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{ Monthly Archives } March 2009

links for 2009-03-30

2009 03 30 Sandy Kemsley Links Comments (0)

links for 2009-03-29

2009 03 29 Sandy Kemsley Links Comments (0)

links for 2009-03-27

2009 03 27 Sandy Kemsley Links Comments (0)

links for 2009-03-26

  • North American ECM Community
    And now, from IBM ECM… the worst URL ever for a community site! IBM seems to be doing a social media push on their ECM products, with this being a part of that.
    (tags: ecm bpm)
2009 03 26 Sandy Kemsley Links Comments (0)

links for 2009-03-25

2009 03 25 Sandy Kemsley Links Comments (0)

links for 2009-03-24

  • What should come first, AS-IS or TO-BE? | The Process Executive
    Comments on starting with current-state process models versus future-state. I find it hard to start without at least a high-level current state model, but like Craig, I don't like to spent too much time on that until we have a least a high-level future-state model. Then, go back and drive out the requirements and exception cases from the current state.
    (tags: bpa)
2009 03 24 Sandy Kemsley Links Comments (0)

In Honour of Ada Lovelace

I pledged to write a blog post for today, Ada Lovelace Day, in honour of a woman in technology who I admire. Although there have been some great women in technology throughout history – Grace Hopper comes to mind, and is the subject of many blog posts today – I wanted to write about someone who I know personally, and who I feel has contributed to my personal or professional development.

I didn’t have any women mentors in the early part of my technology career. I went to a high school in suburban Toronto during the mid-70’s where I had to fight to be admitted to the technical courses, and my mentors there were two male teachers who helped get me gain entry into the courses, then taught me the right (and wrong) way to wire circuits and design mechanical gearboxes. I moved on to engineering at University of Waterloo, where I recall one female professor and one woman teaching assistant during the entire time, neither of whom had a lasting impact. I did my work terms at mines, pulp mills and oil companies in northern Ontario and Alberta: again, not many women around. I came to believe that I didn’t need to have other technical women in my life, since I was doing just fine with male mentors (a convenient belief, consider that was my only choice).

That started to change when I owned a software services company, and was growing it to its eventual size of 40 people. As CEO, CTO and chief cook and bottle-washer, I was involved with pretty much every technical hire that we did. And something completely unintentional happened: I hired a completely female technical management team, all of them talented computer scientists and engineers, and also capable of leading teams. It wasn’t about equal opportunity or any crap like that, it was about finding people who not only had mad tech skillz, but who I trusted to run some part of my company, who understood my vision for it, and who could mentor the people on their teams. They just happened to all be women. That changed something for me. I realized that although I had learned a lot from the male mentors in my life up to that point, I had a lot to learn from the technical women around me, too. These women taught me that collaboration and compassion are not at odds with technology, but enrich it: this was in the late 90’s, when technology was still hard-edged, and the word “collaboration” wasn’t a part of most of our vocabularies.

That’s a lot of preamble, but when I sat down to write this, I felt compelled to explain why my first women tech heroes didn’t come along until I was already 20 years into my technical career. Since then, there have been many more, but I want to go back to one of those first ones with whom I entrusted a huge part of my growing team, Marion Cameron. Marion is a former developer, the best project manager who I’ve ever worked with, and was a tremendously calming and mentoring influence over my growing team of (mostly male) developers. She had stopped programming before I met her, but she has a degree in computer science (also from Waterloo) and spent some amount of her younger years working on contract as a developer in other countries, including a stint in Vietnam while there was a little armed conflict going on there. When I met her, she was a project manager working for one of my customers; she moved on, but when I was later looking for someone as our first project manager hire who could grow into a much more senior position, we tracked her down. As we grew, she took on the management of all project managers and developers, although we eventually split the role so that she could focus on the project management team.

One thing that Marion taught me is that you don’t need to raise your voice to make yourself heard. Petite and soft-spoken, Marion commanded respect from our team and our customers because she knew her stuff, and because she was committed to making sure that the right thing happened. I have heard her raise her voice only once in anger the entire time that I’ve known her, and she did that in private in my office rather than in front of our team or customers. I can’t say that I’ve stopped raising my voice or saying totally inappropriate things sometime, but it certainly seems to be a lot less frequent, and I credit her with helping me to understand the value of taking a moment to think about what I’m saying before I blurt it out.

Another key thing that she showed me was how to bring collaboration into a team. She is a natural collaborator, and manages to find the right path to a solution while gaining consensus, but without that devolving into endless rounds of meetings. I know that if we had had collaborative tools such as wikis back then, she would have been the first to find a way to use them to great effect.

She also taught me a lot about managing people, particularly that strange and wonderful group of developers that made up our team at the time. Most of them were young, talented and a bit full of themselves, prone to bruised egos and always testing the limits. She nurtured them in a variety of ways depending on the individual and the circumstances: part skills mentoring, part coddling, part constructive criticism, and always a healthy dose of respect.

Marion helped me to be a better technical leader, and ultimately a better person; for that, I dedicate my Ada Lovelace Day blog post to her.

Tagged
2009 03 24 Sandy Kemsley blogging Comments (1)

Pragmatic BPM and SOA webinar

The webinar that I recorded a couple of weeks back for SearchSOA has finally made it online, although I can only find it on the SearchCIO site. You have to register for the site in order to listen to it, although it’s free.

2009 03 23 Sandy Kemsley BPM
SOA Comments (0)

New mobile theme

I just replaced the WPtouch iPhone Theme with MobilePress after seeing it on Doug Cornelius’ blog. I think that it supports a wider range of mobile devices; I also like the clean interface, and that the pages show at the bottom of the main posts list.

Feedback is welcome, especially from anyone on a non-iPhone/iTouch device.

2009 03 22 Sandy Kemsley blogging Comments (5)

links for 2009-03-21

2009 03 21 Sandy Kemsley Links Comments (0)

links for 2009-03-19

2009 03 19 Sandy Kemsley Links Comments (0)

Next week: Toronto, not San Diego

Yes, it’s true, I’m going to miss a North American Gartner BPM summit for the first time in, well, maybe forever. There’s two reasons for this: first and foremost, I’m 110% busy with time-critical client work right now, and a week in sunny San Diego just doesn’t fit into my calendar. Also, if you review my coverage of last fall’s summit, I’m not finding enough new material at each summit since they moved to the two/year format: I’m not learning much, and there’s not much new to write about. I believe that they’ve started to add some new material specific to BPM in a tight economy, and they had a pretty successful event in London a few weeks back, so I look forward to catching up with the material – and those of you attending – at the next one.

For all of you who have sent messages asking if we can meet up in San Diego next week, I’ll raise a glass to you from these chillier climes.

2009 03 18 Sandy Kemsley Gartner Comments (3)

Webinar: Dynamic BPM platforms

Clay Richardson of Forrester and Keith Swenson of Fujitsu gave a webinar this afternoon on dynamic BPM platforms. There will be a replay available; I’ll update this post with the link when I get it, or someone can add it to the comments if they get it first.

Richardson started with some fairly generic research by Forrester on business problems such as cross-functional processes and process agility, then defined a dynamic business process as one that is built for change and adaptable to the business context. There’s also a significant collaboration/social software message, where dynamic BPM requires both a high degree of collaboration as well as a high degree of information support.

As he points out, most BPM only tackles the structured parts of a process, but doesn’t interface with things such as personal reminder lists, external email and instant messaging. The entire business process does include those things; it’s just that most organizations are using manual, ad hoc methods to integrate between structured systems (including most BPM) and unstructured activities and systems. He stratifies this into three parallel types of work: ad hoc human activities, structured human activities, and system-intensive processes. Although many BPM solutions can do the latter two, many organizations use very different tools for purely system-to-system interactions than they do for processes that contain human-facing steps.

He stated that dynamic BPM is able to handle ad hoc and collaboration scenarios in the context of a more structured business process: being able to blend structured and unstructured work. This allows knowledge workers to do work on their own terms using the tools that they choose, but by doing this in the context of dynamic BPM, visibility into these ad hoc processes is maintained. In the course of providing this visibility, it also feeds back information to IT on how the processes are executed, allowing for these to potentially be structured and standardized where appropriate.

He then turned it over to Keith Swenson, who reinforced the definition of dynamic BPM as empowering users to get work done their way, specifically in cases where there is no pre-defined “best way”to complete the work. The plan is elaborated while you work, not ahead of time; he used one example of emergency fire response units, and another of a movie rollout by a production studio. In both cases, there is not a fixed process or assembly-line plan for how things should be done; they need to be able to do unpredictable things in the context of completing the work, with decisions about what to do next made by multiple people. In many cases, portions of the work is sub-tasked to others, who use their own judgment to create and execute the plan on the fly.

Ad hoc subprocessesThe predominant way that ad hoc processes are handled now is email: people send messages to assign a task to someone, but there’s not a lot of tracking of what work has been assigned to whom, and the status of that work. From a modeling standpoint, consider that this could end up looking like nested subprocesses of ad hoc tasks, where these subprocesses and tasks (and the resources to whom they are assigned) need to be created as they are identified. What we need is smart email, which allows someone to just break out of the structured process, fire off an email to someone who may not have been predefined as a resource, and have that email communication (including the responses) be visible through the standard tracking mechanisms as part of the process.

I’m not left with any sense of how this might tie into Fujitsu products (or, in fact, any other BPM products), although Swenson is enough of an independent thinker that it may not have a direct link, but be more of an educational push. He did mention something pretty vague about how they did support dynamic BPM, but it’s not clear if this is current standard product offering, future product offering, or services. They are promoting a two-day workshop for visualizing your current dynamic business processes, so this may be more related to what they can offer from a services standpoint since they also have some innovative stuff in process discovery. When you think about it, some part of dynamic BPM is really just process discovery, aimed at finding the parts of the ad hoc processes that can be turned into structured processes for a standard BPM implementation. The rest of it is about creating the linkages between the ad hoc process handling methods – such as email and IM – so that these become first class participants in a business process.

There’s a few of the smaller vendors who are creating direct interfaces with Outlook/Exchange in order to provide this sort of management of email requests and responses, including HandySoft (where, coincidentally, Richardson used to work) and ActionBase (which I reviewed last month), but the larger vendors needs to start including this sort of functionality in their BPM products as well.

2009 03 18 Sandy Kemsley BPM Comments (15)

links for 2009-03-18

2009 03 18 Sandy Kemsley Links Comments (0)

BPM Centers of Excellence webinar today

Today (March 18th) at noon Eastern, I’ll be doing a live webinar on BPM centers of excellence that will become part of the Appian-sponsored BPM Basics informational site. You can sign up for the webinar here if you want to listen to it live, which will include Q&A from the audience; the version without Q&A will be available for replay on the BPM Basics site.

2009 03 18 Sandy Kemsley BPM Comments (6)

links for 2009-03-17

  • Gartner Says Enterprises Can Experience As Much As a 20 Percent Cost Savings Within First Year of Using BPM to Improve Business Processes
    Gartner has really switched focus in the past several months to helping companies deal with the downturn in the economy. Looks like that will be a focus at the BPM summit in San Diego next week.
    (tags: bpm)
  • Technotes – Diario de tecnologia
    A Spanish blog on BPM, from the product marketing manager at Polymita, a new entrant to Gartner's BPM MQ. If you use Google Reader to subscribe to RSS feeds, you can set up a folder of foreign-language blogs and instruct Reader to just translate them all to your language. So far, I follow BPM-related blogs in French, Spanish, German, Italian and Russian.
    (tags: bpm blogging)
  • Serena Makes Good on Promise: Dumps Microsoft Exchange for Google Gmail
    A case study of moving from Microsoft Exchange to Google Apps mail (I assume that they mean the domain email, not Gmail, in the article). The whole conversion took them 3 hours, much less than expected, and saves them $1M over 3 years for their 700+ employees. Also, Google gives such generous space allowances that there's no more annoying messages from the mail server requesting that you delete stuff or stop receiving mail. Any small or mid-sized company would be insane to host their own mail servers these days, and the economics are trending towards this for larger companies as well.
    (tags: software business productivity)
2009 03 17 Sandy Kemsley Links Comments (0)

Gartner warns against shelfware-as-a-service

Gartner’s had a good webinar series lately, including one last month with Alexa Bona on software licensing and pricing (link to “roll your own webinar” download of slides in PDF and audio in mp3 separately), as part of their series on IT and the economy. As enterprises look to tighten their belts, software licenses are one place to do that, both on-premise and software-as-a-service, but you need to have flexible terms and conditions in your software contract in order to be able to negotiate a reduction in fees, particularly if there are high switching costs to move to another platform.

For on-premise enterprise software, keep in mind that you don’t own the software, you just have a license to use it. There’s no secondary market for enterprise software: you can’t sell off your Oracle or SAP licenses if you don’t need them any more. Even worse, in many cases, maintenance is from a single source: the original vendor. It’s not that easy to walk away from enterprise software, however, even if you do find a suitable replacement: you’ve probably spent 3-7 times the cost of the licenses on non-reusable external services (customization, training, ongoing services, maintenance), plus the time spent by internal resources and the commitment to build mindshare within the company to support the product. In many cases, changing vendors is not an option and, unfortunately, the vendors know that.

There are a lot of factors in software licensing that can come under dispute:

  • Oracle’s (and many other vendors’) definition of “named user” includes non-human processes that interact with the database, not just the people who are running applications. This became a huge issue a few years back when enterprise systems started being connected in some way to the internet: is the internet gateway process a single user, or do all potential users have to have individual licenses?
  • Virtualization and multi-core issues need to be addressed; in many cases, these hardware partitioning is often not adequately covered in license contracts, and you need to ensure that you’re not paying for the maximum potential capacity of the underlying hardware, not what you’re actually using.
  • Make sure that you have the right to change the platform (including hardware or underlying database) without onerous fees.
  • Watch out for license minimums embedded within the contract, or cases where upgrading to a larger server will cost you more even if you don’t have any more users. Minimums are for small organizations that barely meet discounting thresholds, not large enterprises. Vendors should not be actively promoting shelfware by enforcing minimums.

Maintenance fees are also on the increase, since vendors are very reliant on the revenue generated from that in the face of decreasing software sales. Customers who have older, stable versions of a product and don’t generate a lot of support issues feel that costs should be decreasing, especially since many vendors are offshoring support so that it is cheaper for vendor to supply it. Of course, it’s not about what the maintenance actually costs, it’s about what the market will bear. Gartner suggests negotiating maintenance caps, the ability to reduce your maintenance if you use less licenses, and the right to switch to a cheaper maintenance offering. Document what you’re entitled to as part of your maintenance, rather than relying on a link to the vendor’s “current maintenance offering”, to ensure that they can’t decrease your benefits. Watch out for what is covered by maintenance upgrades: sometimes the vendor will release what they call a new product but what the customer sees as just a functional upgrade on their existing product. To get around that, you can try licensing the generic functionality rather than the specific products by name (e.g., stating “word processing functionality” rather than “Microsoft Word”).

When polled, 64% of the audience said that they have been approached by a vendor to do a software audit in the past 12 months. In some cases, vendors may be doing this in order to recover license fees if they have lost a sale to the customer and feel that they might find them out of compliance. Be sure to negotiate how the audit is conducted, who pays for it, and what price that you pay for additional licenses if you are found to be out of compliance. Many software vendors are finding it a convenient time to conduct license audits in order to bolster revenues, and for the first time ever, I’ve heard radio advertisements urging people to blow the whistle on their employer if they are aware of pirated or misused software licenses, which is a sort of crowd-sourced software audit.

Software as a service licensing has its pitfalls as well, and they’re quite different from on-premise pricing issues. Many SaaS contracts have minimums or do not allow for reductions in volumes, leading to shelfware-as-a-service – consider it a new business model for wasting your money on software license fees. There is aggressive discounting going on right now – Gartner is seeing some deals at $70/user/month for enterprise-class software – but there may be much higher fees on renewal (when you’re hooked). There are also some unrecognized fees in SaaS contracts: storage (if beyond some minimum that they provide as part of the service, which is often charged at a rate far above cloud storage on the open market), additional costs for a development and test sandbox, premium maintenance that is more aligned with typical on-premise enterprise software support, non-corporate use (e.g., customers/partners accessing the system), integration, and termination fees including the right to get your data out of their system. Make sure that you know what the SaaS provider’s privacy/security policies are, especially related to the location of the data storage. Most of the Canadian financial services firms that I deal with, for example, will not allow their data to be stored in the United States, and many will not allow it to be stored outside Canada.

Furthermore, SaaS vendor SLAs will only cover their uptime, not your connectivity to them, so there are different points of failure than you would have for on-premise software. You can hardly blame the vendor if your internet connectivity fails, but you need to consider all of the points of failure and establishing appropriate SLAs for them.

Bona finished up with some very funny (but true) reinterpretations of clauses in vendor contracts, for example:

  • What the vendor means: “We are going to send you software that you are not licensed to use. If you use this software in error, you will be out of compliance with this contract, and woe to you if we audit.”
  • What they actually wrote: “Licensee shall not access or use any portion of the software not expressly licensed and paid for by the licensee.”
  • What you probably want to change it to: “Licensor shall not ship any software to licensee that licensee is not authorized to use.”

The summary of all this is that it’s not a task for amateurs. Unless you want to just let the vendor have their way with you on a large contract, you should consider engaging professionals to help out with this. Gartner provides this type of service, of course, but there are also high-quality independents (mostly former analysts) such as Vinnie Mirchandani.

2009 03 16 Sandy Kemsley Vendors
business
cloud
outsourcing Comments (0)

links for 2009-03-13

  • Michael Hammer Was Right – Process Is The Main Thing
    Excellent point by Anatoly Belychook: "the BPM car in motion is constant improvement yet the starter of this car is one-shot, radical enough, reengineering-style process improvement". In other words, we all love the idea of BPM as a vehicle for constant process improvement, but we would likely never start down the BPM path in the first place if there weren't something badly broken that needed fixing.
    (tags: bpm)
2009 03 13 Sandy Kemsley Links Comments (0)

links for 2009-03-11

2009 03 11 Sandy Kemsley Links Comments (0)

Lombardi’s user conference goes online

In an amazing reflection of the economic times, Lombardi announced today that their user conference, Driven, will not be taking place in Austin as originally planned, but will be an online conference. From their email update:

For the last few weeks, we have been talking to customers all over the world about Driven – our annual user conference. The feedback has been consistent – people want to come but many companies are under travel restrictions.

So, we have decided to change the format for Driven this year. Instead of you having to come to Austin, we are going to bring Driven to you. Think of it as Driven without the travel. Actually, we are calling it Driven Online.

I assume that this means that the attendance numbers just weren’t shaping up as expected, and they had to make a tough decision to cancel the onsite conference.

It’s still the week of April 20-24th, but the content is severely restricted: a single one-hour webinar each day at 11am Eastern. It’s live, so that there will be a Q&A session at the end of each webinar, but this amount of content doesn’t even begin to come close to what would be at a real conference.

It will be interesting to see what other conferences end up cancelled this year; I can’t believe that this will be the only casualty.

2009 03 09 Sandy Kemsley Lombardi Comments (6)