Just feed me

Email newsletters: the web 1.0 of permission marketing. How many of these do you subscribe to? How many that you receive do you actually read? I receive a number of email newsletters each day, almost all on the subject of technology in some way, but I have to confess that there are over 300 of them sitting unread in my email, dating back many months. I read these selectively, usually sorted by sender, during times when I have no internet access, such as on long flights (although that practice is now under review if I’m not allowed to bring a laptop on board).

RSS feeds, on the other hand, are the ultimate web 2.0 form of permission marketing: I subscribe to feeds that I want, without passing along any personal information that might result in unwanted spamming to my email. I read them online using Bloglines when I’m connected to the internet (which is almost all the time), and since each entry typically is a single subject rather than a collection of topics that I would find in an email newsletter, I can quickly go through them and figure out which ones that I want to spend more time on and which that I want to delete.

What this all has to do with BPM is that a number of the BPM portals (Business Process Management Group, Business Process Management Institute and Business Process Trends) don’t syndicate their content using RSS, but make you sign up for email newsletters. A couple of exceptions are BPMEnterprise.com, and ebizQ (which hosts this blog), a broader-based integration-related site.

A good percentage of you read this blog via the RSS feed — many through the Feedburner feed that provides some extra widgets on each post — so I know that you appreciate my complaint.

Traffic blips

I noticed a blip in my blog traffic on August 2nd, and I’m never sure what causes that although I did post 4 times that day about subjects as varied as the TED talks videos and how Ventana shouldn’t really be talking about BPM. Today, I caught up on some of my podcast listening and discovered that James Governer mentioned me in the Redmonk Radio podcast that day, too.

So far, my scientific analysis proves that if I blog four times per day and Redmonk mentions me in a podcast, my traffic goes up. 😉

New(?) del.icio.us feature

I use del.icio.us for bookmarking sites that I want to remember, and I use a cool feature to post each day’s links as a blog post. A while back, I learned about the “for” tag in del.icio.us, where if you tag an item with “for:username“, that item appears in the “links for you” section for that user on del.icio.us, which they can also subscribe to in their RSS reader. In other words, you can tag a site using del.icio.us specifically for another person to look at.

Today, when I was tagging something, I noticed a new section in the tagging screen: usually there’s just “recommended tags” (how most other people have tagged this link), “your tags” and “popular tags”, but now there’s also “your network”, which lists the for: tag for each of the people who are listed as being in your del.icio.us network.

Stats that never seem to go away

I’ve been watching statistics like this ever since I started in the BPM/document management field over 15 years ago, and they never seem to really go away. These ones were published by AIIM earlier this year:

400 Hours — Number of hours per year the average employee spends searching for paper documents. (Source: Datapro/Gartner Group)

$6 – $12 Million — The amount the typical enterprise with 1,000 knowledge workers wastes per year per year searching for nonexistent information, failing to find existing information, or recreating information that cannot be found. (Source: IDG)

25 Percent — Percentage of enterprise paper documents that are misplaced and will never be located. (Source: Datapro/Gartner Group)

The last one puts me in mind of a contract that I did a few years back for a manufacturing organization. A very old company, they were converting their engineering drawings (some dating back 100 years) and aperature cards [a pre-historic storage medium that consisted of a piece of microfiche embedded in a computer-readable punched card containing the indexing information] to scanned images, eventually to be redrawn as CAD files, and implementing some basic change request and approval workflow. I had an internal company email address, as I often do when working with customers, and one day was copied on the following mass internal email:

Found: an aperture card, reference #xxxxxx, on the road between building A and building B.

You can be pretty sure that this is one of the misplaced ones.

Webinar: the business value of BPM standards

Although labelled “The business value of BPM”, this is really a webinar on BPM standards as a wrap-up of the recent OMG BPM Think Tank, which I blogged extensively about.

Since I was at the Think Tank and have a lot of opinions on the subject of BPM standards, I’ll be presenting at this webinar (as opposed to my previous role as moderator) along with Connie Moore from Forrester and Jeanne Baker from OMG and Sterling Commerce. Connie will be covering the business value of standards, Jeanne will be doing a wrapup of the Think Tank, and I’ll be doing an interactive discussion between the three of us on the future of BPM standards.

Being a presenter on this webinar prompted me to finally update my bio on the ebizQ site; a few people who I’ve met lately assume that I work for ebizQ, which I don’t, so this should clear it up.

The webinar is on August 9th at noon Eastern, and you can sign up here.

The Other Four Misperceptions of Outsourcing

Almost six months later, part 2 of this Gartner podcast arrives. Linda Cohen talks about the second four of the eight myths:

  • the myth of sourcing independence;
  • the myth of service autonomy;
  • the myth of economies of scale;
  • the myth of service management as self-management;
  • the myth of the enemy (i.e., setting up the vendor as an adversary);
  • the myth of procurement;
  • the myth of steady state; and
  • the myth of sourcing competency.

Good discussion, especially on how procurement needs to get a better handle on how to negotiate long-running services contracts in a non-adversarial way (myths 5 & 6). As a long-time service provider, I know how important it is that you start a contract with both parties not feeling like they just got screwed, because that can damage the relationship for months or years to come. Organizations that are used to using a heavy-handed approach with product vendors might want to consider that they’re now negotiating with another company that is going to become an integral part of their operations for a long time — the mentality needs to be more like hiring an employee than buying a product.

Myth 7 (steady state) is also interesting, although pretty obvious: business changes, and the relationship between an organization and its outsourcer needs to be able to adjust accordingly on a fairly regular basis.

It’s probably worth going back to the podcast covering the first four myths and listening to them together.

Enterprise 2.0 meeting tonight in Toronto

There’s an Enterprise 2.0 session tonight at Rowers Pub in Toronto:

Inspired by the success of everything Camp in Toronto comes one more event for your pleasure. Enterprise2.0 is about the business world applications of “Web 2.0” and “Social Media”. The idea for Enterprise 2.0 is built on the hypothesis that the real killer app for the next generation of web and collaborative media technologies is in the enterprise. How can we take our learnings from the recent boom in the consumer internet and apply them to boosting employee productivity, enabling new ways of working and doing business.

Free, although you have to buy your own beer. Sign up on the wiki if you plan to attend.