WordPress upgrade complete

I’ve upgraded WordPress to version 2.5, and the Barthelme theme to version 4.5 (which is only compatible with WP2.5+). Let me know if you see any problems with the site.

One problem that I had with upgrading: I use widgets in my sidebar, including three text widgets for my feed block, my Google ads, and a hidden one at the end that includes my statistics counter. After upgrading, I went into the Widgets section, set a few parameters (there are some new options, such as being allowed to set a custom title on the Search widget) and saved the changes; this caused all the text widgets to become blank. They were still there, just empty. Luckily, I had seen this when upgrading another site earlier today, and had saved the contents of the widgets to paste back in. I deleted each of the text widgets and recreated them with the saved text that I had, and they seem to work fine now when I make edits to other widgets and re-save.

I’m having a bit of a problem posting from Windows Live Writer; I reset my credentials and tried a couple of times before I could publish this post successfully. Hopefully that’s a temporary glitch.

Experience!Tech closing keynote: Tom Kelley, IDEO

For the closing keynote, we’re back to the live video feed from the IDC conference in Boston to hear Tom Kelley of IDEO. He wrote The Art of Innovation, and is following it up with The Ten Faces of Innovation, which is also the title of his presentation today (alarmingly, scheduled for 1.25 hours at the end of the day).

Not surprisingly, he’s talking about innovation. In theory, everyone is in favour of innovation, but in practice, it falls into Covey’s quadrant #2: important but not urgent. This causes innovation to be put off repeatedly, until someone else starts taking your business because they’re out-innovating you. So even though it tends to live in quadrant #2, it can take on an urgency if you fail to attend to it.

Some thoughts:

  • The type of innovation required in today’s markets is to passionately pursue new ways to serve your customers.
  • Standing still will result in the death of a brand: to quote the Red Queen, “If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that.”

Samsung is using design and innovation to outpace Sony: the brand value of Samsung surpassed Sony in 2004 for the first time ever, primarily because Sony thought that their superior brand value would carry them without maintaining a high level of innovation (or increasing their level of innovation): they’re still innovators, just not as innovative as Samsung, and barely enough to keep their brand value from dropping further.

In his first book, he focused on the tools of innovation; in the second book, he focuses on the people side, or the roles and corporate culture required for innovation. He sees several roles that contribute (which are his ten faces of innovation):

  • The learning roles:
    • The anthropologist
    • The experimenter
    • The cross-pollinator
  • The organizing roles:
    • The hurdler
    • The collaborator
    • The director
  • The building roles:
    • The experience architect
    • The set designer
    • The caregiver
    • The storyteller

He then looked at two of those roles: the anthropologist and the experience architect (he actually allowed the audience in Boston to decide between him talking about the experimenter and the experience architect by throwing a little squishy ball that was provided at their seat).

The anthropologist goes into the field to observe people’s experiences with products in order to drive innovation of those products through empathic design. They have the ability to see things that have previously gone unobserved, and have a lot of “a-ha” moments of discovering innovative ideas and unsolved problems. Anthropologists are necessary because when you’re immersed in an environment, you can’t see either the problems or potential solutions. Kelley had a lot of great anecdotes on how anthropologists have improved product design.

The experience architect is focused on creating an amazing experience for each individual consumer of a product: not just creating a great product, but marketing it as such so that people will chose it over the competitor, even paying more or going out of their way to get it. Think Starbucks coffee or Westin’s Heavenly Bed, both of which have built a brand with a very loyal following. Companies are building in features that no one uses, but the key is to build something simple, looking at the entire customer experience to identify the best places to make their experience extraordinary.

I really enjoyed Kelley’s talk: very engaging and lots of great anecdotes about design, making the 1.25 hours speed by. Having been to a lot of conferences where the closing keynote is completely unrelated with anything to do with the conference content, it was great to hear a keynote that’s relevant as well as entertaining.

Experience!Tech Social Media panel

I’m in the panel on social media featuring Jay Goldman of Radiant Core, Jeremy Wright of B5 Media and Tomi Poutanen, former head of Yahoo Social Search, moderated by Jesse Hirsh.

Jeremy: social networks are broken. We have a huge amount of data that we can pivot around people who we know, but we should really be pivoting around what interests us.

Jay: there is a perception of social network fatigue amongst those of us who are early adopters, but the mainstream hasn’t even adopted them yet.

Tomi: “I haven’t deleted my Facebook account…yet”.

Twitter channel: if you have Facebook fatigue, you’re using it wrong.

Tomi: social networks tend to attract like-minded people when they’re starting up, but can grow to a size where they’re too general to have a cohesive community.

Jay: Pownce is like that summer blockbuster movie that you’re looking forward to, but it sucks when you finally try it.

Jesse: should social networks be purely for entertainment, or can they be used in the enterprise?

Jay: different social networks can solve different problems for different people. He goes to LinkedIn to connect to people professionally, but doesn’t hang out there.

Tomi: some social networking apps provide recommendations for purchases, which solves a problem for the consumer.

Jesse: how to balance the need for community with the vision to reach a broad audience?

Jeremy: our community wants to be social.

Tomi: Yahoo Answers failed because there was too much push put into it before the market/community was there that could really use it as it was intended. Facebook Beacon failed because they didn’t handle privacy properly. A more valuable linkage between Facebook and online retailers would be, for example, to see recommendations for a book made by my Facebook friends while on Amazon.

Jesse: is Facebook so far ahead that OpenSocial will never take off?

Jay: the same was said about MySpace when Facebook started, yet Facebook (in spite of still having less users that MySpace) is the social network that we talk about [at least in grownup company].

Jeremy: OpenSocial is like Java for social networks, in the “write once, run anywhere” sense. [Jay commented that this is the part of Java that is least successful since it doesn’t work in many cases]

Jesse: to what extent should privacy be central to any social networking strategy?

Jay: most people don’t know that there’s a privacy problem until someone tells them that there’s a problem; the reaction to Beacon was driven by those people who are closer to the tin foil hat end of the spectrum. However, eventually privacy does become an issue and must be respected at the risk of legal action or abandonment of the community.

Jay: LinkedIn is playing catchup with Facebook, although it offers the “degree of separation” measure that’s useful for business people. A lot of the types of connections that he used to have on LinkedIn now occur on Facebook. [I’ve seen some recent writings that indicate the business people are moving back to using LinkedIn for professional networking, and using Facebook for personal networking; this is much the way that I use the two social networks.]

Tomi: combining social networks into one isn’t necessarily the answer: do you want the same social network for everything, or be able to use different social networks to segment your communities? At Yahoo, they couldn’t agree how to merge social networks.

Jay: dataportability.org is trying to solve this problem. This is not a new battle. [In fact, this is really no different conceptually than the problem of islands of information within enterprises, where customer and other data is replicated many times over in multiple systems.]

Experience!Tech 08 Web 2.0 Panel

The afternoon began with two concurrent sessions — Enterprise 2.0 and Web 2.0 — and the Enterprise 2.0 session didn’t seem too enterprise-y, so I’m in the Web 2.0 session, featuring Jeff Fedor, formerly of Covarity, Leila Boujnane of Idée and David Crow of Microsoft, moderated by Stuart MacDonald of TripHarbour. After the introductions, Stuart wandered back to his laptop at the lectern and announced that he was watching the Twitter channel both for comments and questions.

This session is bouncing back and forth between the participants and subject matter a lot, so I’ll just list some of the interesting disconnected snippets of conversation, with my comments [like this]:

Leila: Web 2.0 has resulted in a great proliferation of data, much of it still in silos, driving the need for federated search (including image search such as provided by Idée).

David: the importance of the social graph (exposing your relationships online) in driving the new level of connectivity amongst people on the internet, but this capability is not being used within enterprises. Particular concern with how your stupid antics on Facebook will impact your ability to be hired.

Jeff: we all maintain different contexts of online life — work, home, etc. — but there is no good way to synchronize this. [This is driving all of the lifestreaming apps that we’re seeing today, like FreindFeed and OnaSwarm]

David: is Web 2.0 a set of technologies, a set of social behaviours, a conference run by O’Reilly? A company like Amazon, which started as an online bookseller has become a huge provider of cloud computing platform, moving from being a web-based business to a web services provider.

Leila: we still need to have business/transactions at the heart of whatever we’re doing in Web 2.0, regardless of how inexpensive cloud computing is.

Stuart: no significant business is created with mashups, it’s done in the old-fashioned way.

Jeff: mashups are for demos, not for building real business solutions.

[My opinion is that mashups, for the most part, are for prototyping and as the new generation of end-user computing, the latter of which is definitely real business solutions.]

Leila: scaling is irrelevant but important: you have to build it into your architecture but usually aren’t worried about it when you first get your product out the door.

Jeff: need to understand the business pain points before building a solution, or you’ll end up re-doing large parts of what you did.

Jeff: the bar has gone up in requirements for capital; it’s not good enough to have an idea, you must at least have a POC and some business validation.

David: the amount of capital required to start is smaller, since less investment in infrastructure due to cloud computing both for development and scalable production

David: there is value to reputation, both for individuals and businesses, but you don’t have to translate the social economy into the “real” economy

Leila: it’s not about just delivering something that does the job, the user experience can completely change how people use your product.

David: there are local events happening (e.g., TorCamp) that can directly impact the larger business experience. There is a stratification of the community and we need to bring the groups together.

[Question from the audience on how to bring together the stratified groups, particularly to include people who don’t live/work in the downtown core.]

David: we need to diversify and include more people in the *Camp groups and other social/business venues. The only requirement to belong is to be interesting/interested.

Leila: Canada is an amazing place to build something because there are few barriers, but we don’t mentor enough to help foster growth and share experiences. We have a responsibility to mentor others to help the business community grow.

David: we need to toughen up our entrepreneurs so that they can handle hearing “no” and can absorb criticisms appropriately.

David: the community is the framework; it’s not what you take out of the community, it’s what you put in.

Experience!Tech 08 morning sessions

I’m at Experience!Tech 2008 today at the MaRS Centre in Toronto — nice to be attending a conference in my hometown for a change. This morning’s sessions are being beamed to us live from the IDC Directions conference in Boston, so although we have the timeliness of seeing the speakers present, it’s not quite the same as seeing them in person. This afternoon will be in-person panels, which should be great.

Unfortunately, it appears that I missed the only good presentation of the morning, given by Grover Righter of iMobileInternet, but apparently the slides are online and a number of my peeps were Twittering about it. The rest of the morning’s presentations, all provided by IDC executives, sound like guys who are either scrambling to figure out what Web 2.0 is, think that they’re teaching Web 2.0 101 to some of the suits in the audience, or inadvertently loaded a 2006 slide deck. Honestly, if I hear one more middle-aged guy talk about how his kids shop/watch TV/live their lives on the internet (implying, of course, that he still has his executive assistant print out his email for him), I will not be responsible for my actions. Obviously, I’m living in Middle Age 2.0, because I’m sitting in the audience Twittering with the people who are sitting directly beside me, and creating this blog post.

We’re in the presentation by Scott Lundstrom of IDC that is causing a great deal of barely-suppressed laughter in the TorCamp group around me, as he very carefully explains Web 2.0 to us:

  • Blogging as a business (said very slowly, to make sure that we all understand that you can actually make money at this)
  • Schadenfreude as a business model (a view, in my opinion, held by those who are terrified of the transparency that social networking brings; in fact, he refers to “the bloggers” in a very “us versus them” way, as in “you don’t want to become a victim of the bloggers” — oh, wait, am I victimizing him with this post? 🙂 )

Last up for the morning is Frank Gens of IDC looking at enterprise IT in the “post-disruption” marketplace, listing what business execs want from their CIOs. The top five:

  • Need to speed up
  • Improve information access
  • More innovative ideas from IT
  • Improve IT support
  • Support modern tools (e.g. Web 2.0) — this was not previously surveyed, but made the top 5 in its first year
  • More high-value business services

He then moves on to what CIOs want from their suppliers:

  • Very competitive pricing
  • Support for industry standards — this has moved up significantly in the rankings
  • Understand my industry/business
  • Clear business case for offerings
  • Strong community of “solutions” partners

IDC is really big on surveys, so not surprising that the presentation is mostly made up of their survey results (no real innovative ideas here) plus a few case studies (such as P&G, who have done some very innovative things in R&D and business intelligence). Unfortunately, the conclusions that he draws are out of date and not revolutionary thinking at all: “services will be delivered over the web”, “Google will buy Salesforce.com or some other player in the SaaS space”, “the mobile web is important”, “big names will drive the market”, “disruption is the new status quo”.

“Eureka 2.0”? Oy vey.

I think that Scott Brooks summed it up best.

Column 2 turns 3

Zoli Erdos and Seth Godin have it right: when it comes to getting hired, you don’t need a resume, you need a blog. A blog that you’ve been writing for a while contains a much more complete picture of you, and forms more than just an online portfolio, it broadcasts your personal brand.

How appropriate to read those posts just as I hit my 3rd anniversary of writing Column 2. From a branding and informational perspective, it works for me: more than half of my new prospects and customers mention that they found me through my blog, or at least read it before contacting me as part of their due diligence. Furthermore, it’s considerably broadened my networking community, allowing me to have interesting conversations with — and sometimes even meet face-to-face — other bloggers who I read and respect.

I’ve done some form of online journaling since around 2000, and Column 2 started as my personal soapbox to talk about business process management and other business/technology subjects, gradually shifting to include Enterprise 2.0 topics. A few logistics and statistics:

  • I use WordPress as my blogging platform, and have also converted my minimalist corporate site to WordPress since it’s so easy to use to maintain a website.
  • I use Windows Live Writer for writing almost all of my posts, since I can write offline when there’s no connectivity, and can also easily cross-post to multiple blogs such as I did to the FASTforward blog a few weeks ago.
  • On average, I have more than 200 unique visitors per day visit my site (300+ page views), plus over 750 reading it via RSS feed.
  • I’ve written over 1200 posts, which have generated over 1000 comments: a low comment-to-post ratio, likely due to the large number of enterprise-type readers who may not be as comfortable publishing their opinions in response to my posts. In fact, sometimes someone will email me with a comment on a post and I have to encourage them to use the comments so that others can read their opinion.
  • My most-visited posts (which counts page views, therefore doesn’t include RSS readers) include a link to the Gartner 2007 BPM Magic Quadrant report, a short report on layoffs at Savvion and other vendors, a discussion on policies, procedures, processes and rules, and my link to the Forrester report on human-centric BPM for Microsoft platforms, in which I also listed the vendors in each of their four categories.
  • The posts for which I receive the most praise are my live-blogging at conferences. I started out by taking notes (on my laptop) at conferences for my own reference, then realized that others might benefit from what I see and hear, and started posting them to my blog. I finish each post during the presentation and post it immediately (wifi permitting), since I realize that there is no way I would ever go back later and finish up all those posts after a day of conference-going. That means that those certainly aren’t my best writing and don’t contain a great deal of analysis, but they’re timely and fairly detailed, providing a view of the conference presentations for those unable to attend.

I started out with Column 2 on my own website, then ebizQ invited me to post on their site, where I stayed for over a year. However, as an independent analyst/consultant, my own brand is critical, and when I found out that many people thought that I worked for ebizQ, I moved back to my own domain. That taught me a valuable lesson about blogging on someone else’s site and the impact on my personal brand, and I’ve turned down a number of offers since that time in favour of some very selective syndication (Intelligent Enterprise republishes a couple of my posts each month, and I cross-posted to the FASTforward blog while at their conference).

Blogging isn’t always easy, and it takes time, making it hard to stick at sometimes. However, the rewards — both professional and personal — have made it all worthwhile. Thanks for reading.

BPMN survey results

I really didn’t sit down this afternoon to write that last enormous post on the Great BPMN Debate, I remembered that Jan Recker (co-author on the research paper that sparked the debate, although not a participant in the debate) had sent me a pre-release copy of a paper that he authored, “BPMN Modeling — Who, Where, How and Why”, which summarizes the results of the survey that he conducted last year. One thought led to another, and before you know it, I’d written an essay on the most exciting thing to happen in BPM standards in ages.

Back to Jan’s paper however, which will be published this month on BPTrends. He surveyed 590 process modelers using BPMN from over 30 countries, and found some interesting results:

  • BPMN usage is split approximately in half over business and IT, which is a much higher percentage of IT users that I would have guessed. Business people are using it for process documentation, improvement, business analysis and stakeholder communications, whereas IT people are using it for process simulation, service analysis and workflow engineering.
  • As you might expect given that result, there’s a wide variation in the amount of BPMN used, ranging from just the core set for basic process models, to an extended set, to the full BPMN set. It would be interesting to see a correlation between this self-assessment and usage statistics based on the actual BPMN diagrams created, although as far as I know, the survey respondents didn’t submit any examples of their diagrams.
  • Not surprisingly, only 13.6% received any formal BPMN training, and I believe that this is the primary reason that most people are still using only a tiny subset of the BPMN constructs in order to create what are effectively old-fashioned flowcharts rather than full BPMN diagrams.

He finished with a list of the major obstacles that the respondents reported in using BPMN, or places that they would like to see improvement:

  • Support for specifying business rules, which echoes many of the other discussions that I’ve seen around having some standardization between process and rule vocabularies and modeling languages.
  • Support for process decomposition, although I really didn’t follow his argument on what this means.
  • Support for organizational modeling, particularly as that relates to the use of pools and lanes: sometimes, for examples, a lane indicates a role; other times, a department. There are some things happening at OMG with the Business Motivation Metamodel and Organizational Structure Metamodel that may help here.
  • There are some BPMN constructs that are less often used, although it’s not clear that anyone recommended getting rid of them.
  • The large number of different event types is problematic: “ease of use of process modeling is sacrificed for sheer expressive power”. This is a variation on the previous point (and on the crux of the Great BPMN Debate), indicating that actual BPMN users are a bit overwhelmed by the number of symbols.

I’ll publish a link to the paper when it appears on BPTrends; it’s fairly short and worth the read.

The Great BPMN Debate

If you have even a passing interest in BPMN, you’re probably aware of the great debate happening amongst a few of the BPM bloggers in the past week:

Michael zur Muehlen and Jan Recker publish an academic research paper on BPMN usage, “How Much Language is Enough? Theoretical and Practical Use of the Business Process Modeling Notation”, to be presented at an upcoming conference. To quote the introduction in the paper, its aim is “to examine, using statistical techniques, which elements of BPMN are used in practice”, and they laid out their methods for gathering the underlying data. They used some standard cluster analysis techniques to identify clusters of BPMN objects based on usage, and determined that the practical complexity (what’s really used) was significantly different from the theoretical complexity (the total set) of BPMN. Michael teaches in the BPM program at Stevens Institute of Technology, so I wasn’t surprised to see a stated objective related to BPMN training: “BPMN training programs could benefit from a structure that introduces students to the most commonly used subset first before moving on to advanced modeling concepts.” Note that he says “before moving on to”, not “while completely disregarding”.

Michael then blogged about the paper but went further by listing three implications that were not expressed in the paper:

  • Practitioners should start with the more commonly-used BPMN elements, and leave the more specialized constructs for analysts who will presumably be doing more complex modeling.
  • Vendors that support BPMN can make a realistic determination of what percentage of BPMN diagrams can be represented in their tool based on today’s usage of BPMN.
  • Standards bodies should consider if they should be creating additional complexity if no one is using it.

It was these implications that sparked the arguments that followed, starting with Bruce Silver’s post directly challenging much of what Michael said in his post. It appeared to me that Bruce hadn’t read the full research paper, but was commenting only on Michael’s blog post, hence didn’t fully appreciate that the paper was really just analyzing what people are doing now, not making any value judgements about it. Bruce was a bit harsh, especially where he suggests that Michael’s “BPMN Overhead” label on the least-used objects was “clearly meant to mean ‘useless appendages’.” Bruce had some valid rebuttals to Michael’s three implications, and although I disagree somewhat with Bruce’s first two points (as I commented on his post, and was rewarding by Bruce telling me that I was stating the bloody obvious), I agree that the standard makers have not included unnecessary complexity, but that they have created a standard that the market still needs to grow into. However, I find the BPMN specification to be overly verbose, creating a greater degree of perceived complexity than may actually exist.

Michael responded to Bruce’s post by pointing out that the aim of their research was to find out how people actually use BPMN, not how vendors, consultants and standards bodies think that they use it (or think that they should use it). Michael restates his three implications in greater detail, the first two of which seem to align with what I thought that he said (and stated in my comment on Bruce’s original post). His clarification on his third point was interesting:

We actually like BPMN’s advanced vocabulary. But have you asked end users what they think? Well, we did. Not only in this study but also in Jan’s large-scale BPMN usability studies we did find that users are in fact very troubled by the sheer number of, for example, event constructs. Are they used at a large scale? No. Do users understand their full capacity? Typically not. Why is this not at all reflected in BPMN development? That is exactly our point. Sure, our argument is a somewhat provocative statement. But if it helps to channel some attention to end usage, that’s fair by our standards.

Bruce responds in turn, saying that if Michael had presented this as “statistical correlations between diagram elements in a sample of BPMN collected in the wild”, then it would have been okay, but that the conclusions drawn from the data are flawed. In other words, he’s saying that the research paper is valid and interesting, but the post that Michael wrote promoting the paper (and including those unintentionally provocative implications) is problematic. As it turns out, in terms of Michael’s group of the 17 least-used BPMN constructs, Bruce could live without 15 of them, but will fight to the end for the other two: exception flow and intermediate error event. However, Michael doesn’t say that these are useless — that’s Bruce’s paraphrasing — just that they’re not used.

There’s a bit of chicken-and-egg going on here, since I believe that business analysts aren’t using these constructs because they don’t know that they exist, not because they’re useless. Many analysts don’t receive any sort of formal training in BPMN, but are given a BPMN-compliant tool and just use the things that they know from their swimlane flowcharting experience.

Anyway, Bruce finishes up by misinterpreting (I believe) the conclusion of Michael’s post:

Michael ends his piece by asserting that the real BPMN is not what vendors, consultants, and trainers like me say it is, but the way untrained practitioners are using it today.

What Michael actually said was:

[O]ur own experiences with BPMN and with those organizations using it gave us this hunch that the theoretical usage (what vendors and consultants and trainers tell us) often has little to do with what the end users think or do (the practical usage). And why is it important to know what the end users think and do? Because it can help the researchers, vendors, consultants and trainers of this world to channel their attention and efforts to those problems real users face. Instead of the problems we think exist in practice.

Although it’s not completely clear, I believe that Michael is saying that we need to understand what people are doing with BPMN now in order to design both training and systems.

This was an interesting debate to watch, since I know and respect both Michael and Bruce, and I found merit in the arguments on both sides although I don’t fully agree with either.

There was an interesting coda on the validity of BPMN for model-driven development with Tom Baeyens weighing in on the debate and stating that BPMN should stick to being a modeling notation and not be concerned with the underlying execution details: “[t]he properties can be removed and the mapping approach to concrete executable process languages should be left up to the vendors.” Bruce responded with some thoughts on model portability, and how that drives his categorization of BPMN constructs.

If you’re at all interested in BPMN, it’s worth taking the time to work your way through this debate, and keep and eye on Bruce and Michael’s blogs for any further commentary.