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Business Process Incubator: Another Online BPM Community, But With Standards

BPM standards, I mean.

Yesterday saw the public beta launch of the Business Process Incubator; although this was inadvertently announced by Robert Shapiro during a public webinar last month, it only moved out of closed preview yesterday. I had a briefing from Denis Gagné of Trisotech, one of the driving forces behind BPI, and have had a test account to try it out for the past month.

BPI has a focus on BPM standards, especially BPMN and XPDL, and is intended to a be a hub for content and tools related to standards. That doesn’t mean that this is another walled garden of content; rather, a lot of content is mashed in from other locations rather than being published directly on the site. For example, if you search for me on the site, you’ll find links to this blog and to a number of my presentations on Slideshare, plus the ability to rate the content or flag them on a My Interests list. That means that there’s a lot of content available (but not necessarily hosted) on the site from the start, and it’s growing every day as more people link in BPM-related content that they know about.

The site is divided into four main areas:

Do, including services for verifying, visualizing, validating, publishing and converting process models in various standard formats. These are premium services available either directly on the site or via an API: you can try them out a few times with a free membership, but they require payment for more than a few times each month.
Share, for contributing content such as process models, tools and blogs; this is also used to view process models shared by others.
Learn, for viewing the links, blogs, books, training and other content added in the Share section.
Tools, for viewing the tools added in the Share section; these are categorized as diagramming, BPMS, BPA, BAM and BRE. Trisotech’s own free BPMN add-in for Visio is here, but is also featured directly on most other pages on the site, something that competing diagramming tools might object to.

Most content on the site can be tagged and rated, allowing the community to provide feedback. There needs to be better integration with other social networking besides just standard “community share” options on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, and this site just begs for BPI iPhone app, or at least a mobile version of the site.

Although I like the clean user interface, the categorization takes a bit of getting used to: for example, you add both content and tools in the Share section, but you view the links to content in Learn and the links to tools in Tools. Furthermore, you both contribute and view process models in the Share section; this appears to be the only type of contribution that is viewed in Share rather than another section. Also, the distinctions between some of the functions in the Do section are a bit esoteric: most users, for example, may not make the distinction between Transform (which is an XML transformation) versus Convert, since both turn a file of one type into another type. Similarly, Verify ensures that the file is a BPMN file based on the schema, whereas Validate ensures that there are no syntax errors in the BPMN file.

Although vendors can participate in the community as partners, it is vendor-independent. Rather than vendor sponsorships, the site is monetized through a membership model that allows access to most of the content for free, but requires a $300/year premium membership for unrestricted access to premium features, such as process model validation and translation services. In that way, the bulk of the site revenue is expected to come from corporate end-user organizations that use a combination of free and premium memberships for their users, and can sign up for a corporate membership that gives them four premium memberships plus 50% any additional ones. End-user organizations are becoming more aware of the value of BPM standards, and understand the value proposition of a standard notation when using process models to communicate broadly within their organization; BPI will help them to learn more about BPM standards as well as being a general resource for BPM information.

Businesses can have their own page on the site using a custom URL (e.g., www.businessprocessincubator.com/tibco), fancy it up with their own logo and business description, and list all of the site content that belongs to them, whether links to tools, blogs or other content. Partner pages are free, but are monetized by referral or commission fees on any RFI/RFQs, services, training or paid content offered via those pages.

The cloud-based functions offered in the Do section are also available through a public API for vendors to include directly or white-label them in their own offerings; although monetized for this wasn’t settled last month, it would be possible to do this through an API key, much like other public APIs. Both APIs and a toolbar are available for including BPI content and functions on another site.

Partners are already ramping up on the site, and by fall, BPI will be in general availability for all members. There’s now quite a bit of choice in BPM online communities: in addition to all the BPM-themed social networking sites and discussion groups, there are now several public communities offering tools and functionality specific to BPM, such as BPM Blueworks and ARISalign. Gagné sees BPI as complementary and partnering with those sites – for example, those sites could have a partner page, as BPM Institute does – since they augment the other sites’ content with standards-focused materials. BPI’s openness via APIs and a toolbar allows it to be added as a BPM community from another site, and will likely see many referrals from BPM vendors who don’t want to build their own community site, but like the idea of participating in one that’s vendor-neutral. Although BPI is focused on BPM standards, the open platform gives it the potential to grown into a full BPM social networking site with a broad variety of content.

By the way, as your reward for reading this entire post, here’s a link to get a free premium membership. Enjoy!

IBM Cloud Strategy: Collaboration, Dev/Test Environments, and Virtual Desktops

Today, IBM announced their cloud strategy and roadmap; I was at the analyst update last week and had a chance to hear about it first-hand from IBM execs, a customer and a partner.

Erich Clementi, who heads enterprise initiatives at IBM, started the briefing by showing their cloud evolution over the past year, and plans for the remainder of 2010. Last year saw the launch of LotusLive collaboration services and the Test Cloud for hosted test environments. By the end of 2009, cloud offerings had expanded to include analytics, storage and email plus cloud consulting services, and the beta for cloud-based development and test environments had opened up. That beta has evolved so that today we’re hearing about the launch of Smart Business Dev/Test on IBM Cloud: an enterprise-class environment for provisioning virtual machines on demand for software development and testing. By the end of this year, there will be more cloud offerings, and a variety of security, resiliency, capacity and compliance options, and an ecosystem of partners.

He discussed what they’ve learned from their clients: there is a universal interest in cloud computing, but that there won’t be a “Big Switch fantasy” happening in large enterprises any time soon. Instead, this is part of a transition from owning IT assets to sourcing IT solutions as part of an organization’s enterprise IT delivery mix, where cloud complements on-premise, and these often coexist in integrated hybrid services. Although cost is a factor, speed of deployment is also a key driver, since that drives time to value. And, since IBM always has a large services component, they have a suite of services around moving to and maintaining cloud services. To be clear, there is a predominant focus on private clouds, or what some would not consider cloud at all: fast provisioning (after you install all the hardware and infrastructure software), but everything is on the customer’s site, making this virtualization rather than true hosted cloud.

For hosted cloud, they see the initial sweet spot as the collaboration space, where they’re targeting the LotusLive brand, including the web conferencing tool which we were using for the briefing, email suite (Lotus Notes lives!) and even social networking, such as the BPM BlueWorks community. Altogether, IBM has 18 million users on LotusLive, including their own workforce and some large customers such as Panasonic.

Targeting both public and private cloud is their Smart Business Desktop, where the entire desktop environment – OS and applications – is virtualized rather than installed on the actual desktops, allowing for access from anywhere, and also providing desktop remote control and other IT service functions. This has long been used for VPN access to networks, but is a newer concept for full-time internal desktops. Coincidentally, eWeek just published an article on virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), discussing the benefits in terms of reduced maintenance and hardware costs (reduce desktop TCO by 15-35%) as well as business continuity, but also the relatively high startup costs and complexity; the author ultimately states “I hesitate to recommend VDI across the board”.

The third part of their cloud strategy is for virtual hosted server environments for ISVs – what appears to be a direct competitor to Amazon’s EC2 – providing development and test infrastructure through developerWorks Cloud Computing Resources, but apparently also production hosting (I think – the presentation was a bit vague here).

For my regular BPM readers, if you’ve made it this far, consider how you could use cloud development and test servers for BPM deployments, where some of the multiple environments required (usually at least four, sometimes as many as six) could be moved out of your own data centers, and provisioned at will.

Pat Toole, CIO of IBM, was up next to discuss how they are using their own products internally, speaking as a customer of the cloud offerings. They started with hosted development and test environments, and have half of their new development in the US happening on the dev/test cloud; this has reduced their server provisioning time from five days down to about an hour for both Power and x86 environments. Next, they looked at BI and analytics, with the dual aim of reducing costs and making the data more readily available to users. They consolidated 100 data warehouses into a single Cognos environment for 80,000 internal users in their Blue Insight initiative, and expect to add another 30 applications and double their users over the next year.

On the collaboration front, they turned on LotusLive web conferencing for all employees to use for internal and external meetings, logging 200 million minutes last year. They’ve recently added Engage for 6,000 users initially; although this seems to provide full social networking capabilities, Toole mentioned file sharing as the primary use case.

They’ve implemented Smart Business Desktop at one center in China in order to reduce TCO by more than 40% and improve security and control, and plan to roll this out to their call centers in US and India. Echoing the eWeek article, he said that this is not for everyone in the organization, but makes sense for certain classes of users and desktops. They’re also about to launch their first pilot on the storage cloud, and have identified about 1,000 applications for deployment in the production cloud.

In “eating their own cooking”, IBM is doing what any of their customers would be doing: trying to make their computing environment more efficient and less expensive.

Mike McCarthy, who heads the cloud computing group, gave the the details of today’s announcement:

Smart Business Development and Test environments on the IBM (public) cloud, initially within North America, on a pay-as-you-go or reserved capacity basis. Although hosted on their public cloud, this is intended to support enterprise clients in that it’s not an open community, but a platform for hosting your development and test environments as securely as if they were on premise; in fact, they plan to offer dedicated hardware environments in the future for the truly paranoid. There are several pre-configured software images to select from, offering a wide choice of configurations and deployment models. They offer 99.5% availability, sufficient for most dev/test environments, and support options up to 24×7 telephone support. This allows you to provision a development or test environment yourself in a matter of minutes: choose the service (software image, such as OS or OS plus tools), configure the usage configuration, and click to provision a new virtual server. Initially, they’ll be offering Red Hat and Novell Linux on x86 environments, with additional hardware options as well as Windows later in the year.
Adding development services, such as Rational SDS, to the existing Smart Business Test Cloud offering for private cloud deployments.
Rational Software Delivery Services for both their private and public Smart Business Development and Test Cloud.
Tighter integration of the developerWorks online community and the development/test cloud initiatives through a variety of learning resources.

Evan Bauer of the Collaborative Software Initiative joined the IBM team on the call to discuss their use of the IBM cloud for developing, testing and hosting the US Department of Education’s Open Innovation Portal. They used the beta version of the IBM cloud and open source software to develop and deploy this portal within three months. Hosting on IBM’s public cloud allows them to scale quickly and achieve excellent response time, providing a valuable pilot for the future use of cloud for government applications.

Last up was Tom Lounibos of SOASTA, an IBM partner offering CloudTest, an on-demand service for load-testing web applications by provisioning hundreds of virtual servers to simulate millions of users hitting a website. There are a couple of key use cases for this type of load-testing – e-commerce sites with seasonal peaks, and social media sites with peaks caused by news events – with some very high profile cases of unacceptable latency or even site failure due to load. CloudTest has been around for a while, but they’ve just announced that they’ll be running on the IBM cloud.

The IBM (public) cloud will initially be hosted in the US, with data centers in Europe added later in 2010. Although there was some talk about other data centers (such as Asia) in the future, the entire rollout plan wasn’t clear. Many organizations, especially financial services, need to have the data centers located in their own country, or at least one with better privacy laws than the US, so both the location of the data centers and the ability for a customer to select which country is hosting their systems will become important as IBM looks beyond the US market.

For those of us used to working with virtual servers hosted elsewhere, the concepts announced today aren’t new, but the IBM brand brings an air of respectability to the idea of using hosted virtual environments for a variety of uses.

2010 03 16 Sandy Kemsley cloud Comments (0)

ARISalign Online Process Modeling and BPM Community

There has been much speculation in the BPM world about Software AG’s online BPM community, originally dubbed AlignSpace, or as it has been recently renamed, ARISalign. Originally launched in a private beta months ago, those of us on the outside have been anticipating a look at how they plan to “combine social networking tools with intuitive tools for process design and modeling [to] collaborate effectively to create and improve processes”.

A few weeks ago, prior to the official beta release, I had a chance for a briefing with Thomas Stoesser of Software AG for a closer look, and I’ve been playing around with it myself since the beta opened. With ARISalign, they’re providing tools for collaboratively capturing business processes in an early process discovery stage, and also providing an open BPM community for anyone to participate, not just ARIS and webMethods users. In the future, they’re also planning for a marketplace for BPM-related products and services, although that’s not in the current offering.

Logging in to ARISalign, you see a home dashboard that shows a feed of updates on your projects, groups, discussions and networks, plus a message center and a list of your current projects. There’s also a Facebook-like status feature, although I’m not sure that I’d use this feature since it’s unlikely to be my primary social network – I don’t even do Facebook status updates any more since I started Twittering.

Projects are how process artifacts are organized in ARISalign, with a project including a number of components:

A whiteboard, similar in appearance to Lombardi Blueprint and other process discovery tools, that allows users to add “stages”, then activities that belong to each stage.
Any number of process maps that can be linked to, but not generated from, the activities on the whiteboard.
A discussion forum, which provides a simple threaded discussion board within the project.
A library of related files/documents that can be uploaded as background or reference materials. Currently, the library can only contain uploaded content, not links to content that is hosted elsewhere; links would have to be added in a discussion thread.

If you like the project framework but don’t plan to add process models, then a group has all the same features as a project except for the whiteboard and process maps: you can use it if you want only a discussion forum, library and timeline shared between a group of people.

Creating a project requires only specifying a project name: everything else is optional or has some reasonable defaults. You can add a description, and select industry and language from predefined lists, although these are used as project search metadata only and don’t change the form of the project in any way. You can also select the access control for viewing the project, confusingly called “Project Type”, as open (visible to all), restricted (anyone can see the project in a search list, but not the details or content) or hidden (not visible to non-members, even in search results). All projects require that you join the project in order to participate, which may or may not require a process administrator’s approval.

There are three roles that a member can be assigned for a specific project:

Project administrator, including the project owner/creator, which allows all functions including administering members, changing user roles, and archiving and renaming content.
Project contributor, which allows working with tools and adding content.
Project reviewer, which allows viewing content, participating in discussions and adding comments, but not changing content such as process models.

Unfortunately, there is no way to change the project owner from the original creator, although this is in the future plans, as is the idea of creating project templates for faster startup.

For an existing project, members will often want to start on the project dashboard where they can view a feed of all activity on the project (echoing the personal dashboard for a user, which shows activities for a user, their projects and their network). Similar to functionality recently added to Facebook, a user can hide specific people, models and activities on the dashboard, which creates a filter of only their view, not everyone’s view of the project dashboard.

To get started with process modeling, however, you’ll start on the project’s whiteboard tab, a near-real-time collaborative process discovery tool. High-level process steps, or stages, are added, then activities added below each stage: a process discovery paradigm for non-process-oriented users to just list the steps that are involved in the process. All project members can see each other’s changes as they occur, and can invite additional project members directly from the whiteboard view. Activities can be assigned properties, including comments by project reviewers; activities with comments show a pencil icon on the activity so that others know that comments exist. In the future, activities will also be able to have attachments; currently, attachments can only be added to the project library.

The whiteboard view also allows adding goals and KPIs, although these are purely informational and can’t (yet) be applied to any process models created within that project. In the future, there may be value in considering how KPIs can be linked to the process models and exported for use in other tools.

Unlike some other process discovery tools, the whiteboard view does not auto-generate a process model – apparently there was quite a bit of internal design conversation over whether to do this or not – but one or more process models can be added to the project. Adding and editing a process model creates a split screen view with the whiteboard and the process model; activities can be dragged from the whiteboard to the process model, which creates a linkage between the activity in those two locations, such that highlighting the activity on the whiteboard also highlights it on the process model, and vice versa. A whiteboard activity may be linked to more than one process model, so changes to the activity are not promoted to the process model. There can also be whiteboard activities that don’t end up on any process model. I’m not sure that I’m on board with this method; first of all, I would like to see a way to auto-generate a process model from the whiteboard, and I also think that if something is in the whiteboard view, it needs to be on a process model somewhere: otherwise, why is it in the whiteboard view at all? It appears that the reasoning behind this is that the process model is intended to be an executable process model, such that only the things that might end up in a BPMS would be included, whereas the whiteboard model includes purely manual tasks. Multiple processes from one whiteboard appears to make sense so that non-process people don’t have to think about what are distinct processes, but on second glance, I’m not sure that’s the right way to go.

The more we dig into this, the more that I’m left with the feeling that this is a front-end for webMethods, not an ARIS extension, although the process modeling palette looks more like ARIS Express rather than the webMethods Designer. ARISalign is intended to be a purely business tool, so doesn’t expose web services calls or other technical complexities.

Process models can be exported to webMethods format, XPDL, or opened directly in ARIS Express, but there’s no round-tripping since importing the model back from ARIS Express requires uploading it as a different project. ARIS Express now supports “whiteboard” collaborative models, so the whiteboard can be exported and opened in ARIS Express as well as the process model. There are no offline capabilities; the only offline alternative would be to export to ARIS Express, then upload the changed models to a different project or take screen snaps of the ARIS Express changes and add as images to the project library to document offline changes. Neither of these is particularly attractive, so this may not be an option if you have to have offline access. There are plans to improve the ARIS Express integration in the future, possibly allowing a process model to be downloaded and locked for editing in ARIS Express, then re-uploaded in place.

There’s a view of all process models in a project, which allows those models to be managed (renamed, exported, deleted), but any editing of the models occurs in the split-screen view with the project whiteboard.

Aside from the project functionality, there are a number of social networking features for managing your profile and your connections. You can set different views of your profile for your network or for public display, and can view recommendations of people to whom you might want to connect based on company, industry and shared contacts. The Message Center is very Google Wave-like, with participants shown at the top, and allowing public or private reply to any part of the thread. This holds potential to become the conversation framework used within projects, to replace the current simple discussion groups. In general, the UI is quite nice (although some may not like that it was created with Adobe Flex), and has borrowed liberally from successful features of Facebook and other social networks. The navigation is quite flat, making it easy to find your way around in the interface.

Software AG also showed off an ARISalign iPhone app at CeBIT, although it’s not generally available yet. I’m not sure I’d use this for much process modeling, although it would be useful for tracking what’s happening on projects, accepting invitations, participating in discussions and even looking at (or some light editing of) the whiteboard view.

Currently, ARISalign is available only as a hosted solution, and is hosted on the US version of Amazon Web Services. It’s architected so that on-premise hosting could be enabled in the future, although not in the current version. Software AG should consider having a version hosted on the EU AWS instance, since many organizations don’t want their information – even process models that don’t contain customer data – hosted in the US due to the privacy laws.

This is the first publicly-available version of ARISalign, and no one expects it to be perfect. How quickly Software AG can respond to users’ requests for new functionality – such as the inclusion of a marketplace for add-on applications and services – will be the real test of success, as I mentioned in my recent review of the IBM BlueWorks community.

There’s also the issue of merging the existing ARIS Community with ARISalign or at least cross-linking user accounts, which seems a logical step, but is not permitted by Germany privacy laws until Software AG and IDS Scheer officially become a single company, which could be several months still. The two sites may not end up merged; you can imagine the ARIS Community site being left with product support for ARIS and remain more actively managed, while the user-generated content such as discussions as well as the more generic tools be moved over to ARISalign. You can be sure that there will be some internal politics around this decision, too. Regardless, in the mean time, there’s a badge in the sidebar of each site linking to the other, encouraging you to sign up on the other site. That might, however, cause a bit of social networking fatigue for many business users.

2010 03 15 Sandy Kemsley BPM
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IBM BlueWorks Online BPM Community

I had a briefing a couple of weeks ago on IBM BlueWorks by Angel Diaz and Janine Sneed from the BlueWorks team. BlueWorks is IBM’s cloud-based BPM environment, providing the following capabilities:

Browser-based modeling, including strategy maps, capability maps, process maps and BPMN processes.
Pre-built content to supplement or replace a BPM center of excellence (CoE), including the ability to submit your own content.
Online community for collaboration and exchange of ideas.

BlueWorks was launched last July, and has several thousand people signed up, although I didn’t get a good feel for the level of activity. It’s based on Lotus Business Space, with the modeling editor and repository from the WebSphere BPM suite, which allows IBM to offer both a hosted and on-premise version.

They’ve kicked off the content part of BlueWorks by seeding it with a lot of content from internal and external contributors, including information provided by their professional services arm. The results is a large repository of articles, sample strategy maps, business measures such as KPIs, forums and blogs with more information that you could hope to scavenge through. It’s all categorized and tagged in multiple ways, however, making it easy to filter the library to just what you’re looking for, whether by topic, industry, or type of content. They also include industry content packs, which are bundles of industry-specific strategy maps and other content.

The process designer is Flash-based, and it only took me about 5 minutes to crash it; luckily, it saved as I worked, so I didn’t lose any work. Some of the operations are not very intuitive (I had to go to the help file to figure out how to add a new activity), but once I learned a few of the basics, it’s pretty efficient to use, and I could use the keyboard for entering my activity list, which I like. The process is shown in both a text outline view and a process outline view, very similar to other process discovery/outlining tools such as Lombardi Blueprint (which should make the integration of Blueprint into this environment straightforward from a user interface standpoint, if not a technical one). Once complete, I could export to a PowerPoint presentation (which includes slides for the process model and the details that I entered), a Business Document Archive (a binary format that I’m not familiar with) to my local file system or the asset repository, or to a WebSphere Business Modeler XML format.

This is where I found things a bit strange: I couldn’t export or otherwise convert the process model that I had created to use in the BPMN modeler, which is a separate tool. Maybe this is something that the Blueprint folks can teach them about. I found the BPMN modeler a bit clunky: resizing and placement of elements was awkward, although it allowed me to validate my model as valid BPMN. There definitely needs to be a way to move between these two process model types, to eliminate redrawing and also to allow a process analyst to quickly flip between the different perspectives. From the BPMN model, I could save to the shared repository, or export to BPMN 2.0 XML, WebSphere Business Modeler XML, or a Process Diagram Archive XML format.

I didn’t spend a lot of time on the strategy or capability maps; a strategy map is a mind-map type of model that allows you to model business SWOT factors as well as business goals, whereas a capability map shows the business capabilities and can link them to process models. The strategy, capability and process maps all have a similar user experience, and are all shown as siblings within folders in the BlueWorks space under the Design tab; BPMN models, on the other hand, are shown in a separate tab and have a completely different UI. The BPMN model seems like a bit of an add-on: obviously, there’s a need for BPMN modeling in an online BPM community, but they haven’t quite got it integrated yet. The three Design map types are really intended for business users, and allow functions such as pasting an indented bulleted list from a PowerPoint presentation into a strategy map to create an initial map. Links and attachments (including documents and folders) can be added to any node in any of the three Design diagram types. All four model types have versioning, and models of all types are visible in my dashboard view.

Aside from the functionality of the modelers, there’s the ability to collaborate on models: each person has their own private space in BlueWorks, or they can share their models with their team members. The upcoming version 7 of BlueWorks will allow more fine-grained privacy controls to allow sharing only with specific groups.

The content and community parts of BlueWorks form the basis of a CoE: smaller companies could use this as their only CoE, whereas larger ones might want to use content from BlueWorks with their own internal content. Content submitted to the content section is not only visible to anyone on BlueWorks, but also is explicitly licensed to IBM for redistribution, so this isn’t a place for your private intellectual property, but a good place to share ideas with people from other companies. IBM partner companies are starting to use it for sales material and starter content.

The hosted version of BlueWorks is free, and you don’t even need to be an IBM customer, but if you want to take this capability inside your own firewall, IBM would be happy to sell you WebSphere Business Compass (formerly WebSphere Publisher). Also based on Business Space, Diaz described it as an in-house version of BlueWorks, but it has many more tools such as forms designers, organization charts and other process modeling tools. You don’t need to use WebSphere Business Compass – it’s possible to go directly from BlueWorks to an executable system using the WebSphere and BPMN export formats – but for some companies, BlueWorks will act as the “gateway drug” to get them hooked on the bigger and better functionality of Business Compass.

I was briefed on Software AG’s online community, ARISalign, earlier this week and will post my thoughts on that soon; in both cases, these competing online communities lack some key functionality, but need to get their platforms out there for people to start using and feeding back on what’s needed. The best online community will result not from who has the most advanced starting point, but from who can be most responsive to their community’s needs.

You can sign up for your own BlueWorks account for free, and there’s a webinar tomorrow at 1pm ET on getting started with BlueWorks that will be recorded and available for replay later.

2010 02 16 Sandy Kemsley BPM
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BPM, Collaboration and Social Networking #brf

Although social software and BPM is an underlying theme in a lot of the presentations that I give, today at the Business Rules Forum is the first time that I’ve been able to focus exclusively on that topic in a presentation for more than 3 years. Here’s the slides, and a list of the references that I used:

BPM, Collaboration and Social Networking

View more presentations from Sandy Kemsley.

References:

The seminal papers on Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0: What Is Web 2.0 by Tim O’Reilly and Enterprise 2.0: The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration and Andrew McAfee.
Web 2.0 and BPM, the presentation where I first started talking about BPM and social software, from the BPMG conference in 2006.
Collaborative BPM: Drivers and Impacts, a paper that I wrote for the Handbook on Business Process Management, to be published by Springer something this year.
Richard Hirsch of Siemens has a series of introductory posts about social BPM, starting with Social BPM: A Taxonomy + The Playing Field, Social BPM: Definitions and Dissensions and Community-focused BPM: Lessons Learned from SAP’s Enterprise Services Community.
Other general discussions of BPM and social software can be found at Social Networking and BPM of the Future by Rashid Khan, Social Technologies Will Drive The Next Wave Of BPM Suites by Clay Richardson of Forrester, and Take advantage of Web 2.0 for next-generation BPM 2.0 by Pradip Roychowdhury and Diptiman Dasgupta of IBM.
The collaborative BPM modeler within Google Wave was described in Gravity – Collaborative Business Process Modelling within Google Wave by Alexander Dreiling of SAP, and in Very Quick Thoughts on Gravity: BPM / Google Wave integration by Richard Hirsch.
I summarized a Gartner presentation on BPM in the cloud in Pursuing Process Agility Goals Using SaaS.
Christina Lau of IBM gave a paper on BPM 2.0 – A REST based architecture for next generation workflow management at the Devoxx conference, highlighting the lightweight integration models that we can expect to see as social software impacts BPM; mashups and BPM within the enterprise are also discussed by Lauren Kelly in Enterprise mashups bring IT, LOB collaboration to BPM.
Both Michael Rosemann and I cover the topics of BPM and Twitter, him at Where BPM and Twitter could meet and me at BPM and Twitter (and other social destinations).
I cover several different BPM social networking communities of practice in Lombardi Blueprint update, Community participation in a hosted BPM system, and AlignSpace social BPM community. You can also find a BPMN community site online; Birgit Hapfelmeier, a grad student at QUT (which has a top-notch BPM program), discussed other communities in Business Process Modelling using Social Networks, as well as Scott Francis of BP3 in The Rise of Social BPM Tools.

There are many other references in this field; feel free to add your favorites in the comments section.

2009 11 03 Sandy Kemsley BPM
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Getting Business Process Value From Social Networks #GartnerBPM

For the last session of the day, I attended Carol Rozwell’s presentation on social network analysis and the impact of understanding network processes. I’ll be doing a presentation at Business Rules Forum next month on social networking and BPM, so this is especially interesting even though I’ll be covering a lot of other information besides social graphs.

She started with the (by now, I hope obvious) statement that what you don’t know about your social network can, in fact, hurt you: there are a lot of stories around about how companies have and have not made good use of their social network, and the consequences of those activities.

She posited that while business process analysis tells us about the sequence of steps, what can be eliminated and where automation can help, social network analysis tells us about the intricacies of working relationships, the complexity and variability of roles, the critical people and untapped resources, and operational effectiveness. Many of us are working very differently than we were several years ago, but this isn’t just about “digital natives” entering the workforce, it’s about the changing work environment and resources available to all of us. We’re all more connected (although many Blackberry slaves don’t necessarily see this as an advantage), more visual in terms of graphical representations and multimedia, more interactively involved in content creation, and we do more multitasking in an increasingly dynamic environment. The line between work and personal life blurs, and although some people decry this, I like it: I can go to many places in the world, meet up with someone who I met through business, and enjoy some leisure time together. I have business contacts on Facebook in additional to personal friends, and I know that many business contacts read my personal blog (especially the recent foodie posts) as well as my business blog. I don’t really have a lot to hide, so don’t have problem with that level of transparency; I’m also not afraid to turn off my phone and stop checking my email if I want to get away from it all.

Your employees are already using social media, whether you allow it within your firewall or not, so you might as well suck it up and educate them on what they can and can’t say about your company on Twitter. If you’re on the employee side, then you need to embrace the fact that you’re connected, and stop publishing those embarrassing photos of yourself on Facebook even if you’re not directly connected to your boss.

She showed a chart of social networks, with the horizontal axis ranging from emergent to engineered, and the vertical axis from interest-driven to purpose-driven. I think that she’s missing a few things here: for example, open source communities are emergent and purpose-driven, that is, at the top left of the graph, although all of her examples range roughly along the diagonal from bottom left to top right.

There are a lot of reasons for analyzing social networks, such as predicting trends and identifying new potential sources of resources, and a few different techniques for doing this:

Organizational network analysis (ONA), which examines the connections amongst people in groups
Value network analysis (VNA), which examines the relationships used to create economic value
Influence analysis, a type of cluster analysis that pinpoints people, associations and trends

Rozwell showed an interesting example of a company’s organizational chart, then the same players represented in an ONA. Although it’s not clear exactly what the social network is based on – presumably some sort of interpersonal interaction – it highlights issues within the company in that some people have no direct relation to their direct reports, and one person who was low in the organizational chart was a key linkage between different departments and people.

She showed an example of VNA, where the linkages between a retailer, distributor, manufacturer and contract manufacturer where shown: orders, movements of goods, and payments. This allows the exchanges of value, whether tangible or intangible, to be highlighted and analyzed.

Her influence analysis example discussed the people who monitor social media – either within a company or their PR agency – to analyze the contributors, determine which are relevant and credible, and use that to drive engagement with the social media contributors. I get a few emails per day from people who start with “I read your blog and think that you should talk to my customer about their new BPM widget”, so I know that there are a lot of these around.

There are some basic features that you look for when doing network analysis: central connectors (those people in the middle of a cluster), peripheral players (connected to only one or two others), and brokers (people who form the connection between two clusters).

There are some pretty significant differences between ONA, VNA and business process analysis, although there are some clear linkages: VNA could have a direct impact on understanding the business process flows, while ONA could help to inform the roles and responsibilities. She discussed a case study of a company that did a business process analysis and an ONA, and used the ONA on the redesigned process in order to redesign roles to reduce variability, identify roles most impacted by automation, and expose critical vendor relationships.

Determining how to measure a social network can be a challenge: one telecom company used records of voice calls, SMS and other person-to-person communications in order to develop marketing campaigns and pricing strategies. That sounds like a complete invasion of privacy to me, but we’ve come to expect that from our telecom providers.

The example of using social networks to find potential resources is something that a lot of large professional services firms are testing out: she showed an example that looked vaguely familiar where employees indicated their expertise and interests, and other employees could look for others with specific sets of skills. I know that IBM does some of this with their internal Beehive system, and I saw a presentation on this at the last Enterprise 2.0 conference.

There are also a lot of examples of how companies use social networks to engage their customers, and a “community manager” position has been created at many organizations to help manage those relationships. There are a lot of ways to do this poorly – such as blasting advertising to your community – but plenty of ways to make it work for you. Once things get rolling in such a public social network, the same sort of social network analysis techniques can be applied in order to find the key people in your social network, even if they don’t work for you, and even if they primarily take an observer role.

Tons of interesting stuff here, and I have a lot of ideas of how this impacts BPM – but you’ll have to come to Business Rules Forum to hear about that.

2009 10 06 Sandy Kemsley BPM
Gartner Comments (3)

Social media for community projects

If you ever wonder what BPM analyst/architect/bloggers do in their spare time, wonder no more:

Ignite T.O. Sandy Kemsley -The Hungry Geek from Ignite Toronto on Vimeo.

I was invited to give a presentation at Ignite! Toronto this week, and decided to discuss how I’ve been using social media – Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, blogging – and some integration technologies including RSS and Python scripting to promote a new farmers’ market in my community. I’m on the local volunteer committee that acts as the marketing team for the market. Here’s the presentation, it’s not too clear on the video:

The Hungry Geek

View more presentations from Sandy Kemsley.

If you’re not familiar with Ignite, it’s a type of speed presentation: 20 slides, 5 minutes, and your slides auto-advance every 15 seconds. For a marathon presenter like me, keeping it down to 5 minutes is a serious challenge, but this was a lot of fun.

For a technology view, check out slide 17 in the slide deck, which shows a sort of context diagram of the components involved. Twitter is central to this “market message delivery framework”, displaying content from a number of sources on the market Twitter account:

I manually tweet when I see something of interest related to the market or food. Also, I monitor and retweet some of our followers, and reply to anyone asking a question via Twitter.
When I publish a post on my personal blog that is in the category “market”, Twitterfeed picks it up through the RSS feed and posts the title and link on Twitter. These are posted to both the market account and my own Twitter account, so you may have seen them if you’re following me there.
Each week, I save up a list of interesting links and other tweet-worthy info, and put them in a text file. My talented other half wrote a Python script that tweets one message from that file each hour for the two days prior to each Saturday market day.
I connected my Flickr account with Twitter, and can either manually tweet a link to a photo directly from Flickr, or email a photo from my iPhone to a private Flickr email address that will cause the link to be tweeted. I could have used Twitpic for the latter functionality, but Flickr gives me better control over my photo archive.

The whole exercise has been a great case study on using social media for community projects with no budget, using some small bits of technology to tie things together so that it doesn’t take much of my time now that it’s up and running. I’d be doing most of the activities anyway: taking pictures of the market, cooking and blogging about it, and reading articles on local food and markets online. This just takes all of that and pushes it out to the market’s online community with very little additional effort on my part.

2009 08 28 Sandy Kemsley Web20
blogging
off topic
open source Comments (3)

Gartner’s 2009 Hype Cycle

Gartner’s hype cycle for 2009 was released this week, and there was a webinar today with Jackie Fenn to walk through it. The actual diagrams are not working on their press release right now, but ReadWriteWeb is hosting their own copy of the emerging technologies hype cycle (which was in the press release originally) if you want to take a look.

Gartner has 79 different hype cycles focused on individual technologies, rolled up in this special report that is free but doesn’t contain the meat: for that, you need to click through to the hype cycle for the technology in which you’re interested and purchase that report.

Fenn explained the concept of the hype cycle: technologies move from an innovation trigger up a steep slope of positive hype to the peak of inflated expectations, then down an equally steep slope of negative hype to the trough of disillusionment before increasing gradually along the slope of enlightenment to the plateau of productivity. She explained some of the specific indicators for each part of the cycle – which is what Gartner is analyzing to tell where on the hype cycle that a particular technology lies, along with the analysts’ subjective opinions – such as when certain rounds of venture funding kick in, and when best practices emerge. Different types of companies adopt technologies at different points in the hype cycle, depending on how conservative that they are, and how critical the particular technology is to their competitive differentiation.

By bisecting the curve at the local minimum in the trough of disillusionment, companies can ask themselves “what’s here that we could be using” for technologies to the left (considered new/cutting edge), and “what’s here that we’re not using” for those to the right (considered mainstream). There are some anomalies, such as corporate blogging and wikis already climbing the slope of enlightenment, whereas social software suites – which would likely include both of those – are just past the peak of inflated expectations.

She did a quick poll to see what technologies (from a very select subset of emerging technologies) that the attendees think will generate the most value for their organizations during the next two years, then linked the responses to where those technologies lie on the curve: not surprisingly, cloud computing topped the poll at 42%, and it’s at the peak of inflated expectations right now, where there is a proliferation of suppliers and activity beyond early adopters. Social software suites, just past the peak with negative press beginning and supplier consolidation approaching, was second at 29%.

There are several new hype cycles this year, including cloud computing, data center power and cooling, and virtualization; there are also several new technologies listed in the emerging technologies hype cycle that Fenn focused on in the webinar, such as wireless power.

Every technology on the emerging technologies hype cycle is also on a priority matrix that serves as a rough risk-benefit measure, showing the expected years to mainstream adoption (based on Gartner’s analysis of how fast that each is moving through the hype cycle) mapped against the level of expected benefits (low-moderate-high-transformational).

Gartner produced their first hype cycle in 1995, and Fenn showed the original one from back then with a few of the technologies mapped on it; some of those are still poking along, such as speech recognition that hasn’t moved much in 10 years; others, such as Bluetooth, moved through the cycle at a brisk pace and reached mainstream adoption quickly.

Gartner has published a book on Mastering the Hype Cycle: How to Choose the Right Innovation at the Right Time (Gartner), which provides a framework for understanding the hype cycle and adoption patterns that new technologies will move through, and understanding the danger zones.

2009 08 12 Sandy Kemsley technology Comments (2)

AlignSpace social BPM community

A couple of months ago, Software AG launched AlignSpace, a social BPM community, and gave a webinar to explain what it’s about (replay here). AlignSpace is intended to be a vendor-neutral place where people doing process discovery can share ideas and collaborate on process discovery. Gartner estimates that over 40% of BPM project time is spent on process discovery, which is inherently a collaborative activity including everyone from process participants through developers and a BPM center of excellence, but there aren’t a lot of great tools out there to do this.

Software AG looked at a lot of social media sites to understand the key features that people want when working together online, and created a cloud-based platform where people can capture process requirements and model processes. This is intended to be beyond what Lombardi is already doing with Blueprint, where people can collaborate on create a specific organization’s process models, and create the potential for a marketplace as well as a collaboration platform. That being said, their initial process outline view has a lot in common with Blueprint, with stages/milestones comprising activities, and the way that can be also visualized as a process map. You can import a model from Visio or XPDL for sharing in AlignSpace, then export it back out again. They also have a home page that shows what’s happening in processes in which you’re involved, and links to your contacts on other social sites.

The AlignSpace Marketplace is intended to be able to find or document BPM resources, whether people or products/models, then allow participants to rank those resources for others to see.

They’re still in a closed beta, but you can go there and sign up to participate. AlignSpace will be free to use, and although vendor-independent, it will be launched with a library and community of resources (some of which will, necessarily, have particular vendor expertise). There’s some lightweight Software AG branding on it, but it’s not their intention to block anyone from it: it’s really intended to be an open BPM community. I give them a lot of credit for this, since most of the other BPM communities launched by vendors are very much specific to their own products, which is going to stifle a lot of good discussion. Software AG seems to recognize, even in these economic times, is that a rising tide floats all boats: if more people are interested in BPM, and AlignSpace helps to get them over the initial barriers of adoption, then all BPM vendors will benefit. Outside the BPM vendor-specific offerings, there are definitely other collaborative workspaces and social networks around, but few with a BPM focus.

Security is obviously going to be a serious consideration: even though most companies don’t put customer data in their process models (as opposed to the executing processes), the processes may represent intellectual property that provide them with a competitive advantage. They are looking at corporate-restricted versions, such that only users from within your domain can access it; the same sorts of security measures have already been put in place in Blueprint, and you can be sure that other cloud solutions are going to have to solve the same problem.

They have ambitions to move this beyond BPM and provide a collaborative space for discovery/requirements for other sorts of IT projects: a bit like ConceptShare, but with more of a focus on technology implementations rather than media and design.

I had a chance to talk to Miko Matsumura of Software AG around the time of the initial AlignSpace announcement; he admitted (which is what I love about Miko) that initially AlignSpace is a lot of big ideas but not much delivered. Like Google with its betas, the idea is to get something out there for people to use, then use their early feedback in order to decide what gets added in next. Although they’re trying to focus on “data format promiscuity” in order to allow customers from many BPMS vendors to participate, the process models are publish and subscribe rather than an interactive whiteboard model in their BPM sketchpad. The big focus is on creating fertile ground for the concept of collaborative process improvement, pulling together innovators from across multiple organizations and infecting companies with process innovation. Data formats are only one issue, as he points out: there is as much tribalism and heterogeneity in the people issues as in the systems that they use, and we need to get the tribes to disband, or at least come to a neutral territory.

From a social media standpoint, the AlignSpace presence doesn’t get full marks: their blog hasn’t been updated since June, their Twitter stream is mostly links to other BPM resources rather than any original material or updates on AlignSpace, and on Facebook they have both a group and a page, without a clear distinction between how each is used.

This all sounds great, but as yet, I haven’t seen the beta. Yes, that’s a hint.

2009 08 10 Sandy Kemsley BPA
BPM
Web20
cloud Comments (12)

BPM and Twitter (and other social destinations)

Professor Michael Rosemann of the BPM Research Group of Queensland University of Technology has published a short paper on BPM and Twitter on the ARIS Community site, where he lists three possible uses of Twitter with BPM:

Use Twitter to update you whenever there are changes to a process that you’re following. In this case, he’s talking about following processes, not process instances, so that you receive notifications for things such as changes to the process maps/roles, or new aggregate monitoring statistics.
Have a process follow you on Twitter (or an automated stream that knows when you’re scheduled to be unavailable), so that it knows when you’re away and assigns substitutes for your role.
Have a process instance tweet, either for milestone notification or with a link to the process instance, acting as a BPM inbox.

I’m not so sure about the second one, but the first and last are really just a matter of capturing the events as they occur, and sending them off to Twitter. Most BPMS can generate events for some or all of these activities, potentially available through an RSS feed or by posting them onto an ESB; as Rosemann points out in his article, there are a number of different ways to then get them onto Twitter.

My other half did a series of experiments several months ago on process events, including output to Twitter; he used a GPS as input (I wanted him to use a BPMS, but he was keen on the location events) and simple Python scripts to send the messages to Twitter. He tested out a number of other interfaces, including Coral8 for event stream processing, two blogging platforms, Gtalk, email, Google’s App Engine and Amazon’s Simple Queue Service; the idea is that with some simple event processing in the middle, you can take the relevant events from your BPMS (or any system that generates events) and send them pretty much wherever you want without a lot of customization.

I think that using Twitter to monitor process instances is the most interesting concept of the three that Rosemann presents, since you can potentially send tweets to people inside or outside your organization about process milestones that interest them. If you’re nervous about using Twitter, either for security reasons or fear of the fail whale, you can run your own microblogging service using an open source platform such as laconi.ca or a commercial solution such as Socialtext’s Signals.

I’ll be attending the workshop on BPM and social software at the upcoming BPM research conference in Ulm, Germany; I haven’t seen the papers to be delivered at the workshop (or the rest of the conference), but I’d be very surprised if there isn’t a lot of discussion about how to incorporate Twitter and other social tools into our more enterprise-y BPM existence.

2009 08 07 Sandy Kemsley BPM
Web20
cloud Comments (7)

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.

Tagged e2open

2009 06 24 Sandy Kemsley BPM
E2.0 conf Comments (0)

Open Text Social Media briefing

I had a chance to meet with Cheryl McKinnon from Open Text while here at the Enterprise 2.0 conference for a briefing and a demo of Open Text Social Media, their enterprise social software offering to be released within a few weeks. This is a part of the Enterprise 2.0 market that I’m really interested in: how do we add a social layer on existing enterprise platforms, such as enterprise content management (ECM)?

Open Text already has some amount of collaboration around document management in their product portfolio, as well as web content management. Since they have a solid content management platform backing all of the content, they’re able to add the necessary aspects of governance, compliance and security that has to surround certain content without, hopefully, that getting in the way of collaboration. The Open Text Social Media product is pushing that a step further, adding more social aspects to content collaboration. Most content management – and content collaboration that goes with it – focuses on connecting people to content; OTSM also connects people to people in a content-centric manner.

They started with a few basic principles: keep the user interface simple so that there would be few barriers to adoption, while maintaining the security, auditability and records management functionality from the underlying ECM suite. They’ve removed the requirement for the content to be viewed in the hierarchical folder-type fashion that is inherent in the ECM system, and added discussions and wikis as well as maintaining a social graph of person-to-person interactions. This provides three key areas of functionality:

The social network inside an enterprise
A social marketplace with customers and partners
A repository for “corporate memory”

We moved on to a demo, starting with the personal dashboard home screen that shows the status and presence indicator of people who I follow, communities to which I belong, and content that I have flagged to follow. My personal profile contains structured information, some of which can be pulled from LDAP/ActiveDirectory, plus Facebook-like status messages – this is what appears on the home screen of people who follow me – and my blog. Also, anywhere where my name appears within the site, hovering over the link pops up a mini view of my profile.

Communities are a combination of wikis, documents and discussions, and can be designated as public, public read-only, private and secret. All of these security designations are inside the firewall: “public”, for example, means that everyone inside the enterprise can see and contribute to it. Private read-only could be used for more traditional broadcast intranet content; private means that the content is hidden but the community is visible and anyone could request membership in the community; secret means that the community is hidden and available only by direct invitation. Discussions within a community appear on the “Feed” tab, and are fairly standard topic-based discussions where you can read and reply to the thread, with the additional ability to flag a topic so that it appears in my flagged items on my home screen, where new replies to the topic would be indicated: a sort of content subscription. There is no ability (yet) to include an external feed into a community, although there’s a bookmarklet to make it easy to share external links as part of a discussion. The “Documents” tab in a community is (I assume) a view into the underlying content repository, but is a flat list view rather than a folder-based hierarchy since presumably there would be a small number of documents in the community. I’m not sure how well that user interface will scale if a community has hundreds of documents on that tab, although there are filtering capabilities. The wiki tab within the community allows multiple wiki pages to be created, also apparently in a flat navigation structure which may not scale well. The wiki has pretty standard (and easy to use) edit and comment functionality, plus the ability to flag content to follow in my home page. There’s a complete revision history stored for each wiki page, and you can roll back to an earlier version if required.

All of the community content can be pushed into the ECM archive, which would enforce records retention and other governance rules, although we didn’t get into the details of how seamless that would be to community authors and readers.

The searching is where we really start to see the people-to-people capabilities: searches locate content, as you would expect, but also locate people and communities that are contributing to or discussing that content, as well as people who have the search terms in their profile or their blog posts.

They round it all out with some pretty slick applications for a Blackberry or iPhone. These are applications, not mobile versions of a website, so include persistent cache for use when you’re offline.

There’s an obvious overlap with SharePoint functionality here, and there will undoubtedly be a battle inside some organizations between these two proven enterprise platforms when it comes to social media. Open Text’s advantage is their ECM repository, which far out-performs anything that SharePoint has to offer, and can be used as the back-end content repository for SharePoint even if a customer decides to go that direction for their enterprise social networking. That’s not unique to Open Text; other ECM vendors such as IBM/FileNet also have SharePoint connectors to allow their repositories to be used to manage SharePoint content transparently. Open Text, however, goes beyond that by offering direct social networking extensions to their ECM platform that have the potential to replace SharePoint in an organization that has already standardized on Open Text’s ECM. This direct integration with a robust content repository provides them with a distinct advantage over the Enterprise 2.0 point solutions, and make them the one for the other ECM vendors to beat in the social enterprise content collaboration market.

2009 06 24 Sandy Kemsley ECM Comments (0)

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.

Tagged e2conf

2009 06 24 Sandy Kemsley E2.0 conf Comments (2)

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.

Tagged e2conf

2009 06 24 Sandy Kemsley E2.0 conf Comments (2)

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