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Social processes #e2open

For the last session of the day – and what will be the last session of the Enterprise 2.0 conference for me – I shifted over to the Enterprise2Open unconference for a discussion on social processes with Mark Masterson. As part of his job developing software for insurance companies, he put together a mockup of a social front end for an insurance claims adjuster’s workplace. The home page is dominated by the activity stream, which includes links to tasks, blog posts, documents and other systems that are relevant to this person’s work. It’s not just the usual social network stuff; it also includes information from enterprise systems such as ECM and BPM systems. There would be rules to set priorities on what’s in any given user’s activity stream.

There’s also more purely social features, such as a personal profile with the ability to provide status updates and indicate presence.

When the user clicks on an item in the activity stream representing an enterprise BPM task, the information from the task and its process is pulled into this environment, rather than launching the BPM system’s user interface; this becomes a unified desktop for the user, rather than just a launchpad. Information about a claim could include external data that is mashed up into the interface, such as Google maps. The right panel of the interface changes so that it always shows information to support what is happening in the main pane; when a BPM work item is open, for example, the right panel includes links to people and content that might be related to that specific case. It also includes a tag cloud that can be used to click through to information across the enterprise about that subject; for example, clicking on the “fraudulent injury” tag showed a list of people who are related in some way (that is, they are a resource with some experience) to fraudulent injury claims, and what their role in the process might be.

Masterson presents this as a vision for what he thinks is the best type of interface to present to all the participants in the claims process: no jumping around between multiple applications, no green screens, and the relationships between information from multiple systems combined in ways that make sense relative to the adjuster’s work. I see some of this type of functionality being built into some of the more modern BPM systems, but that’s not what a lot of insurance companies are using: they’re using out-of-date versions of FileNet and other more traditional BPM systems.

As with most unconference sessions, this is a small bit of presentation and a lot of audience discussion. Some in the group made a distinction between collaboration and social, and didn’t see the sort of collaboration within business processes that happens within organizations as social. Masterson (and I) disagree: whenever you deviate from the structured business process in a process such as claims adjudication, it’s an inherently social activity since people are relying on their tacit knowledge about what other people can bring to the process, and using (often) ad hoc methods for bringing them into the flow. I think that they are confusing “social” with “public”, and have been drinking too much of the E2.0 Kool-Aid that’s being passed around at this conference.

The real unique thing here is not putting a pretty front end on enterprise systems (although that’s a nice feature, it’s just a relatively well-understood integration issue); it’s the home page as a unified view of a user’s work environment – I hesitate to call it a unified inbox since it’s not just about delivering tasks or messages to be acted upon – and the information relationships that allow the right panel to be populated with relevant information and links for the specific work context. As opposed to tagging of process instances to use as future templates for exception cases, an idea that I’ve been knocking about for a while, this goes beyond that to collect information that might be related to a process instance from a variety of sources including blogs and wikis. Consider that the claims adjuster is handling a specific exception case, and someone else did a very similar case previously and documented their actions in a procedures wiki: this sort of environment could bring in information about the previous case when the user is processing the current case. The information in the right panel is replacing the user’s memory and the line of sticky notes that they have on the edge of their screen.

There’s some cool ideas in here, and I hope that it develops into a working prototype so that they can get this in front of actual users and refine the ideas. There’s a lot that’s broken in how enterprise processes work, even those that have been analyzed and automated with BPM, and bringing in contextual information to help with a specific work step (especially case management steps such as claims adjudication) is going to improve things at least a little bit.

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2009 06 24 Sandy Kemsley BPM
E2.0 conf
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Social media and marketing #e2conf

Peter Kim moderated a panel of three people from end-user organizations – Ben Foster of Allstate Life Insurance, Greg Matthews of Humana, and Morgan Johnston of JetBlue – on social media adoption for both external as well as internal use by enterprises.

Allstate recently launched the consumer-facing Good Hands Community, including both a social site and a Twitter presence, for both traditional marketing and sales purposes, but also to maintain a relationship with ex-customers who may have left for financial reasons but still could benefit from Allstate information and potentially become a customer again in the future. It includes tools and calculators, discussion forums and other information.

JetBlue uses social media – specifically Twitter, where they have 730,000 followers as of today – to engage customers, inform customers about what’s happening at JetBlue, and even provide updates on weather and other information that impacts their service delivery.

Humana has a social site run by their consumer innovation center – a sort of center of excellence for enterprise social media – that they are using to try and transform how they interact with their customers and partners; unfortunately, my bandwidth right now won’t allow it to actually load, so I’ll have to take their word for it. This is run separately from their corporate website, and doesn’t include any private customer data.

All of these are intended to engage the consumers, both for informing and for gathering feedback. Social media can be a sort of “canary in a coal mine” about impending problems, and it’s a valuable channel to monitor in order to hear how people are talking about your products or services, potentially heading off PR and customer service disasters before they occur. It’s also a sales lead generation channel, with companies like Dell using Twitter to broadcast deals that aren’t available anywhere else, generating significant revenue from those tweeted deals.

It’s important for multiple departments in an organization to contribute their ideas and needs for consumer-facing social media. It’s not just an IT project, although IT is going to be involved in order to deploy the platform, and there’s a need for rapid prototyping and changes to the site without having to go through an old-fashioned waterfall development approach: this might dictate that the existing corporate IT not be involved, but a new team formed to support this sort of agile approach.

One of the panelists noted that you can see the trends in conferences: social media is now on the agenda at IT conferences, at marketing/PR conferences, at HR conferences and at customer service conferences, indicating that people from multiple areas within organizations that have an interest and a stake in social media.

You have to learn by doing with social media: people have to get in there and start producing content, then see what the consumer feedback is like for that content in order to tune the message and style. That’s a scary thing for most companies, but these three are setting a good example.

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2009 06 24 Sandy Kemsley E2.0 conf
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The Future of Social Messaging in the Enterprise #e2conf

An eight-person panel discussed how organizations can use social messaging to improve internal and external communication and collaboration. I’m not even going to try to track who says what, since I’ve lost track of who’s who (except for the lone woman on the panel), so just random notes:

  • Unified Communications vendors need to open up their products to allow social messaging to participate. Voice seems to be ignored in Enterprise 2.0 (note that there are no sessions on voice at this conference), but needs to be a part of it. This is especially true when we consider devices such as the iPhone, which is used to participate both through social media and voice. People don’t want think about what tool to use, they want to focus on the problem that they’re trying to solve.
  • Enterprise 2.0 isn’t about giving people “one more thing to do”, but to help make people more effective. This is a big one that I see when trying to get people within my clients to collaborate, often because they don’t give up doing things the old way, so see the new collaboration tools/methods and an additional step rather than a replacement for an old and inefficient way to do things.
  • Social messaging is about forming weak ties, not necessarily about pre-targeted recipients. The ROI may not be obvious up front, but serendipitous discovery of information and people provides unexpected value.
  • We need to stop focusing on the tools and applications, and start focusing on the people and use cases. That is especially obvious in this panel, which still has too much of a tool focus – Marcia Conner from Pistachio Consulting has to keep dragging the conversation back to the people, practices and conversations.
  • The same issues of information security apply to social messaging as to any other form of communications. Social messaging tools don’t equate to information leakage, they just provide another platform for what is likely already happening by voice, email and other methods if you have employees that don’t adhere to your security policies. Governance begins with individuals, and if you can’t trust your employees, you need to monitor their activities. If the corollary is true – that if you monitor your employees’ activities, that means that you don’t trust them – then I see a lot of companies with no trust in the people whom them so carefully recruit and hire. It’s impossible to completely lock down data in any organization, so there needs to be policies (and education about those policies) that lead to self-policing.
  • There is insufficient granularity of presence: with most social platforms, there is a single view of you that is exposed to everyone who you choose to expose it to, and you can’t tune the experience for different audiences. In other words, don’t put anything on Twitter that you wouldn’t want your employer, your competitor or your mother to read. I’ve noticed that although platforms like Facebook are providing tools to allow you to limit what parts of your profile are available to different groups of your contacts, very few people bother to use them.
  • Enterprises matter less; relationships and conversations matter more. Don’t limit yourself to just an enterprise conversation, think about a participatory culture. (I think that I won the Enterprise 2.0 buzzword bingo on that last statement)

These are just the high points; you can check out the Twitter stream for this session or the replay of the video if you want to hear the entire panel.

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2009 06 24 Sandy Kemsley E2.0 conf
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Applying the Social Dimension to the Lockheed Martin Mission #e2conf

The morning started with Andrew McAfee interviewing Shawn Dahlen and Chris Keohane from Lockheed Martin about how they’ve progressed on their internal social network since we heard about it at last year’s conference.

Back in 2004, they approached the CIO to get project seed money for internal blogging, since there was a need for internal communications that wasn’t being met by company newsletters. For a few thousand dollars, they were able to set up a blogging platform that allowed internal affinity groups to communicate, then realized that they needed to lock down some of the information for security purposes and closed down some of the access, particularly to employees outside the US.

The 9/11 commission report noted that the existence silos of people and information – a “need to know” environment – was part of the problem in government and defense industries, providing Lockheed with the motivation to start opening up some of their information across the company, regardless of location. They worked closely with their internal legal department to make sure that they were

They took their SharePoint environment, which was already in use for document collaboration, and added more social networking aspects by upgrading the blog and wiki capability. This allowed them to evolve an existing, familiar platform into something more social, providing an easier migration for Lockheed’s 150,000 employees. The revolutionary part was to make these communities open to all employees by default, rather than defaulting to a closed site, and currently 65% of their thousands of communities are open.

Because they were making SharePoint do things that it didn’t naturally do, there was a lot of customization involved, but what they’ve ended up with is the ability for anyone to create a community. Apparently, HR resisted this, and lobbied for more centralized control of who could create an internal site rather than allowing self-service, but with the number of internal communities, this would have seriously crippled the spread of the tools to support collaboration within the company.

McAfee asked the question about how easily Lockheed’s aging workforce adopted these social solutions; interestingly, some of the 20-something engineers were some of the ones that had problems with the social community, since although they knew how to use the tools, they didn’t have the business experience to make the tools support the Lockheed business processes. Some of their most prolific bloggers are from the over-40’s workforce, probably because they just have more knowledge to contribute. In other words, enterprise social networking isn’t about age, it’s about appropriate tools, motivation and having something worthwhile to share. You need to have the younger and older parts of the workforce work together in order to achieve the best results.

They went through – and are still experiencing – challenges with acceptance by the executives and across the organization, and have learned that social media needs to be grounded in the challenges of your enterprise. You need to create tools that support what people need to do, not just push something in and force people to use it. The result is that they have leaders within the company who blog regularly, but more importantly, who read, comment and act on what they read in blogs: this shows that management is participating, and that they see it as a channel for

They didn’t set rules around what content should or shouldn’t be included on the sites, but it has taken on the form of what would be normal employee behavior, which is pretty much what we heard yesterday from IBM, Deloitte and EMC. They provided two examples of “misuse” that were removed from the sites: one where someone was talking about their new car, and the other where someone was complaining about the employee review process using questionable tone and/or language.

There’s a breakout session this afternoon with the two Lockheed guys, going into more detail about their social networking platform and its adoption.

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2009 06 24 Sandy Kemsley E2.0 conf
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Applying the successful strategies of social networks to the enterprise #e2conf

Aaron Levie of Box.net is presenting in the last breakout slot of the day, looking at how to apply the lessons learned in consumer social networks to how these can be applied within the enterprise. He started on the ideas of speed (as in speed/ease of sharing information), community and openness as key features of the consumer web, then went on to discuss why traditional enterprise software isn’t social, based on these three measures. Okay, a bit of a simplistic and technology-focused view, but let’s run with that for now. Also conveniently supports why you would use a service like Box.net…

This was followed by a pretty lightweight list of how this could be applied in the enterprise, but nothing earth-shattering. For a presentation that was supposed to be about content-centric social networks, it was remarkably content-free.

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2009 06 23 Sandy Kemsley E2.0 conf
Enterprise 2.0
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Transition strategies for Enterprise 2.0 adoption #e2conf

Lee Bryant of Headshift looked at the adoption challenges for Enterprise 2.0 technologies in companies that have grown up around a centralized model of IT, particularly for the second wave adopters required to move Enterprise 2.0 into the mainstream within an organization. He points out that we can’t afford the high-friction, high-cost model of deploying technology and processes, but need to rebalance the role of people within the enterprise.

External tools are subject to evolutionary forces and either adapt or die quickly, whereas we are forced to put up with Paleolithic-era tools inside the enterprise because it’s a captive market. 21st century enterprises, however, aren’t putting up with that: they’re going outside and getting the best possible tools for their uses on demand, rather than waiting for IT to provide a second-rate solution, months or years later.

There is a shift from individual productivity to network productivity, that measures the improvements that occur because we’re doing things together and connected rather than as individuals. If everyone in the company has common goals, then there’s a big boost in productivity when people work together.

There’s a need to make hidden data visible and use it to drive collective intelligence – I see this all the time with the need for enterprise search and content management for static content, but also enterprise micro-blogging and other conversations that surface more transient ideas for consumption.

It’s all about improving processes and reducing the cost of doing business, although not necessarily in the structured BPM style of process improvement; instead, it’s about using social tools to change how people can collaborate and work together. This might include adding a social layer to existing tools, such as we see when collaboration is added to ECM and BPM but moving beyond that.

However, even though all of this is happening already, there’s the issue of bringing these tools, techniques and methods to the people who don’t normally use social networking for either business or pleasure. Do the revolutionary ideas that we hear bandied about at this conference really have a place in the cubicle farm? Interestingly, I’m seeing an arrogance exhibited at the conference that really puts me off; it manifested partly in the Microsoft-bashing at this morning’s panel, but comes down to a complete lack of respect for the structure of many existing enterprises. How do we respect what’s already there in those organizations while helping them to move into the 21st century?

Bryant showed some of the ways that they drive out behavioral use cases within organizations, match that to available social tools, then develop behavioral transition strategies that effectively “tricks” people into using these new tools in order to bridge the old methods and tools into the new. This is all about focusing on the tasks that people do and the things that they know, and providing some tweaks that get them doing things differently. For example:

  • For people who are addicted to email on their Blackberry, transition them to reading RSS feeds on the same platform (also within Outlook 2007): it looks similar, it provides a similar broadcast functionality, and lets them get away from filing and deleting the information.
  • Replace the phone book with a social network that provides the same information, and allows people to “friend” people who they contact frequently.
  • Get rid of the intranet, and create something that looks like your old intranet, but has edit buttons everywhere. In other words, turn your intranet into a wiki where anyone can update information if they have it. The information is more up-to-date and accurate, and gets people in the mode of being authors. It doesn’t mean that you have to allow every page to be editable by everyone, as Razorfish did, but can provide a more controlled environment that allows people to edit their team’s areas.
  • Create a place for employees to share and rate ideas, sort of like a suggestion box with voting.
  • Organize information in new and interesting ways, such as providing a social bookmarking tool to allow people to add tags to documents within their enterprise content management system in order to improve findability and indicate interest in documents. This can be used just to allow people to “organize their stuff”, or can be used in the case of an upcoming platform migration, where people can tag documents that should be migrated to a new ECM platform.

The thing to note about all of these ideas is that they are focused on things that people were already doing, and just tweaking the methods that they use to do them. That makes it a lot less threatening, and therefore much more likely to be adopted.

It also comes down to giving people choice, which is often not done inside large organizations: IT usually dictates which tools are used for which purpose, and which content goes into a wiki versus a content management system versus a blog. Unfortunately, years of having IT dictate tools and content location means that many enterprise users are somewhat sheep-like when it comes to choice: if you give them a choice, they’ll keep doing things the same old way since it’s the path of least resistance, and in today’s economy, they’re probably busy doing the work of more than one person. The reality is that although they could be more productive with the new tools, they have no time to learn how to use them and how to make them a part of their work environment.

Luis Suarez from IBM was in the audience, and talked about his own personal journey over the past year at moving himself – and the the people who he works with – off email and onto social media platforms such as blogs and wikis. When he would receive an email, he would show people how to use a different platform instead of email, such as SlideShare for sharing presentations.

There are still going to be barriers: salespeople may not want to share their information, even with their colleagues, because they are financially incented to not share; and middle management doesn’t want their teams to collaborate because they perceive that they’re losing control over what’s happening. As Bryant points out, the ultimate solution to these barriers is human mortality and natural selection.

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2009 06 23 Sandy Kemsley E2.0 conf
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Lessons learned from internal communities #e2conf

Peter Kim (formerly a Forrester analyst, now Dachis) moderated a panel on lessons learned from internal communities – that is, the social networking communities inside enterprises – with Jamie Pappas from EMC, Joan DiMicco from IBM Research and Patricia Romeo from Deloitte.

I met DiMicco at last year’s conference in a session with Jeff Schick talking about IBM’s social networking strategy, and she focuses on Beehive, their internal Facebook-like social networking site. I have friends who work for IBM who really like Beehive, and use it both for socializing and for finding like-minded people for work projects; the 60,000 other people inside IBM who also use it likely agree. Beehive is an internally-created research project that is only available within IBM; eventually, the functionality will be productized in Lotus Connections.

EMC’s EMC|ONE is similar in nature, providing an internal social network that helps to break down silos within the organization. They see this as a way to learn about social networking and work out some of the kinks with their usage, as a starting point for eventually engaging their customers and partners. They’ve used Jive’s ClearSpace as the technology platform, including the wiki and blog functionality. They have about 12,500 internal users with another 10,000 lurkers who haven’t registered as users but access the information, representing about 2/3 of the employee population.

Deloitte’s D Street was developed for the same reasons of connecting people across the organization, but was also explicitly created to make the workplace more attractive to the incoming Gen Y/millennial workers; in fact, Romeo comes from the HR side of the house, and this had a big HR push behind it. They built on a SharePoint 2007 platform, but customized it significantly to create a more complete experience. 90% of the US Deloitte employees have visited D Street at least once, and they currently have 20,000 profiles which represents about half of their employee population.

Peter Kim started on some panel questions:

  • With respect to who funded the social network, for Deloitte, it was HR; for EMC, it was marketing (since they have a goal to have an outward-facing site) and they still can’t get their HR involved.
  • DiMicco stated that the age demographics of the users match the demographics of IBM, and are not biased towards the young engineers that everyone else figured would dominate the site usage. I’m so relieved to hear this, since I’ve been saying that it’s not an age thing – her hypothesis is that people will socialize their achievements internally in order to support their own career growth, and that inside a (more or less) private walled garden, people will share and participate. Maybe the difference that people are attributing to age is really about what people are willing to expose in a public forum, rather than how willing people are to participate in social networks.
  • There was an interesting discussion about the balance between internal and external social networks, and whether there was some consideration of how people were already using sites such as LinkedIn and Facebook.
  • An audience question about attrition indicated that there is no real tracking of any dropoff in participation: once someone creates a profile on the enterprise social network, they’re considered to be a participant even if they never update it or contribute in any other way ever again. I think that this should be measured; otherwise, there will be a burst of people who sign up initially then never contribute again, without any good understanding of what is required in order to keep the community alive. IBM is doing some research in this area; they have a bit of an advantage because they are a research organization and are developing a product, which is quite a different focus than EMC and Deloitte who are just end-user organizations in this context.
  • D Street has a staff of 3 people who are monitoring and moderating content that is added to the site, plus technical resources to keep things running. Beehive is not actively monitored, but allows readers to flag content if inappropriate; a team of four people built and maintain the site. ECM|ONE has a bigger team of moderators, probably because they have a goal for outward participation and may have bigger legal/compliance/governance concerns.
  • IBM has a social media policy, grown out of their original blogging policy, which is part of their general policy on what is appropriate in the workplace; they have very few problems because it is just part of general employee behavior guidelines. EMC and Deloitte said pretty much the same: very few problems have occurred (although they both have content monitoring/moderation which might impact that) and mostly it falls under employee behavior guidelines.

There was an audience question about whether the usage levels of these three technology-oriented companies would be representative of enterprises in general, and how they marketed the social networking sites internally. EMC tailored the message for each individual group to tell them what’s in it for them, rather than trying to have a one-size-fits-all collaboration message. Deloitte, since they came in through the HR side, use the profiles as the launch point for any internal references to employees, which led people to click through and see the profiles, sometimes inspiring them to create their own. This tied into a discussion about measurement, and what each of these companies were measuring about their sites. IBM used Beehive as the networking site for an internal conference last year, so had the opportunity to measure how people used the site in the context of that conference (Beehive users must feel like lab rats sometimes), as well as some analysis of the social graph that is created as people use the site. DiMicco had a great term, “return on contribution”, to show how they measure the value that contributed content provides to the enterprise. I can completely get into the concept of return on contribution :)

This was a great panel with three very different views on enterprise social networking. In all cases, the companies see the social network as being a bigger part of their intranet, and even a part of their externally-facing network.

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2009 06 23 Sandy Kemsley E2.0 conf
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Enterprise 2.0 Reality Check panel #e2conf

I’m watching the panel entitled “Enterprise 2.0 Reality Check: What’s Working, What’s Not, What’s Next”, moderated by Matthew Fraser, and featuring Christian Finn of Microsoft, Nate Nash of BearingPoint, Neil Callahan of mktg and Ross Mayfield of Socialtext. Amazingly, I’ve found the optimal way to do this is to go back to my room and watch it streaming over the web, since the wifi is completely overloaded in the conference area and the seating is cramped.

It’s always difficult to blog a panel since the topics tend to vary widely (and quickly), so just a few thoughts:

  • The Enterprise 2.0 technology is mostly an evolution of what has come before, although the cultural changes are more revolutionary.
  • Finn talking about how collaboration spread throughout Microsoft, both through official and unofficial channels, which allowed SharePoint to gain a foothold internally. Small projects get it started, then people see the value and get executive sponsorship. Mayfield followed up by stating that revolutions happen when people don’t have a choice, and pondering how choice is changed by the very large footprint that SharePoint has.
  • Fraser asked the panel if there was an ROI for Enterprise 2.0; Finn responded by comparing the ROI of a document management system to that of a wiki; as Mayfield pointed out, there’s not a lot of “I” in the ROI of Enterprise 2.0. Callahan talked about the shift from “technology is scary” to “technology is fun”, bringing out the old chestnut about how our kids are all more tech-savvy than our CIOs (which I believe to be both incorrect and irrelevant); his point was that IT is no longer bringing the technology to business, but that line of business managers are having to make their own decisions about purchasing technology, shifting the ROI case from the boardroom to the LOB managers. This is a pretty interesting point, since it shows not just that LOB managers can make their own technology purchasing decisions, but that LOB managers must make their own technology decisions. Stowe Boyd popped up from the audience with a comment that we no longer look at the ROI of putting a telephone on someone’s desk (Finn had made the same point earlier about how we’re not giving up email any time soon), and that ROI may not be relevant in this case.

There was quite a good discussion about the ROI of Enterprise 2.0 that followed; check out the on-demand stream of the video. The large number of vendors/researchers/analysts asking questions (as opposed to actual end-user organizations) is noticeable.

You can also check the Twitter stream for this conference session here or for the entire conference here. I’m not a Microsoft supporter, but I have to say that the Twitterati was a bit hard on Finn (lots of “Mac versus PC” cheap shots): yes, he was talking a lot about SharePoint, which is not always used as a shining example of Enterprise 2.0, but the reality is that SharePoint is installed in a lot of “old economy” organizations; even if it’s not the best collaboration tool out there, it’s the only one that a lot of companies have, and it’s how they’re going to learn about some Enterprise 2.0 functionality. With one of my financial services clients, SharePoint is the only thing that remotely resembles collaboration that they have inside the firewall (and therefore approved for corporate information): several people there have actually laughed at me when I suggested using a wiki, and I’ve had to drag some of them kicking and screaming onto SharePoint just for document collaboration. Another client uses wikis, but only within IT, and is unwilling to open up wiki-based information collaboration to non-technical people. The game is changing, but it’s changing very, very slowly in some market segments.

Good panel, covering a lot of issues about both technology and people.

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2009 06 23 Sandy Kemsley E2.0 conf
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At the Enterprise 2.0 conference #e2conf

There’s been a lot of muttering that the Enterprise 2.0 conference is just a vendor love-fest, rather than having a significant attendance from people who are actually doing Enterprise 2.0. Whether it’s because the bloom is off this conference’s rose, or the economy, it’s telling that I was able to pick up a room here at the conference hotel through Priceline for $120/night, considerably down from the near-$300/night rate offered as the “special conference rate”. Last year, there was not a room to be had here several weeks in advance. Incredibly, they’re planning a second Enterprise 2.0 conference later this year in San Francisco; maybe the more relaxed west coast business attitudes are proving more receptive to Enterprise 2.0 in general, and certainly there will be a lot of vendors glad for only having to make the short drive north from the Valley.

Lots of disruption yesterday as flights into Boston were delayed or cancelled due to weather conditions, and the rainy weather here this week will impact attendance at the evening events, if not the conference itself. I arrived yesterday in time for the afternoon workshops, but left after 45 minutes of a not-very-insightful presentation (probably okay for newbies, but not if you’ve read anything about Enterprise 2.0). At least I made it to a couple of good social events in the evening, since this has become a conference where I come to hang out with interesting Enterprise 2.0 people rather than learn any new Enterprise 2.0 content.

I poked my head in to the starting keynotes today, but headed back to the breakfast table when Matthew Fraser started reading the captions on the tedious making-fun-of-management cartoons that he had pasted into his presentation. I’m now back in the conference room, electrical power at my feet but only sporadic wifi, and see a more interesting slate of presentations coming up for the remainder of the day. Up next is the keynote panel discussing an Enterprise 2.0 reality check, looking at what’s working, what’s not and what’s next. This afternoon, I plan to attend a panel on lessons learned from internal communities, Lee Bryant’s presentation on adoption strategies, and Aaron Levie’s (of Box.net) presentation on content-centric social networks. Stay tuned.

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2009 06 23 Sandy Kemsley E2.0 conf
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Enterprise 2.0 conference next month

I’ll be at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston next month as part of their bloggers’ network. If you plan to attend, you can click the badge at the left for 30% off your registration, or to receive a free pavilion pass.

I am not compensated in any way if you click through for this, although I am receiving a free press pass to attend the conference (but paying my own travel expenses hence not staying at the hideously overpriced conference hotel).

I’m looking forward to seeing everyone there again this year.

2009 05 20 Sandy Kemsley E2.0 conf Comments (0)

Workflow and BPM Open Forum #sapphire09

It’s the last session of the day – and for me, for the conference – and I’m attending the open forum on workflow and BPM hosted by a number of people from inside and outside SAP with experience in different workflow and BPM areas. The format was 100% audience Q&A, and the focus was really on the SAP Business Workflow within the core ERP system, not NetWeaver BPM; this isn’t completely surprising considering that BPM just went into unrestricted release this week, so there’s probably not enough of it in the wild to generate much of a discussion on it.

There was an interesting discussion on what types of processes and applications lend themselves to being “workflowed” – time-sensitive (deadline monitoring), review and approval, audit and control requirements – which was not specific to the workflow/BPM platform.

Unfortunately, not enough content for me, since BW is too buried within the ERP to be of interest to me, and I ducked out early.

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2009 05 13 Sandy Kemsley BPM
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Ginger Gatling on the Universal Worklist #sapphire09

I spent yesterday and this morning in the global communications center at the north end of the conference center, since SAP’s teams for managing social media (that’s us bloggers), press and analysts brings the SAP executives to us for meetings up there. They pipe in the keynote sessions, give us comfy tables with internet access, power and printers, and feed and water us; I’m guessing that some of the press/bloggers/analysts never venture out of the global communications center all week. I just can’t resist the call of the regular sessions, however, and I hiked through the extensive show floor to the south concourse for Ginger Gatling’s session on the Universal Worklist (UWL).

This session isn’t specifically about BPM, but the UWL is used as the common inbox portal for tasks from a variety of sources including BPM and business workflow. This session was for people who use UWL already, with Gatling’s top ten recommendation for configuring it for better usage.

Almost no one uses UWL out of the box – only one person in the audience claimed to be doing this, and even they have recently started to customize it – since there are a variety of ways to customize it: processing of multiple tasks in the list simultaneously, forcing comments/responses when specific actions are taken, override the default task launch mechanism, create custom action buttons, or just basic visual styling. UWL can also handle non-SAP tasks: a task from any application can be integrated by using the UWL Java API to create a UWL connector for that application. In fact, that’s how NetWeaver BPM tasks end up in the UWL. There were a couple of people in the audience interested in using UWL for non-SAP tasks, with one of them stating that they had 19 different workflow systems and want to use UWL as their “window to everything”.

Interestingly, although UWL can be personalized by users, almost everyone in the audience said that they hide that option because it makes it harder to support. This is pretty basic personalization, such as column order and sorting, but it’s amazing what people can get confused over, especially when they’re trying to explain it to a remote support person. Also, most of the audience disable substitution (that is, redirecting your tasks to someone else while you are away) at the UWL portal layer, since there could be several applications surfacing tasks into UWL, and you can’t apply the same substitution rules across all of them. Both of these – personalization and substitution – are examples of features created by developers who don’t really understand the business environment, but were likely designed and tested in an overly simplistic version of that environment: otherwise, who would assume that all of the tasks in a “universal” worklist could be delegated to the same person?

This is not something that I will ever have to do myself, but it’s an important glimpse at what sort of customization needs to happen for a BPM application that is going to use UWL as an inbox, in addition to the customization that is done for the task user interface itself within BPM.

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2009 05 13 Sandy Kemsley SAPevents Comments (0)

Wolfgang Hilpert and Thomas Vollmering on NetWeaver BPM #sapphire09

I started to get paranoid yesterday when my meeting with Wolfgang Hilpert and Thomas Vollmering was scheduled at the same time as Ginger Gatling’s session on NetWeaver BPM, then they didn’t show for the meeting – was there something they didn’t want me to know? However, it was just a scheduling glitch, and eventually we met up so that they could brief me on the current release and what’s coming later this year.

When I last had an in-depth look at the product late last year, it was in late beta; since then, it’s been through the SAP ramp-up (early ship) process, and was released for unrestricted shipment on Monday. I’ll be finishing up my review of the current release in an upcoming post, and as soon as Thomas forwards on the material that he promised to send (hint, hint), I’ll be able to post a bit more on the future directions.

The newly released version is still lacking a lot of expected BPMS functionality, but has focused on the features that SAP’s customers said that they needed the most: human-centric BPM (since there are existing products in the SAP suite that cover lower-level orchestration) and a integrated composition environment that can eventually be used for process composition across all layers: human-facing tasks, web services, and core ERP processes. Due to their Yasu acquisition, they also did direct integration between the BPM and BRM environments, although there were some rough edges there and in some of the other areas, such as handling the user interface at process steps.

In spite of the shortcomings of the first release, SAP’s vision for BPM is far-reaching, especially around the integration of events and analytics. They are taking advantage of the innovation that’s happening within the BusinessObjects group, and there’s a potential for them to create a powerful platform not just for managing processes, but for handling events, including the results of analytics at a human-facing step as a decision-support tool, and for analyzing and optimizing processes.

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2009 05 13 Sandy Kemsley BPM
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Marge Breya on BusinessObjects Explorer #sapphire09

A small group of bloggers had the opportunity to sit around a table with Marge Breya to expand on what we saw during the press conference on BusinessObjects Explorer. She discussed how unstructured data has being elevated to first class status within SAP, with analytics and reporting tools that can lay over unstructured as well as structured data. Part of this involves parsing structure out of unstructured data through an appropriate semantic layer.

They’re also playing with things (that she couldn’t really talk about, although some customers have access) that provide much more of an hosted Web 2.0-type of experience. They’re working on Explorer On Demand, which allows you to upload spreadsheets and other file-oriented data, then do some analysis and visualization on your own data to get an idea of how valuable tools like this are. They handed out some test drive passes for this, so I may get a chance to play around with it some time soon. I expect that many organizations won’t want their data warehouse in the cloud, but this will at least give them a chance to try it out in a no-risk environment. They’re doing this with more of their BusinessObjects platform, where there’s a free version that allows for some starter functionality, then hope for it to go viral in terms of stepping up to paid on demand or on premise versions. That’s a pretty powerful model in the consumer space, although traditional enterprises may have a more difficult time adopting technology in this manner. Considering that the higher-end of Explorer is targeted at large organizations, this could be the biggest challenge.

Breya had some interesting background on product strategy as well, especially around how SAP had traditionally been doing OLAP-based business intelligence, and BusinessObjects didn’t have much in the way of OLAP, so the acquisition produced a minimum of overlap. Polestar, on the market for a couple of years as an ad hoc query tool, was retooled into Explorer for a million or so rows of data, and Explorer Accelerated, a software and hardware bundle, that can handle billions or rows.

She went on to talk about the ties between BI and BPM, and although she couldn’t talk about anything specific, there are some interesting things coming in terms of operational BI, monitoring and characterizing processes for the purposes of process improvement, as well as invoking analytics within processes for decision support.

In response to a question about the consumerization of SAP products, she promises us “an experience that will take decisioning to the next level, involving collaboration” in something that is just entering private beta now. I’m picturing a cross between Xbox Live and Vanilla Sky, which would be cool, but I still think that there are challenges to adoption of completely new user experience paradigms. Since SAP has a wide customer base in manufacturing and other industries with low margins and the requirement for constant product innovation, this may not be as much of a challenge as it would be verticals such as financial services and insurance.

We had a discussion about the cloud versus on premise as the location for data, with the underlying theme that it’s not an all or nothing proposition: while operational data may be behind the firewall, it makes much more sense to leave third-party benchmarking data in the cloud where it can be shared and frequently updated. The new generation of BI products from any vendor can’t be restrictive in their data sources, but have to be able to aggregate information from a variety of sources both inside and outside the firewall.

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2009 05 12 Sandy Kemsley BI
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#sapphire09 press conference – Business Objects Explorer

Jon Schwarz, SAP Executive Board Member, gave the global press conference at SAPPHIRE this morning, with a focus on BusinessObjects Explorer (formerly known as Polestar) and how it helps their customers to become clear enterprises: seeing, thinking and acting clearly. As Prashanth Rai twittered, it’s more like a mini keynote than a press conference, or at least this part of it.

SAP is seeing a fundamental change in customer expectations, both from the buyers and the users. Buyers need to do more with less, which means reducing total cost of ownership, making it easy to deploy solutions, and getting to ROI faster. Users now want the same level of usability and sophistication of digital media as they see in consumer applications (surprise!), as well as wanting to integrate social and community aspects.

Their strategy:

  • Building on their core business process platform
  • Best foundation for an intelligence platform since the acquisition of Business Objects
  • Next-level BPM, presumably through NetWeaver BPM (although he didn’t state that explicitly)
  • On premise and on demand solutions
  • Web 2.0-like user experience
  • Non-disruptive evolution through timeless software

Marge Breya, EVP and GM of Business Objects and NetWeaver, took the stage to talk about how data is used within organizations, and pointed out a 2007 BusinessWeek research study that showed that most people don’t think that they have the right data (and granularity of data) to do their job, and poor decisions are being made due to lack of information. She then introduced BusinessObjects Explorer, a front-end tool for exploring and visualizing large data sets, both for casual and power users. It allows for searching and sorting, interactive drilldowns, and various types of dynamic graphical visualizations while navigating through the data. This can be done in the context of a SAP report screen, and she showed an experimental version running on an iPhone. In the next year, they’ll be opening up the data sources so that this can be used as an interactive analysis and visualization tool against data warehouses, flat files and other data sources. Currently, there’s a regular version, which good for up to about 1M records, and an accelerated version for much larger data sets. There are, of course, other data analysis and visualization tools in the BusinessObjects portfolio: Xcelsius, Crystal and WebI; the challenge will be a clear delineation of the usage of each of these products, or a consolidation of some of these to create a more compact portfolio.

BusinessObjects Explorer

She was then joined on stage by a panel of customers and partners: Vincent Vloemans from Sara Lee, Katrina Coyle from Molson Coors, Elke Reichart from HP and Alexander Yost from IBM. The two customers have been using Explorer and had lots of good things to say about the speed of analysis (2-3 seconds on data sets of 300M records), the fast learning curve for users with little or no training, and the short time to value. The partners discussed how their hardware optimizes the performance of this solution – apparently, a nice IBM or HP blade server will help things out considerably – and how they are shipping preconfigured and optimized systems.

Schwarz came back up to walk through a more traditional set of press announcements, including their acquisition of Clear Standards; you can read all of the news releases in the news room. We then had an audience Q&A, which ranged across a variety of subjects including the potential for appliances for products such as BusinessObjects Explorer (nothing to discuss yet, but apparently in the works), the role of business and IT in the creation and maintenance of data visualizations and other user-facing information (don’t fire your IT staff yet), sustainability (they’re for it), and the necessity for good data hygiene (seriously).

If you’re on Twitter, #sapphire09 is one of the top trends today. With 10,000 attendees on site and another 8,000 registered online for virtual participation, that’s not surprising.

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2009 05 12 Sandy Kemsley SAPevents Comments (0)

Back to blogging

I’ve been absent from blogging for a while – with the exception of the links posts that are auto-generated from my Delicious bookmarks – due to a very heavy client workload and very few conferences to blog about. I have been twittering, but my Twitter stream tends to contain random thoughts and personal observations rather than BPM-related commentary.

The Twitterati may claim that blogging is dead, but there’s clearly a place for articles, reviews and opinion pieces that need more space to expand on a subject. There’s something about writing longer bits of prose (longer than 140 characters, that is) that helps my brain work around problems better, plus the comments and feedback from readers is a valuable part of the conversation. I plan to get back to more regular blogging, and to kick that off, I’ll be blogging from SAP’s SAPPHIRE conference this week in Orlando. I have a detailed review of NetWeaver BPM that has been in the works for a while, and I’ll be updating that with new information from this week and publishing that as well.

Stay tuned, and don’t delete me from your RSS reader yet.

2009 05 11 Sandy Kemsley SAPevents
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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 BPM Comments (3)

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 LombardiDriven Comments (6)

FASTforward09: Video interview with me on search in the enterprise

Josh Ross did a lot of video interviews here at FASTforward, including this one with me talking about search in the enterprise as part of a content management strategy.

2009 02 11 Sandy Kemsley FASTforward Comments (1)

FASTforward09: David White, Kusiri

David White of Kusiri finished up the afternoon of breakout sessions with a presentation on using customer data to drive business results. He started with some statistics about just how much data flows through businesses: 85% of all data is managed by enterprises, and that’s 85% of a very large number. Businesses, however, need actionable information, not just data, so we start to apply technologies such as search and business intelligence to explore and make sense of the data.

Business intelligence, however, hasn’t delivered the goods, particularly in the area of unstructured content such as documents: BI typically relies on structured (database) data within the firewall, and that doesn’t provide a complete view of things. Traditional search – represented by the “search box” (I think that the presenters are not allowed to say the G-word) – provides too many irrelevant results, hence also not that useful. But just like Goldilocks, we have a solution that’s just right: search applications, that is, a search-powered application that searches across internal and external data, both structured and unstructured, and guides you to actionable information through navigation.

He showed us some screen snapshots from a search application that they have built, but difficult to see and not interactive so not very compelling, as demos go. Overall, it’s a portal-like dashboard application where the widgets in the portal are actually the results of searches. From here, you can click through on a line item to drill down into the information (again, which uses search behind the scenes) to see more detailed information from a variety of sources, as well as additional tools and functionality for taking action on the data or further analyzing it. There’s a lot of functionality here, presented in the sort of dashboard/drill-down visual analysis environment that you might expect to see from a BI system, but accessing information from sources that you’d never have access to in your BI system.

White’s prediction is that in five years, typing criteria into a search box will appear hopelessly outdated: search will just be implicit in the applications that we use to access information. Both the sources of data and the questions that you’re going to ask will change, and traditional BI and search methods can’t handle that; instead, you’ll be using a new generation of search applications that allow you to traverse the data universe.

2009 02 10 Sandy Kemsley FASTforward Comments (0)