Build your social network before you get laid off

I know, that’s completely obvious advice, right? Wrong.

Yesterday, I received an email from a friend who works in telecommunications sales with the subject line “Networking”, informing her list of contacts (I assume; at least she was polite enough to BCC us all) that she had been laid off and was looking for work, and listing her qualifications. I immediately emailed back to ask if she had a profile on LinkedIn or any other sort of online resume that I could look at to see if I knew of anything that might fit, and she responded “What is LinkedIn? Is it similar to Facebook?”. Needless to say, she’s not on either of those two very popular social networking sites.

That prompted me to do my quarterly LinkedIn maintenance: import the email addresses from my contact list, see who’s on LinkedIn that I’m not already connected to (LinkedIn shows you if a person has a profile if you enter their email address), and connect to them — if you just received a LinkedIn invitation from me, that’s why. What amazed me in doing that exercise was how many of my business contacts don’t have a LinkedIn profile, or at least don’t have one linked to their business email address. Do they think that they can never lose their job, or are they just not convinced of the power of online social networks? Both are dangerous opinions to hold in today’s economic climate.

Here’s the reasons that I typically hear for why someone (including my recently laid off friend) is not on a social network:

It’s an invasion of privacy

On any social network, you can reveal as much or as little information about yourself as you’re comfortable with — the only one invading your privacy is yourself, if you choose to do so. On a professional site like LinkedIn, it’s best to reveal everything possible about your work experience, since this acts as an online resume. On Facebook, since the focus is more on personal information, it’s easier to add things that you might regret later; keep in mind that employers, co-workers and business associates might be looking at that profile, and you should manage the content that you put there with that in mind.

Many people fear that their employer will consider their LinkedIn profile as an indication that they’re looking for work, but that’s not necessarily true: you can set your profile to say that you’re not interested in job offers, but just in business networking. Your employer may actually like the fact that you’re being proactive about networking in business, especially if you’re in an outward-facing role.

It takes too much time

The initial setup of a social network can take some time, depending on how you go about it. On LinkedIn, I initially set up my profile by copying and pasting from my resume, then imported my email contact list and checked to see who else was online. This prompted me to clean up my resume and my contact list, two badly-needed activities which took more time than what I spent on LinkedIn itself. Now, I get a weekly update email from LinkedIn with my contacts’ changed information, and I do an email sweep on a regular basis to check for new contacts. If I think of it, I also check for people online right after I meet them for the first time and make the connection then. I list my larger contracts on there as well (once completed), so I add items to my “job” listing once or twice a year. Ongoing time requirement is a couple of hours every couple of months.

Facebook can be a completely different animal, since it encourages you to spend a lot of time on the site. I don’t. I have automated feeds from my Flickr, del.icio.us and blog posts into my Facebook updates, and use a couple of third-party applications to link in my Slideshare presentations and other material, all without me having to visit Facebook. I go there every day or two for a few minutes to check for friends’ upcoming birthdays and scroll through recent feed items, but I miss a lot of the river of information in the feed.

I don’t believe that it will bring value to me

In the case of LinkedIn, it won’t bring value unless you commit to making it a part of your business networking. Not surprisingly, you get out of it what you put into it: if you don’t update your profile and don’t connect to people when you meet them, then your information is not going to be very interesting to anyone. On the other hand, if you keep your profile up to date and complete, recruiters can find you when you’re looking for work, and your contacts will see your change in job status (as in “working for XXX” to “looking for work”) which may prompt them to help you out. You can also send a message to your network of contacts about your job search, making it easy for them to pass it along to anyone who they might know through their network. If you’re not on there or don’t update regularly, they’ll never know.

Even though I’m not looking for a job (having worked for someone else a total of 16 months in the past 21 years, I’m probably unemployable 🙂 ), LinkedIn provides value in keeping up with my business contacts as they move around, and occasionally brings new business my way.

I typically don’t proselytize social networks to those who aren’t already on them, but as my friends start to get hit by job cuts, I feel like they should know what they’re missing. If you know someone who isn’t on LinkedIn and should be, send them a link to this post to make it easy. I’m much more of an ant than a grasshopper, and like to put safety measures in place before I need them. Building your network after you get laid off is a lot tougher than doing it now, especially if you have a mortgage payment due at the end of the month.

You have to focus on vendors even if they are narcissistic or whiny

This post by analyst relations consultant Carter Lusher, entitled You have to focus on influential analysts even if they are negative or unpleasant, totally cracked me up. There are lots of analysts with attitude, but there are also lots of vendors out there who could use some lessons from Miss Manners: in dealing with vendors, I’ve had accusations of bias, suggestions for blog post topics that come straight from the vendor’s press releases, requests to sign a non-disclosure agreement before talking about something that they want me to write about, whiny complaints when I write about another vendor instead of them, and arguments from (always large) vendors why I should pay my own expenses to attend — and blog about — their conference.

These tend to be outliers; most of the people who I deal with at vendors are professional and reasonable, and don’t treat me like the hired help (which is good, because they’re not paying me anything) or like the enemy. Having to occasionally deal with negative and unpleasant people is just part of the job for most of us; for an analyst relations specialist to pretend that all of those negative and unpleasant people are on the analyst side of the vendor-analyst relationship is disingenuous.

SAP BPM 2008: Business Rules Management

I was up bright and early today to hear Soum Chatterjee from SAP Labs give an introduction to their business rules product, the recently-acquired Yasu (which Chatterjee claims stands for Yet Another Start-Up). I’ve had a bit of a look at it in the context of the NetWeaver BPM demos that I’ve had, but wanted to hear about their roadmap for the product.

He started with some very fundamental information on business rules, and made an interesting comment (considering who writes his paycheck): maybe embedding rules in the code of systems like SAP’s ERP was not a great idea. Of course, neither was having rules embedded in database triggers or non-automated methods such as documenting them in procedures guides or just having them in people’s heads. In these cases, we might see lack of flexibility, lack of visibility and lack of enforcement/standardization as well as having the business rules scattered around the organization where they can’t be properly managed. The solution, of course, is SAP NetWeaver BRM 🙂  Consider that the audience is mostly SAP customers who are very used to the idea of business rules embedded within their ERP code, some of these ideas are pretty radical, but he does a good job of laying out the value proposition of business rules, not just a product overview. He put it in the context of BPM, where the ability to change the rules within processes provides maximum agility.

From a rules product standpoint, they have a suite including:

  • A composer for modeling rules, in an Eclipse-based environment that can be used by a business analyst. It uses a natural language-like representation of the rules, and provides conflict resolution and other up-front analysis of the rules being modeled. Rules can be represented as a decision table, classic if-the-else code, or as a graphical rule flow (which is a sort of decision tree). I’ve also seen this integrated into the process modeling environment in their BPM product.
  • A rules manager for deploying and managing rules.
  • A rules engine to execute the rules. Rules can be consumed as web services (and therefore by their BPM or any other composite application modeling environment) and ABAP business applications.
  • A repository for storing the rules assets.
  • A rules analyzer for optimization (not released yet).

They’ve focused on fast methods of testing and refining rules, particularly by a business analyst. They also have a lot of change management and governance built in.

He covered how BRM and BPM will work together:

  • Complex rule-based decisions (pricing, credit decisions, etc.)
  • Responsibility determination (rule-based task assignment)
  • Recognition of business events
  • Routing rules
  • Parameter thresholds and tolerance (constraints)

Rules can be modeled in the rules composer or in the process composer. He showed us a (canned) demo of the rules composer that would have been a lot more compelling if he had narrated it in a bit more detail: I was sitting at the front of the room so could see the screen, but I’m sure that those at the back of the room couldn’t read it and there wasn’t enough narration to follow along with what was happening in the screen playback. Eight minutes into the video (only halfway!), we move from code-based rules to decision tables, which is a bit more interesting from a demo standpoint, but I really doubt if anyone who didn’t already know something about rules modeling would have gained a lot of information from watching this. It also made the composer look a lot more difficult that it actually is, as evidenced from an audience question about whether they expected business users to use this (in a disbelieving voice).

He finished up with the product roadmap:

  • This year, they’ve delivered the business rules composition and execution environment, available for invocation from the various SAP product lines, and integrated with the BPM composition environment.
  • In 2009, there will be more complex decision sequences, integrated support for rule refinement and validation, end-to-end change management, and improved business user participation and collaboration in rules authoring and change management.
  • In 2010, the plan (which of course can change) is to have real-time rule-based responses to business events, advanced rules analysis capabilities with alignment to business goals, and better modeling capabilities for business analysts.

Mobile experiments

I’ve been running a mobile device experiment for the past six weeks: since my Blackberry three-year contract ran out, I switched to using a standard mobile phone (with a greatly reduced monthly fee) plus an iPod Touch. I was lucky enough to score a free iPod Touch — BEA’s last marketing blowout at their conference before being absorbed by Oracle was to give one to every attendee — so this experiment costs me nothing to try out. Those who know me were aghast at seeing me without the trusty Blackberry at my side, where it has been for the past eight years, but I wanted to try out this combo for a couple of reasons.

First, there are so many new devices out lately and a number of new ones on the rise, that I want to reassess my Blackberry bigotry. Specifically, I’m thinking about switching to an iPhone and need to be sure that the non-phone functionality of the iPhone works for me (for those of you unfamiliar with the iPod Touch, is pretty much exactly like an iPhone except no phone, no camera, and no paid plan required from your mobile carrier since it only connects via wifi).

Second, Canada is about to see a rash of new entrants into the mobile carrier space in early spring of 2009, and I didn’t want to be locked into another contract with Rogers when those options became available. That means that I’ll likely stick with this configuration until I know what the new offerings will be: data plans have certainly come down in price here, but I’m also looking for a carrier that will provide me with better-priced US roaming, which is currently about $2/minute with Rogers.

Results so far:

Voice: I continue to use almost none of my voice minutes on the mobile phone, except for a couple of calls when I’m traveling. I’m just not big on talking on the phone.

Texting: I still do some text messaging from my regular mobile phone, but using a standard phone keyboard — even with predictive typing — is so much slower than the Blackberry that I’ve reduced that quite a bit.

Connectivity: Since the iPod Touch connects to any wifi that’s around, I use it around my home/office, at conferences where there’s wifi, and now in every Starbucks in Toronto where I can use my Bell Internet account (or a Starbucks card) to login to the Bell hotspot. A number of airports also have free wifi, allowing me to step off the plane, search for wifi, connect and check my email without breaking stride. Although I don’t have the uninterrupted service that I enjoyed with the Blackberry (which would, of course, be replicated on a full iPhone), I am finding that this is sufficient for most of my needs.

Typing: The touch keyboard on the iPod Touch (same as the iPhone) sucks when compared to the Blackberry: I can touch-type with my thumbs on a Blackberry, making it a very real email composition platform; on the iPod, I’m much more likely to send only a brief reply, if anything at all, and wait to get to my laptop before sending any substantial messages.

Reading email: The email reading experience is great on the iPod, certainly much better than the older Blackberry that I had. I use both Gmail and Google Apps mail, and the IMAP client works well with both, meaning that everything that I do on the iPod is reflected in my email online, and therefore in my desktop IMAP client. [The IMAP client on the Blackberry was always slow and a bit flaky for me, meaning that I used to do POP email there, then have to replicate what I did back on my desktop since I used the Blackberry Internet service, not a corporate server. Obviously, if you’re on a corporate Blackberry server, that experience will differ.]

Surfing: Amazingly good on the small screen, since zooming and rotating are a breeze. No Flash support, which is a bit of a hassle on some sites, but otherwise fairly widespread support. Many sites (including this blog) offer an iPhone-optimized version of their site that auto-detects that you’re on the platform and switches over.

Feed reading: Excellent with Google Reader; since I use Google Reader from my laptop as well, that means that everything read anywhere stays synced up.

Applications: I never found a lot of Blackberry applications that really worked for me, and with no central clearinghouse for them, they were hard to find. The iPod Touch, on the other hand, can run most of the applications available for the iPhone, allowing me to test out the full experience. No VOIP calling, of course, but plenty of useful stuff:

  • Red Rocket, one of only two paid applications that I use, which has all of the Toronto transit maps, routes and schedules. Very handy when I’m waiting at a streetcar stop wondering whether to wait for the next car or hail a taxi.
  • SplashID, the other paid app, which holds confidential information such as credit card numbers and PINs in a secure encrypted format.
  • Files lite, the free (but completely adequate) version of a file transfer/storage application that allows me to copy files from my PC to the iPod in a variety of formats: PDF, Word, PowerPoint, etc. More than storage, I can actually view the files on the iPod, making this a great place for a quick reference library.
  • Instapaper (again, the free version), which allows me to bookmark web pages either on the iPod or my PC, then sync them up to the iPod for offline viewing. Good if I want to review something on a plane or when I’m away from wifi access, but don’t want to print it. The rendering of the page isn’t perfect, but everything that I’ve tried is completely readable.
  • Stanza e-book reader, with a large selection of freely downloadable books, and a desktop application so that you can covert your own files into e-book format for transferring to and reading on the iPod. The reader is quite usable: the text is large enough, and although there’s not a lot of text on each page, flipping to the next page is so fast that it’s a pretty seamless experience.

Battery life: Not great, but then I’m using it for a lot of internet access so hard to compare with the Blackberry where I did less surfing since it wasn’t required for reading email. With a Blackberry, you have the option of carrying an extra charged battery and swapping it out, and it also holds a charge for several days if you’re not talking much.

In summary, I find the phone/iPod combo pretty useful, especially considering that most of my travel is done for the year so I’ll be around my office (where there’s wifi) or at clients in downtown Toronto (where there’s Starbucks wifi on every street corner); I can certainly last out for a few months with this combo to break the Crackberry addiction and consider some alternatives. The keyboard is certainly a huge deterrent to moving to the iPhone (if it weren’t, I would have been tempted to switch already), as well as the battery life issue.

Innovation World: The Woz

We had a brief address by Joseph Lagioia, SVP and head of consulting for Satyam (a big partner of Software AG, and winner of this year’s partner innovation award), then he joined a panel discussion along with winners of the Software AG customer innovation awards: Jim Kern of Morgan Stanley, Robert Rennie of Florida Community College, and Bruce Beeco of Cox Communications.

Steve Wozniak at Software AG conferenceThe real draw here at this morning’s keynote, however, is Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple. He spoke about how he got started in technology and innovation, from high school days where he designed his first minicomputers on paper but couldn’t afford the parts, to college where he had his first opportunity for some serious computing power.

He described meeting Steve Jobs and how they became best friends with a common love of new technology, and some of the differences between the two: Wozniak was a grounded, practical engineer working at HP, and Jobs was skipping class at college and dreaming new ideas. While Jobs was up in Oregon at college, Wozniak saw a Pong game for the first time, then built his own version using his TV at home; Jobs saw that and took a job at Atari, then pulled Wozniak on a crazy project to build the Breakout game in 4 days with 45 chips.

Wozniak wanted to be an engineer for life and build stuff; his ideas came from exposure to a crazy mix of new technologies, like the Pong game and ARPAnet. Jobs was the corporate builder, recognizing the monetary value and finding market for what Wozniak was building. As Wozniak kept building and eventually created a keyboard-driven microcomputer, he started to see the impact that programmers would have, and the two of them came to the idea of a pre-made home computer that used a keyboard instead of switches, and hooked up to a TV as a monitor, allowing hobby developers to get started: the Apple I. Wozniak designed the Apple II shortly after that, then made the leap and quit his job at HP to create Apple with Jobs. No surprise, Wozniak did the engineering, making the products work well, and Jobs did the design, making the products look good. They went off to their first Computer Electronics Show in Vegas, where they met the connections that led them to Xerox PARC where they saw a graphical user interface for the first time: although a lot of great engineering was already in the Apple products, this was the thing that set them apart in the long run. Now, Apple is known for two things — the beauty of the user interface, and the beauty of the product design — while all the great engineering is the silent partner that drives it all.

We all know a lot of this story, but it’s completely inspiring to hear it from Wozniak directly: the things that he observed around him that sparked ideas, and his drive to make these ideas into reality. Completely inspiring.

Innovation World: Susan Ganeshan on webMethods product roadmap

Susan Ganeshan, Software AG’s SVP of product management/marketing, gave a well-attended breakout session on the webMethods suite roadmap and vision. I had a bit of a preview at a breakfast meeting this morning with Mike Lees, director of BPM product marketing, and hope to get a demo of the new major release before too much longer.

Ganeshan started with a quick review of what they’ve released this year — which likely most of the customers in the audience have not yet implemented — that adds quite a bit of functionality. From her presentation, the major additions/improvements in 7.1 were:

  • BPM Suite
  • Eclipse Tools
  • Human Workflow
  • WYSIWYG App Design
  • Process Analytics
  • SOA Registry
  • Introduction of ESB
  • Standards: WS-I, SOAP, HTTP, JMS, etc
  • Role Based Partner Admin & Monitoring

7.1.2, released in September, fixed a large number of bugs in 7.1, plus added more functionality:

  • Usability
  • Performance
  • Stability
  • Bi-directional
  • XPDL

In spite of the insistence yesterday that they’re a middleware vendor, and their strength in the integration-centric BPM sector, they’re adding more capabilities in the human-centric BPM side. I’m not sure if that will be enough to push them up in the Gartner BPM magic quadrant (which considers integration-centric and human-centric vendors together), or to get them onto move them up in the Forrester human-centric BPM wave, but it’s interesting to note that they’ve come from essentially no human-facing BPM a couple of years ago to at least being a blip on the radar now.

They also have a new offering, webMethods Insight, for discovering and managing services and their availability, plus the CentraSite ActiveSOA release that was discussed yesterday; CentraSite ActiveSOA will able to federate services repositories as well as allowing you to set rules-based policies around service provisioning. She announced another upcoming product, webMethods Mediator, for service mediation functionality without deploying a dedicated server to mediation.

webMethods Designer 7.2 has moved the developer environment into Eclipse (to be released next month), which feeds into the Eclipse-based environment that will be seen in webMethods 8, to be released in 2009. webMethods 8 will provide:

  • Customizable, extensible eclipse-based development environment including a set of tools: unified asset design, visual flow editor, WSD editor, document editor, visual mapping, JMS trigger editor, BPEL editor (through a partnership with another, unnamed company), and built-in debugging inherent to the Eclipse environment. By the way, she said (explicitly for attribution): “BPEL is misnamed. It’s not a business process execution language, it’s a service execution language”.
  • In the ESB layer:
    • ESB and integration server with integrated BPEL engine, XML security services, XML schema enhancements, single sign-on, WmPublic enhancements, Subversion VCS support
    • Broker and JMS enhancements including policy-based broker clustering, security enhancement, and JDNI support.
    • BPEL 1.1/2.0 support, plus a number of other new standards support such as SAML 1.1 and SOAP over JMS.
    • For B2B trading networks, data archival management and visibility, dashboards and reporting via Cognos integration, and managed file transfer via another partnership.
    • EDI enhancements including additional adapters such as the previously discussed Salesforce.com adapter
  • In the BPM layer:
    • webMethods Align, a browser-based collaborative modeling tool for process discovery and design: like Lombardi’s Blueprint, but (possibly) inside the firewall. Within Align, you can define the goals of the process, then drag and drop steps directly in a  BPMN-like process map view. More information can be added to each step to, as she says, “allow the business analyst to tell IT what needs to be done here”. She stated that this will have a single shared process model with the executable version, so no round-tripping considerations. You can invite other people to collaborate, which gives you a shared whiteboard sort of capability where you can all work on the process at the same time. Early days for this product; they don’t about pricing, and may consider providing it as a hosted service (although that may cause an issue with a shared model). My advice: give it away for free, since charging for it won’t drive a significant amount of revenue anyway, but a free version will drive adoption across enterprises.
    • Forms-driven processes using MS Infopath or Adobe Forms, which will (IMO) strengthen their human-centric offering
    • Optimization and simulation, including the use of real-time data.
    • User-generated mashups (which she referred to as “user derived applications), allowing a user to create and customize a portal workspace, including interaction between components, then save and share that workspace.
    • Ad hoc process collaboration, allowing a user to step outside the structured process for review or escalation while still working the process in an audited environment.
    • Monitoring, reporting and analytics through Cognos integration.
  • Across the webMethods suite, they’ve improved installation and maintenance.

I’m excited to see the new BPMS release, especially Align, in the coming months.

They have a site for submitting product ideas, Brainstorm, which is community-driven: you can actually vote on the ideas that other people submit. Right now, you need a registered login, but they will soon allow anonymous submissions.

Innovation World: Dan Crowe of AutoTrader.com

Dan Crowe, chief product officer of AutoTrader.com, gave the final keynote of the morning on how they’re using Software AG to bring together business and IT.

As an online business, technology is obviously a big part of their business. In case you don’t know who AutoTrader is, they’re an online classified ad site for vehicles, primarily in the US, competing with other auto sites but also with traditional paper media. Not only do individuals offer their cars for sale here, but auto dealers use it as an advertising platform for much higher volumes of used vehicles for sale. Their site has a lot of stickiness: on average, a customer in the key 18-34 demographic will spend 65 minutes on their site, more than any of their competitors, in part due to the variety of tools and information available in addition to the cars for sale.

Their key strategic IT objectives are to innovate faster than their competitors, extend their platform presence in the auto remarketing value chain, leverage data to demonstrate value, workflow-enable their back office systems, and build a scalable multi-business platform for future growth. They’ve implemented BPM in several areas of their business, with the next target being the order-to-cash process, and have implemented SOA and master data management. They’re currently in a transition from very siloed systems to a more mature, fully-integrated value chain in order to improve customer service, streamline their operations, improve collaboration between IT and business, and increasing competitive differentiation in order to keep their business lead.

They’re branching out into new car advertising, allowing customers to compare the deals on equivalent new cars at different dealerships in their area; you still want to go out and test-drive it first, but they want to be the place where the potential buyers come to find where to go in order to kick the best tires.

Innovation World: Day 1 keynote

Karl-Heinz Streibich gave the opening keynote; some of the same messages as his address at the media and analyst forum yesterday, plus some messaging about how SOA is a paradigm shift, and the Net generation entering the workforce is a strong driver for modernization and integration. He made the point that process innovation outranks product innovation, and how BPM is the future: companies who apply process management are more agile (hence more competitive) and have more optimized processes (hence are more efficient).

He finished up by referring to their new process frameworks — vertical templates including process models, user interfaces, business rules and KPI definitions for building solutions quickly — but didn’t elaborate; however, they issued a press release today discussing them in more detail. Software AG is providing the following process frameworks:

  • Order-to-Cash
  • Procure-to-Pay
  • Payments
  • Underwriting
  • Product Recall
  • New Product Introduction
  • Monthly/Quarterly Closing
  • Employee On-boarding

In addition, their partners are providing frameworks for automotive claims management, electronic check processing, claims management, field services jeopardy management, invoice dispute management, and telecommunications service provisioning.

We also heard from Dr. Peter Kürpick, with much the same message as he delivered yesterday at the analyst forum, although I think that the animated graphics in his slides were nicer today, especially the one showing a process orchestrated across several organizations participating in the end-to-end supply chain. He talked about some of their customers and how they’re improving their business processes using SOA and BPM.

I believe that he had an error in one of his slides, however: in showing how Software AG is a leader in several categories of the analyst reports, and their competitors are not, he showed that they’re a leader in Forrester’s human-centric wave but TIBCO is not. I’m looking at the the wave report right now, and TIBCO actually places higher in the leader category than Software AG. I may have mis-read the slide, it went by quickly and I didn’t have a chance to snap a photo.

He finished up highlighting some of the things coming out of their research lab that will be seen at the demo jam competition today, including BAM capabilities that can be viewed on the iPhone.