research is not the same as gathering requirements from business stakeholders; remember the Henry Ford quote: “If I asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses”. Forrester uses personas in their own materials – for example, representing an application development manager, complete with picture and name – and I’m seeing some companies such as Global 360 use these for BPMS user interface design.
Design first, and understand constraints and potential areas of change as well as the different personas that you discovered in your user research. Keep in mind that you have to serve business goals by serving user goals. Create rough prototypes first, and don’t rush into development or lock into a design too soon. There is some amount of art UX design, so don’t assume that tools can do it for you. Keep the basic principles in mind: useful, usable and desirable.
Trust no one: test your designs. It doesn’t matter how many experts review the designs, there is no better review of some features than testing the UX with a range of intended users. Remember that this is not just about usability, it’s also about usefulness and desirability.
Inject UX design into your software development life cycle. Everyone on the team should understand why UX design is important, and be incented to help create great UX. UX design should be part of your development process, and requires someone on the team to own the UX design efforts. You still need to use the same techniques as discussed in the other best practices, not just do the design in isolation from the users, but having it integrated into the development team will improve the overall software design.

He finished with the ideas that your development efforts are essentially wasted if the user experience isn’t done right, but it doesn’t have to add a lot of time or money to your project. Good UX design is the mark of a great application development team.

Can packaged applications ever be Lean? #BTF09

Chip Gliedman, George Lawrie and John Rymer participated in a panel on packaged applications and Lean.

Rymer argued that packaged apps can never be Lean, since most are locked down, closed engines where the vendor controls the architecture, they’re expensive and difficult to upgrade, they use more functions than customers use, they provide a single general UI for all user personas, and each upgrade includes more crap that you don’t need. I tend to be on his side in this argument about some types of appls (as you might guess about someone who used to write code for a living), although I’m also a fan of buy over build because of that elusive promise of a lower TCO.

Gliedman argued the opposite side, pointing out that you just can’t build the level of functionality that a packaged application provides, and there can be data and integration issues once you abandon the wisdom of a single monolithic system that holds all your data and rules. I tend to agree with respect to functionality, such as process modeling: you really don’t want to build your own graphical process modeler, and the alternative is hacking your own process together using naked BPEL or some table-driven kludge. Custom coding also does not guarantee any sort of flexibility, since many changes may require significant development projects (if you write bad code, that is), rather than a package app that may be more configurable.

It’s never a 100% choice between packaged apps and custom development, however: you will always have some of each, and the key is finding the optimal mix. Lean packaged apps tend to be very fit-to-purpose, but that means that they become more like components or services than apps: I think that the key may be to look at composing apps from these Lean components rather than building Lean from scratch. Of course, that’s just service-oriented architecture, albeit with REST interfaces to SaaS services rather than SOAP interfaces to internal systems.

There are cases where Lean apps are completely sufficient for purpose, and we’re seeing a lot of that in the consumer Web 2.0 space. Consider Gmail as an alternative to an Exchange server (regardless of whether you use Outlook as a desktop client, which you can do with either): less functionality, but for most of us, it’s completely sufficient, and no footprint within an organization. SaaS, however, doesn’t not necessarily mean Lean. Also, there are a lot of Lean principles that can be applied to packaged application deployment, even if the app itself isn’t all that Lean: favoring modular applications; using open source; and using standards-based apps that fit into your architecture. Don’t build everything, just the things that provide your competitive differentiation where you can’t really do what you need in a packaged apps; for those things where you are doing the same all every other company, suck it up and consider a packaged app, even if it’s bulky.

Clearly, Gliedman is either insane or a secret plant from [insert large enterprise vendor name here], and Rymer is an incurable coder who probably has a ponytail tucked into his shirt collar. 🙂 Nonetheless, an entertaining discussion.

How Can Lean Software Enable You To Better Serve The Business? #BTF09

John Rymer and Dave West presented a breakout session in the application development track on how Lean software development practices can be applied in your business. This obviously had a big focus on Agile, and how it can be used within large organizations. Unlike what some people think, Agile isn’t cowboy coding: it is quite disciplined, but it is optimized for delivering the right thing (from a business standpoint) in the minimal time. It’s all based on four principles: deliver the right product, provide hard value, simplify the platform, and allow efficient evolution. An optimal strategy depends on all four of those elements, but Agile projects may deliver on two or three of them, proving the value of Agile before a full Agile strategy is in use.

In order to apply these principles across your entire application development portfolio, you need a strategy that addresses these elements, and provides some way to measure the impact of such a strategy. Delivering the right product requires a focus on people and talent, and the industrial concepts of mass customization rather than mass production; providing hard value requires linking your development process to value streams with their focus on investment return; simplifying the platform requires a focus on tools and technology; and allowing efficient evolution requires optimizing work processes both within development teams and across the organization. I especially liked their chart comparing today’s practices in tools and technologies against Lean practices:

Today’s practices	Lean practices
Install for today and tomorrow	Install for today, architect for tomorrow
Configure a general UI for many users	Design for people in their work roles
Adopt integrated suites	Adopt narrow-purpose modules and services
No component substitution is allowed	Component substitution is allowed
Architectural evolution is slow by design	Architectural evolution is constant by design

There are ways to bring Agile into an organization, even when budgets are flat and there is the perception that legacy systems just can’t be replaced without yet another huge project expense. Likely, your developers are already practicing some Agile methods already, and you could easily gain permission to prove these out in non-critical systems development.

Good session, with a high-speed tag team between Rymer and West. Unfortunately, the logistics aren’t quite as good as the general sessions: too-small meeting rooms requiring elevator access from the main conference area, no tables and no wifi coverage (at least in the room that I was in at this time).