Let’s all play nice, now

Amazing what happens when people lose sight of the need for civility in blog comments, just as they might exhibit in a face-to-face business conversation.

For posts on someone else’s blog where I add a comment, or where I’m interested in following the discussion, I tag it in co.mments.com and subscribe to it in my feed reader — that means that I might see two versions of a comment if it is edited by the original author (if the site allows commenters to edit their comments). Imagine my surprise at seeing the following comment added sometime last night on a long conversation thread that had been very professional up to that point:

Unfortunately this post is based on a lack of understanding of the real requirements of [deleted] applications. I’ve posted a clarification as a response to curtail this wayward discussion:

[URL deleted]

Hope this helps clarify.

I was going to post a comment to ask the commenter (in a nice professional way) if he knew that he sounded like an arrogant jerk, but within a few hours, he had edited the comment to read:

I’ve posted a clarification:

[URL deleted]

Hope this helps clarify.

For those of you who tend to write off-the-cuff nasty comments on blog posts, keep in mind that the internet remembers everything, even if you change it. It also knows your IP address, so using a fake name doesn’t help much.

Source obfuscated to protect both the innocent and the guilty.

BPM Milan: Formal Methods and demos

There were two other papers presented in the Formal Methods section — Covering Places and Transitions in Open Nets by Christian Stahl and Karsten Wolf, and Correcting Deadlocking Service Choreographies Using a Simulation-Based Graph Edit Distance by Niels Lohmann — but we were hip-deep in mathematical notation, graph theory, automata sets and Boolean forumlae (who decided to put this section at the end of the day?), and I lost the will to blog.

We’re moving off to a demo session to close the day, which will include:

  • Business Transformation Workbench: A Practitioner’s Tool for Business Transformation, by Juhnyoung Lee, Rama Akkiraju, Chun Hua Tian, Shun Jiang, Sivaprashanth Danturthy, and Ponn Sundhararajan
  • Oryx – An Open Modeling Platform for the BPM Community, by Gero Decker, Hagen Overdick and Mathias Weske
  • COREPROSim: A Tool for Modeling, Simulating and Adapting Data-driven Process Structures, by Dominic Muuller, Manfred Reichert, Joachim Herbst, Detlef Koontges and Andreas
    Neubert
  • A Tool for Transforming BPMN to YAWL, Gero Decker, Remco Dijkman, Marlon Dumas and Luciano García-Bañuelos
  • BESERIAL: Behavioural Service Interface Analyser, by Ali Aiit-Bachir, Marlon Dumas and Marie-Christine Fauvet
  • Goal-Oriented Autonomic Business Process Modeling and Execution: Engineering Change Management Demonstration, by Dominic Greenwood

That’s it for blogging today; after the demos, I’ll be off to celebrate today’s real event, my birthday. And before you ask, I just turned 30 (in hexadecimal).

BPM Milan: Enterprise 2.0 in practice

Simone Happ from T-Systems Multimedia — the only other non-academic in the room — gave a presentation on Enterprise 2.0 initiatives that her company is seeing in practice. She started with some pretty general stuff on Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0, but moved on to some examples of how they are using wikis to manage/document customer requirements and report on project status, and how the immediacy of publication was important for both of those applications. She also covered some public examples of companies using Web 2.0 to interact with their customers, such as Dell’s Ideastorm, and sites that promote completely new business models by allowing anyone to publish their own ideas for co-monetization with the host company, such as SpreadShirt (or the US equivalent, Threadless) and MyMuesli.

I was expecting a few more concrete examples of Enterprise 2.0 within customer organizations (and maybe something about BPM, since this is a BPM conference); the presentation would have been appropriate as an intro to Enterprise 2.0 for a more general audience, but came off as a bit lightweight compared to the academic fare of the rest of the day.

The session ended with an interesting discussion on Enterprise 2.0, the issues with adoption and some of the success stories; nothing new here, but good to hear the opinions of the dozen or so in the room.

BPM Milan: Firm-hosted Online Communities

Sami Jantunen of Lappeenranta University of Technology presented a paper on Utilizing Firm-hosted Online Communities in Software Product Business: A Dimensional View, co-authored by Kari Smolander.

This is specifically related to online communities hosted by companies for business purposes, ranging from product development to business, and involving only internal resources or external and internal. These can include distributed/open source product development, product maintenance (including peer support), user community support, and brand building.

Issues in building an online community range from how to build a community that will attract users or other external participants, to how to create an online community for online product development. This involves research in a number of different areas: studies of the social aspects of community building, but also product management and software engineering for situations where the community will be contributing to product development.

They worked with three companies in looking at these online communities: Nokia, which covers the full range of objectives and stakeholders, SanomaWSOY (a media company), which is focused on the business objectives and the user community, and Tekla a software company), which is focused on collaborative product development.

They are creating an interactive research forum for supporting the development of firm-hosted online communities, providing some of their experiences but also a place for open discussion.

BPM Milan: Digital Identity

Ben Jennings of University College London presented a paper on Digital Identity and Reputation in the Context of a Bounded Social Ecosystem, co-authored by Anthony Finkelstein.

He started with a discussion about digital identity that reminded me briefly of Dick Hardt’s Identity 2.0 presentation: using himself as an example, showing how he appears in different contexts on the web, such as Flickr, Facebook and YouTube. We all have this same problem of the reconciliation of multiple digital identities: we all have to maintain multiple profiles and multiple social graphs on multiple social networks.

Within some sort of bounded social ecosystem — where we have common goals, such as within an enterprise — the digital identity concept changes: your identity is at least partially pre-created (e.g., through your local network credentials), but this isn’t enough in a large organization where everyone doesn’t know everyone personally and where there may be multiple systems that don’t share credentials. There are still issues of disambiguating and unifying identities between the systems in use within the bounded social context, especially if it’s not a closed enterprise: there must be some fairly complex pattern recognition even to match up email addresses, which can be specified in a number of different formats.

Once you’ve established digital identity, then you can start on the larger issue of trust and reputation; so far, the research has only reached the stage of automating the recognition of digital identity, but will be expanded to (for example) selecting the most appropriate person for a specific task in a process, based on their reputation as derived from their contributions to many other systems.

*Personality Not Included

I’ve just finished reading *Personality Not Included by social marketing guru Rohit Bhargava. I don’t know a lot about marketing, but I know what works and doesn’t work when companies try it on me, and I’m increasingly interested in the crossover between social media and marketing.

Bhargava examines the concept of personality as it applies to organizations: why it’s important for an organization — or often a brand produced by that organization — to have a personality at all, and how to use that personality to strengthen customer relationships. The first two chapters are essential reading for any organization that’s still stuck in old-school marketing: first, why being faceless used to work but doesn’t any more, and second, how social media is fundamentally changing how organizations communicate. Much of the rest of the book is some solid advice on how to create and foster the necessary brand personality, but so many companies are still stuck back in the “why should we do this?” phase that the first two chapters are going to be a major eye-opener for them. Also brilliant are the short “sellevator pitches” at the end of each chapter, summarizing the main message.

With the first half of the book covering the theory of brand personality, the second half digs into tools and techniques for making it happen. The book lists 10 major personality-focused marketing techniques — curiosity, karmic, participation, un-whatever, sensory, antimarketer, fallibility, insider, incidental, and useful — then describes each in terms of what it is, why it works, when you should use it, who’s already doing it, and step-by-step instructions. There’s also guides for finding the accidental spokespeople inside or outside your organization, empowering your employees, creating a successful company blog, and hiring employees with personality.

If I can make one complaint about *Personality Not Included, it’s the overwhelming number of gratuitous analogies used in the writing, to the point where I started finding it annoying. I’m not talking about relevant examples, I’m talking about analogies, like the one where he spends half a page talking about Disney’s movie High School Musical — which has nothing to do with anything else in the book — in order to have us understand the concept of being pressured into sticking with the status quo. By the time that I read a number of these, it started to feel like filler. This is purely an issue of style, not content, and you may experience it differently.

Disclosure: this book was provided to me for free by the publisher, McGraw Hill, through a great program called Mini Book Expo for Bloggers, which allows bloggers to claim a book in order to receive a review copy, in exchange for writing a public review of the book. All books can be shipped for free to bloggers within Canada, and some now can be shipped to the US.

SAP SME Day: Business ByDesign deep dive

Up next is a deep dive on Business ByDesign, the SaaS offering for SMEs. The deep dives so far have been kind of shallow, and mostly centered on sales, marketing, pricing and packaging of the products rather than much to do with functionality. We’re also running 45 minutes late, and seem to be getting later with each session.

This session is particularly interesting because of the analogy to SaaS BPM: these are mission-critical business systems, responsible for the day-to-day business processes, and there’s some significant issues with customer acceptance of their core processes existing in the cloud.

I hadn’t seen Business ByDesign before — somehow I missed it at SAPPHIRE — so it was interesting to have Rainer Zinow, SVP SME Global Services, give us a demo.

The system is role based, so that functionality is exposed depending on the user’s role. Apparently, there’s some basic document management, but we didn’t see that.

The system is built on an in-memory architecture for both transactions and analytics, using a search engine rather than a database (similar to some ideas that I saw at FASTforward); transactions cause database writes, but client applications are always served from memory.

There are some pretty complete analytics available, where you can drill down into specific items of interest, and even link directly back to the transaction on the ERP side, something that you couldn’t easily do with non-integrated BI.

There’s some lightweight workflow, really just manual routing to a person’s inbox that also allows a work item to be forwarded to someone else.

One of the most interesting parts was exposed when he demonstrated saving the online reports to Excel: the Excel version can be converted to contain formulas that point back to the original data source, which are actually pointers to web services. The reporting implication is that you can save the Excel report, then come back later and update it with point-in-time data simply by refreshing the data source; even better is that this set of web services is available to any environment, not just Excel, allowing you to build mashups or other applications that access the core transactional data.

This sort of hybrid model for SaaS is nice, where you can do everything in the on-demand environment, but also be able to download some desktop tools or build mashups that link directly to the online data.

SAP SME Day: Prasad Akella with Business All-in-One deep dive

I missed the late-morning sessions, but I’m back here for Prasad Akella, Senior Director of SAP Business All-in-One Solution Marketing.

We heard about some of the new integrations with All-in-One: just announced last week, the CRM 2007 product is now tightly integrated with the All-in-One functionality, providing marketing, sales and service components. Also, the Business Objects Edge Series integrates to provide analytics and visibility. Other than that, there’s not a lot here that interests me: as with this morning, most people in the audience seem to be a lot more interested in pricing, packaging and system configuration than I am; I’m guessing that some of them make their living helping clients to wade through this sort of information.

SAP SME Day: Jeff Stiles with portfolio update

Jeff Stiles is back to give us an update on the SME product portfolio, and there’s an interesting tie-in to yesterday’s message at the Business Objects day: the portfolio includes both business management and business intelligence, with a pretty strong emphasis on how BI adds value to SAP’s traditional business management.

He went through the entire SME portfolio:

  • Business One, their small business on-premise solution, sold only through channel partners.
  • Business ByDesign, their new on-demand service that provides a single end-to-end business solution, targeted at fast-growing midsize companies that don’t want to built a large IT infrastructure, and typically have less than 100 users. There are a number of pre-configured processes built in, intended to support common business processes without requiring extensive customization. Business ByDesign is available only in US, UK, Germany, France, China and India; the restriction in geography for a SaaS solution seems to indicate that this still requires a significant amount of effort at the customer location in order to sell and service the customer.
  • All-in One, for midsize companies that need a more customizable solution.
  • Analytics with Business Objects.

As you can likely tell by the volume of notes, we spent most of the session with audience questions and comments on Business ByDesign. The sessions this morning have been pretty basic, and I’ve learned way more about SAP sales channels than I ever wanted to know; hopefully we’ll get more detailed product information as the day goes on.

There’s an online tool to help figure out which SME tool best fits the customer requirements, based on five factors: the way you do business, your budget and timelines, your IT expertise and perferences, the way that your employees work, and your future growth plans.

SAP SME Day: Glenn Wada with business update

After an intro by Jeff Stiles, SVP SME Solution Marketing, Glenn Wada, GM US Strategic Growth Enterprises Group, gave us a business update on SAP’s small and medium enterprise (SME) efforts.

75% of SAP customers are SME, although only about 30% of software sales (>1B Euro). SAP defines SME is anything under $1B in revenue, regardless of which product that they’re using, then further stratify that into “small” (under $50-60M), “medium” (up to $300M) and “upper middle” ($300M-$1B). This latter “UME” band is served by the standard SAP direct sales channel, whereas customers below $300M in revenue are served by Wada’s group, which uses a hybrid direct-channel sales model. SAP owns about 30% of the SME market, and continues to grow this market share through their focus on high-growth verticals: high technology, renewable energy, oil & gas, life sciences, services, and retail.

Taking look at the product suite, the SME offerings are Business One, Business ByDesign and Business All-in-One (although keep in mind that some of the UME’s are likely using the SAP enterprise products since the SME distinction is made by revenue, not by product). SAP believes that they can continue to service a company as it grows by shifting them from one product to another — although I’m sure that the transition is anything but painless, if they’re a competent incumbent, they have a good chance of keeping customers as they out-grow the lower-end products.

There will be more detail on the SAP SME product portfolio throughout the day, but here’s a summary:

Business One

  • Single business application
  • 20k+ customers
  • Targeted at small businesses; these businesses are looking at moving to ByDesign or All-in-One by the time that they hit $50-60M in revenue

Business ByDesign

  • Complete, adaptable
  • On demand service
  • 150 customer engagements
  • New business model
  • Focus on 6 key markets
  • 5,500 registrations

Business All-in-One

  • Configurable and extensible
  • 12,300 customers
  • New release based on business process platform, including CRM

I’m a newbie to the SAP SME space (and don’t really know all that much about SAP’s enterprise products either, except as I bump up against them in some of my large clients), and I definitely feel like the least-informed person in the room.