LongJump

I really hate going through a lengthy interview about a hot new product, only to have them tell me at the end that half of what they told me is off the record. Not embargoed until some near-future announcement date, just off the record. Grrr.

Other than that, I had a pretty good demo last week from Pankaj Malviya, CEO of LongJump, who I missed at last week’s Enterprise 2.0 conference. LongJump is the brand for a service provided by Relationals, which has been in business since 2003 with a hosted CRM plaform targetted at media companies. Bonus marks to Pankaj, who starts into the presentation saying that their target users are business managers who organize information and create workflow, then in an aside, says “I see that you’re a business process management expert”, which means that either he’s looked at my blog or his PR person has briefed him well. 🙂

All of their solutions, including both those with the Relationals brand and the new LongJump hosted solutions, are focussed on the small to medium business market. LongJump, in fact, is created on the same underlying platform as the Relationals CRM, including components such as the MySQL database.

LongJump is a platform for creating data-driven, widget-based web applications, as well as offering a shared catalog environment for offering those applications by subscription to other users, including monetization of the applications. The application assembly environment is similar to an iGoogle home page, or other similar portal environments: widgets can be placed on the page, although they can’t exchange data or do other data mashup/filtering functionality like Yahoo Pipes. They have their own widget format, but it’s similar to the Google widget format and they’re working on making it identical so that widget created for Google could be used in LongJump.

LongJump Asset Tracking demo

The demo application was an asset tracking application, and I didn’t see much difference from the seemly endless array of lightweight web-based application development environments until he started showing me how to apply workflow to objects. There’s no graphical process mapper, but you can set states through which an object must pass and the predefined responses at each of those states, which in turn creates a sequence of tasks assigned to specific people or roles. The workflows can be triggered by data events, such as “renewal date less than 30 days”. This is crude from a BPM standpoint — it reminds me a lot of what IBM had in their Content Manager application a couple of years ago to do simple object-based workflow routing — but I haven’t seen anything else like it in this space. They plan to enhance this capability further, and I think that they could have a real competitive differentiator here.

Each application is “packaged” for publication on their catalog; for example, the Asset Tracking application above consists of all of the tabs that you see along the top (Home, Directory, PCs and Servers, Phones, Equipment, Reports, About), where each of those tabs has its own set of widgets and the underlying data sources. The catalog then makes published applications available for subscription by others, and handles the monetization.

LongJump is in an early (closed) beta now, with an open beta expected by end of year — I find this a longish timeline for this sort of application, but it’s coming from a more traditional company so I expect that their internal test and release procedures are different from the usual hair-on-fire Web 2.0 startup. They received 1,800 applicants for the closed beta, and have about 10 customers on there now.

BPMG… I mean, BPEE Conference in London

I received an email this morning about the upcoming Business Process Excellence Exchange (BPEE) conference organized by IQPC in London this October — obviously replacing the BPMG conference that they used to organize. The only problem is the speaker list, which has both Steve Towers and Terry Schurter listed as being with BPMG.

You’d think that the conference organizers would have figured out a bit of what’s happening (or not happening) with BPMG these days, since they had to actually change the name of the conference from last year…

Cleanup day

As you’ll be able to tell by the upcoming post of links (auto-posted from today’s del.icio.us links), it was cleanup day for me. I’m really looking to move off Bloglines and try out Google Reader (although it doesn’t provide a blogroll functionality so I’ll have to replicate my feeds back to Bloglines until that happens), and I needed to do something with all of the “Keep New” posts that I’ve tagged in Bloglines.

No fear, I am enjoying the long weekend; I’m knocking off soon to have a barbeque with the neighbours.

LucidEra on AppExchange

Back in March, I spoke with Ken Rudin of LucidEra about their product launch, and this week I followed up to what’s been going on since then.

The big news is that LucidEra is now available through Salesforce.com’s AppExchange. Although Salesforce.com’s reporting capabilities might be enough if you’re just reporting on the data that you have in their system, LucidEra lets you combine your Salesforce.com data with your corporate data for more of a full business intelligence solution. All of this is hosted, of course, which makes it much more accessible (financially and from an internal IT skills standpoint) for small and medium businesses who want the advantages of BI but can’t afford to play in the BI big leagues.

Rudin was previously with Salesforce.com; combine that with the fact that the first (and, so far, only) LucidEra vertical solution is forecast-to-billing, and that a half dozen of their customers are also Salesforce.com customers, and it’s no real surprise to see LucidEra appear on AppExchange. It’s a natural partnership, and should be of real benefit to some of the Salesforce.com customers who need a bit more in the way of reporting and analytics. Salesforce.com led the first wave of SaaS applications, with a focus on transactional applications that were capturing information; LucidEra is focussed on getting that data out through analytics.

A key feature of LucidEra, whether it’s used in the Salesforce.com context or not, is that you can combine data from a number of different sources, both other hosted data sources and your own on-premise systems. LucidEra becomes your data mart for reporting and analytics, and you just need to get the data in there. They provide automated extract-transform-load for a number of common financial systems, and have some customizable scripts that can be used for systems that they don’t support directly, which may use an Excel spreadsheet as an interim part of the ETL process.

SMBs have never really had the opportunity to do any advanced business intelligence before; companies like this are full of Excel spreadsheets hacked together to mimic a subset of BI functionality. In that situation, the CFO (or any senior management) is always 6 or 7 reports away from what they really need, and with data manually extracted and massaged in spreadsheets, it can take hours or days to do a drill-down into the existing data. In many cases, they could greatly benefit from having BI, but the strategic advantage is not in having that as an in-house solution, but in having the analysis capability and knowing what to do with it. LucidEra gives them a chance to experience better data integration, better data analysis, and all in a way that can be more easily shared amongst people in the organization. Furthermore, it can be done by the business managers themselves, without relying on IT once the data ETL process is set up into LucidEra’s forecast-to-billing solution.

Forecast-to-billing is still the only vertical solution available, although LucidEra obviously wants to create an environment that will encourage other companies to build solutions on their underlying platform. They will be working on other solution applications, and also plan to extend forecast-to-billing to cover everything from the beginning of the cycle (prospects) to the end (cash). They’re also working on some time-based analysis functionality, although Ken wouldn’t talk much about that.

Since our first conversation in March, they have their first customers up and running, with more on the way. Being on AppExchange should certainly help that along.

I believe that SaaS is the way to go for much of the IT infrastructure for SMBs. If I were running a 40-person company now, as I did 7 years ago, I’d be using hosted solutions as much as possible to reduce the internal IT footprint, and therefore reducing costs.

Even Smart Enough Systems get the blues

Scott Selhorst dropped me a note last night to point to his interview with James Taylor about James’ book released this week, hoping that I could build on that rather than having to cover a lot of the same ground when I interview him today. Since Scott published a 52-minute podcast, I haven’t had time to listen to it yet, and may not before I talk to James later today, so I may be repeating some material. However, I think that there’s a big divide between text and voice interviews, and the same people don’t necessarily consume both.

I did have a laugh when I imported the interview into iTunes for synching onto my iPod; I assume that Scott didn’t set a default genre on the mp3 file, and in iTunes it shows up as “Blues”.

IQPC BPM Summit: David Haigh

Last speaker of the day — and of the conference — was David Haigh, Global Director of Continuous Improvement at W.E.T. Automotive Systems, discussing Lean Product Development. It’s actually refreshing to be at a BPM conference where I’m the only person that I heard (since I missed Jodi Starkman-Mendelsohn’s talk this morning) that talked about the technology.

They previously tried out a lot of different quality programs, including ISO 9000, Six Sigma, Lean, BPR and other techniques, but these were always initiated by the subsidiaries and didn’t really catch on, so in 2006 they started on a global program that included the shop floor, logistics and product creation. Whereas they had always focused on the production/fulfillment value stream previously, they expanded the scope to include the entire order-to-cash cycle, particularly to include the design portion of the cycle that has the smallest cost element but the largest cost influence.

I loved his analogy for hand-offs in the business process: it’s like the telephone game that we played as kids, whispering a message from one person to the next to see how message changes by the time it reaches the end; any hand-off results in a reduction in information clarity, as well as being a big time-waster.

Since he’s in an engineering manufacturing environment, there’s some interesting ideas that at first seem unique, but have value in many other areas: set-based design, for example, where you spend the engineers’ time researching and pushing boundaries on the technology that underlies customer solutions, rather than spending the time building one-off customer solutions. The equivalent in the BPM world would likely be having them focus on building out the service layer, not assembling the services using a BPMS. He also spoke about Toyota’s practice of streaming engineers up to higher levels of engineering rather than “promoting” them to sales or management — I always tried to do that when I ran a company, since there’s always some people who just want to stay technical, and don’t want their career to suffer for it.

They’ve built a “workflow” and project planning tool in Excel that has some interesting concepts: no dependencies between tasks, just points of integration, and the team sets the deadlines (can you say “collaboration”?). This helped them by providing tools for visualizing waste in the process, and driving to reduce the waste, which is the main focus of Lean.

This has been an interesting conference, although the attendance is quite a bit less than I had expected, but that makes for a much better environment for asking questions and networking. And speaking of networking, I think that I just have time to run home before the Girl Geek Dinner tonight…

IQPC BPM Summit: Kirk Gould

Kirk Gould, a performance consultant with Pinnacle West Capital, talked about business processes and metrics. I like his definition of a metric: “A tool created to tie the performance of the organization to the business objectives”, and he had lots of great advice about how to — and how not to — develop metrics that work for your company.

I came right off of my presentation before this one, so I’m a bit too juiced up to focus as well on his presentation as it deserves. However, his slides are great and I’ll be reviewing them later. He also has a good handout that takes us through the 10 steps of metric development:

  1. Plan
  2. Perform
  3. Capture
  4. Analyze
  5. Display
  6. Level
  7. Automate
  8. Adjust
  9. Manage
  10. Achieve

He has a great deal more detail for each of these steps, both on the handout and in his presentation. He discussed critical success factors and performance indicators, and how they fit into a metrics framework, but the best parts were when he described the ways in which you can screw up your metrics programs: there were a lot of sheepish chuckles and head-shaking around the room, so I know that many of these hit home.

He went through the stages of metrics maturity, which I’ll definitely have to check out later since he flew through the too-dense slides pretty quickly. He quotes the oft-used (and very true) line that “what gets measured, gets managed”, a concept that is at the heart of metrics.

Smart (Enough) Systems

James Taylor of Fair Isaac has co-written a book with Neil Raden called Smart (Enough) Systems, and it releases this week. I had the pleasure of receiving an advance copy a couple of months back, and wrote a brief review that might be included somewhere buried in all that small text at the beginning of the book that no one ever reads. 🙂

The subtitle of the book is “how to deliver competitive advantage by automating hidden decisions”, and it highlights how it’s critical to embody more intelligence in today’s business decision-making and have consistent, automated decisioning built into business processes in order to remain agile and competitive in today’s fast-moving market. They take you through the core concepts of enterprise decision management (EDM), dive into the underlying technologies, then address how to integrate EDM into your business processes to create your own Smart (Enough) Systems.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading it, and James and I are trying to set up a time to have a more in-depth chat about it; stay tuned for that.

Bloglines has broken my feed

I’ve always been a big fan of Bloglines, but I’ve had a few minor problems in the past when subscribing to my own FeedBurner feeds (FeedBurner takes the source feed from my site, adds on statistics tracking and a few helpful links at the end of each feed item, and produces a new feed): if the source feed location changes, and I update FeedBurner, Bloglines somehow doesn’t get the updated feed location. I think that they’re mishandling FeedBurner feeds, and mapping through to the original feed instead.

Without going into the gory details, suffice it to say that Bloglines is not handling my FeedBurner feed correctly; in fact, after I contacted their support and asked them to refresh their cache to fix the original problem of not getting the new source feed, they’re now picking up an old test version of a FeedBurner feed that I created back in March, but no longer exists.

If you’re a Bloglines user, I recommend moving to a competent feed reader (as I will soon be doing), or subscribe to the source feed directly at https://column2.com/feed/ (comments feed at https://column2.com/comments/feed/).