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PROCESS FOR THE ENTERPRISE
A Blog about Enterprise BPM and Business Process Improvement by the folks at BP3
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
WE’RE HITTING “PAUSE”
April 24th, 2012
We’re hitting “pause” on blogging while we roll out site upgrades. We’re
updating our BP3 branding significantly, and as we’re updating content in our
staging environment, my writing skills have been required elsewhere!
Look for the “new look” soon – just in time for Impact!
PS- a little hint of what’s to come, a picture of a BP3 business card:
Tags: #ibmimpact, backstage pass
Posted in News | 0 Comments
WE’RE READY TO MAKE AN IMPACT
April 19th, 2012
[Note: this is a repost of a guest post on the IBM Impact Blog – thankyou to
Shaku Selvakumar for inviting me to share on the blog!]
WHY WE’RE EXCITED ABOUT IMPACT
Last year we went to IBM Impact and really got a lot out of it. Even though I
probably won’t have the good fortune to get free tickets to the Penn & Teller
show for a second year in a row, I’m really looking forward to Impact again this
year.
As a business partner, Sunday was a great time to catch up with some IBM
colleagues, and other partner firms that we occasionally do business with,
before all the customers arrive.
A couple of the real highlights for me last year – Katie Linendoll was a great
host of the main tent sessions. The Caterpillar talk was truly impressive in the
depth of their relationship with IBM over 80 years. The Lincoln Trust sessions
were great – and got great reviews from the folks who made it to their sessions
– I won’t be surprised if their sessions this year are just as good.
This year I’m looking forward to Walter Isaacson on day 1. On Day 2 I’m looking
forward to getting IBM’s vision for BPM and ODM. Specifically Phil Gilbert and
Steve Mills – last year those did an impressive tour de force on all of the
software assets that IBM brings to bear for its customers (and BPM in
particular), and they were my two favorite IBM speakers of the event. We had a
gratifying response to our Keeping the Business in BPM session as well – it was
a packed house and the Q&A was the best part.
TRENDS IN BPM
We’re seeing some trends building that we hope we’re in position to capitalize
on as a company, but mostly we hope we’re in a position to provide our customers
what they need to be successful. The trend toward cloud computing seems
inexorable. As a result we’ve put our own spin on deploying IBM BPM’s Process
Center in the cloud. It has already transformed how we do our own work.
Similarly, the influence of mobile on what we do is growing by the day. We’ve
been investing in a mobile product offering that shows where we can go with
mobile when we marry it up to real BPM. We’re announcing our offering at
Impact, and we’re calling it BPMobility. It represents bringing all of our BPM
experience to the mobile experience – and should give customers an idea of the
kind of engaging, compelling mobile apps they could be putting in the hands of
their employees. Mobile is going to change your business, figure out how to
make the change rather than wait for it to happen to you.
Finally, the BPM tide is coming in. Everywhere we look our customers are doing
more and more with BPM. And more customers are approaching us about really deep
BPM projects that affect their core business. We’re investing in growing out
team to meet this wave of demand that is coming – I’ve never had more visibility
to BPM pipeline projects than I do right now.
SO WHAT IS BP3 DOING AT IMPACT?
First, we’re participating in a session on IBM BPM and Mobile Development. The
session title is “2738 What’s New: IBM BPM for Mobile Application Development“.
We’ll be presenting essentially three approaches to mobile- packaged app, custom
native app, and custom hybrid mobile app – all made possible by new REST APIs
IBM released on version 7.5.1. We’re going to talk about the different
approaches and tradeoffs and what new things like WorkLight bring to the mix.
Second, we’re sponsoring a pedestal (E14) at the expo, under the BP Mobility
banner. Expect us to be there for the duration, ready to demonstrate a native
iPad application that shows just how engaging a mobile BPM app could be. We’ll
also be prepared to talk about the BP Mobility framework that the demo was built
with, and the modules that expose BPM essentials to your mobile app efforts.
But what we want most is to hear your stories – what kinds of mobile apps do you
need to make your business run more effectively? How can we help you to connect
your field teams to your processes more effectively? We want to hear it, and we
want to understand how we can help you do it.
Third, we’re sponsoring a Birds-of-a-Feather session on Mobile BPM (timing
TBD). In it, we’ll reprise our pedestal demonstration and take questions about
our approach and where we see things going in mobile, and how that impacts our
BPM efforts.
A TIME FOR REFLECTION, AND LAUNCHING SOMETHING NEW
We had such a great year in 2011, and there are so many changes unfolding for us
in 2012 as we grow, that we’ve embarked on a re-branding effort for BP3. You’ll
see it reflected in our new branding for BP Mobility, and our new BP3 logo. Our
site refresh is coming just days before Impact. We think the new branding
reflects where we’re going with BP3 for the next 5-10 years. And Impact is a
great way to launch a new product and a new brand – so we’ve set our sights on
this target for all the work we’ve done over the last year to get ready for this
moment. We can’t wait to unveil.
So in this context, it was pretty gratifying to be named an IBM Champion for
Websphere. I have to thank Mihnea Galeteanu for nominating me – something I
wasn’t even aware I would qualify for. Obviously we put a lot of effort into
our blogging and into the BPM community, and it is quite nice to be recognized
for doing what I enjoy doing in any case. Here’s to an even better 2012 for IBM
BPM, Websphere, and the ecosystem. If you’ve read this far, please don’t
hesitate to introduce yourself at Impact – I’d love to meet with as many IBM BPM
practitioners and users and customers as possible.
Tags: #ibmimpact, BPM, IBMBPM
Posted in Cloud, Mobile, People, Technology | 0 Comments
FREE PRESS
April 18th, 2012
One of the great frustrations in the BPM market is how difficult it is to get
companies to share their successes with BPM. Unlike the way GE and a few other
companies trumpeted their six-sigma successes, companies this time around are
keeping their success to themselves, in large part. I know this is true because
we’ve been prevented by our own customers from sharing their success stories!
They often want to keep the great news to themselves.
But then look at Carphone Warehouse – a company I hadn’t even heard of a few
years ago, I now know quite a bit about. And I know about them because of only
one reason – their willingness to publicize their great results from their BPM
initiative with Nimbus, and among the analyst firms. They’ve been referenced in
blog posts, in comments on forums, in comments on blog posts, in news articles,
and in analyst reports and slides. Witness the latest blurb from Gartner:
There is exactly one company called out by name. And it is positive press.
That can’t be bad for business. Can’t be bad for recruiting talent to their
business. And it can’t be bad for their stock price.
If you want some free marketing and press for your firm, publishing your BPM ROI
and success stories is a great way to get it. Congrats to Carphone Warehouse.
Let’s hope some more firms step up to the plate!
Tags: BPM, Gartner, Nimbus
Posted in News | 0 Comments
ALWAYS BE RECRUITING?
April 17th, 2012
Along with “Always Be Closing” and “Always Be Selling”, we can add “Always Be
Recruiting” as Ben Yoskovitz of Instigator Blog writes:
> Running the two processes of fundraising and recruiting simultaneously is
> incredibly challenging. Both are time consuming, frustrating and risky. You’ll
> often hear people tell you that when you’re fundraising it’s almost impossible
> to do anything else with the business (continue building / iterating on
> product, acquiring customers, marketing, etc.) And that’s surprisingly true.
> First-timers don’t believe it until they’re neck deep in fundraising, two
> months in and shocked that the rest of their startup has made little progress.
> But raising money and recruiting are very similar processes, which makes it
> easier to context shift between the two. And if you do manage to get people
> convinced to jump pre-funding (and they’re waiting for it to close), you can
> highlight those targeted recruits to investors. You don’t just have empty
> buckets with titles and job descriptions that you need to fill, you actually
> have people eager and ready to go.
I think we can sum up this post as – Always Be Recruiting (ABR). And it is
true. You don’t start and stop the recruiting process for people who grow your
business – you’re always making connections and keeping track of people who some
day could impact your firm positively – even if they never work for you but just
become an advocate for your business. Maybe “Recruiting” is the wrong word
because to most people it implies the “hiring” part of the process rather than
the “socializing/networking” part of the process.
I’ve had recruiting and hiring and interviewing responsibilities at every
company I’ve worked with – and the one piece of advice I always gave was not to
shut the machine down. You can reduce the number of people you hire, or fly in
for interviews. You can raise the bar in lean times (to hire only truly
exceptional people). But you should never shut it down completely – because it
takes time to get the pipeline going – 3-6 months from a cold start – and you
want to be ready when the demand shows up, or when you suffer attrition. That
3-6 months will feel like an eternity – and you’ll miss business opportunities
simply because you don’t have the right people available.
I’ve seen the cost of this stopping-and-starting first hand. It is why we’re
always listening at BP3. Always keeping our eye on the ball for growing the
business. It has paid off time and time again. And it is why I’m in Indiana
tonight, doing a couple of college career fairs. Time to find a couple of
interns, and a couple of full-time hires, and import some talent down to Austin,
and into the BPM ecosystem.
Tags: backstage pass, staffing, startups
Posted in People | 1 Comment
ECONOMICS AND USER ACQUISITION FOR MOBILE APPS
April 16th, 2012
Vijay Dheap of IBM recently posted about the economics of Mobile Apps, and there
were a few good points to take out of it:
> Mobile web apps leverage highly available skills in web development to deliver
> a mobile specific user experience. Technologies such as HTML5, JavaScript and
> CSS have matured to a point where they can support rich user experiences.
> These apps also have the added benefit that once created, they can be
> repurposed to support multiple mobile device platforms with relatively minimal
> effort. There is a greater level of standardization in the browser engines
> than in any other components of mobile platforms. Mobile [web] apps are the
> most economical approach to serving your mobile users, however they do have a
> significant drawback in that they cannot provide developers access to native
> device resources or capabilities (i.e. contacts, camera etc).
That’s exactly the issue. Doing cross-platform apps (HTML5) optimizes around
development cost, rather than around user experience. In many cases this is the
right thing to do. But of course it comes at a cost. Likewise, building a
native app has a cost of implementation that is higher, with the benefit being
better user experience.
Hybrid apps offer some of the benefits (and tradeoffs) of both worlds.
In some applications (e.g. consumer apps), we have to worry about user
adoption. Adam Nash wrote a detailed blog on the topic of user acquisition for
mobile apps and the mobile web…
> If you are religious about the web as a platform, the most upsetting thing
> about native applications is that they work. The fact is, in almost every
> case, the product manager who pushes to launch a native application is
> rewarded with metrics that go up and to the right. As long as that fact is
> true, we’re going to continue to see a growing number of native applications.
What I love about Adam’s post is that he acknowledges the facts as well as how
they make web advocates feel. It is frustrating that native apps “work” and web
apps just don’t, when it comes to user acquisition.
> On the web, no one knows how to grow organic traffic in an effective,
> measurable way. However, launch a native application, and suddenly you start
> seeing a large number of organic visits. Organic traffic is often the most
> engaged traffic. Organic traffic has strong intent.
I think he sums it up well: “Focus on Experience, not Technology” – in other
words, build the right experience for your user base, rather than just designing
around the technology you want to use or want to win.
Applied to enterprise software – this is a huge shift from the 1990’s and
2000’s. Enterprise software has been almost always focused on the technology
underpinnings at the expense of the user experience. If I had a nickel for
every time I had to discuss the app servers a product supported, which version
of a database the product supported, which javascript engine, which Java
version, etc… Well, I’d be retired. The point of the focus on experience is
that those technical decisions need to be very sound, but then they also need to
be abstracted away so that we can focus on the problem at hand and not on some
of the irrelevant technical details. Enterprise software is being increasingly
“consumerized”, however – and user experience is emerging as an important factor
in that market as well.
Posted in Mobile | 1 Comment
WHAT INSTAGRAM-FACEBOOK TELLS US ABOUT BPM AND MOBILE
April 11th, 2012
In light of the discussion about Mobile and BPM recently, I thought the
Instagram purchase by Facebook was quite interesting.
Om Malik’s GigaOm has a great article on the topic.
> My translation: Facebook was scared shitless and knew that for first time in
> its life it arguably had a competitor that could not only eat its lunch, but
> also destroy its future prospects. Why? Because Facebook is essentially about
> photos, and Instagram had found and attacked Facebook’s achilles heel — mobile
> photo sharing.
Not that Instagram necessarily set out to attack the Achilles heel, but they
definitely found it. But why would it be Facebook’s Achilles heel? Partly
because Facebook started in the era pre-iPhone. Oh I could say pre-smartphone
but that is really disingenuous. It is the iPhone of 2007 that changed things.
It took successful companies like Facebook longer to come around to the
importance of the mobile phone than it did for upstarts like Instagram. If
Facebook had been struggling in 2009, no doubt they would have focused on mobile
to find a wedge to compete against the likes of MySpace. But they weren’t
struggling, they were thriving. They were busy scaling to a few hundred million
users. They can be forgiven for not realizing that mobile wasn’t just a target
platform, but a new source of value and competition.
Because Facebook saw mobile as just a target platform to hit (with a little
different UI than a browser), the optimization was around cost – namely
development and design cost. Focus on HTML5, and a cross-platform experience
that is hard to differentiate from what you’d get in a browser. Voila! One app
to rule them all – it runs on Android, iOS, Blackberry, and Windows Phone, with
possibly only minor tweaks.
But users don’t love HTML5 apps. They love native apps. Instagram created the
native photo-sharing app that people love to use.
Dave Brakoniecki assigns the real cause-and-effect to the idea that Instagram
was solving a different problem than Facebook:
> The problem with photo uploading for every site on the internet has always
> been the hassle of getting your photos from your digital camera to the cloud.
> Here is a pretty standard running order of events from 5 years ago or less:
>
> 1. Take photos on your digital camera
> 2. Transfer photos to your computer
> 3. Edit or process photos as required
> 4. Upload the photos to the cloud
> 5. Tag and release them for public consumption
>
> It’s a lot of steps and a fairly big hassle to actually get photos from your
> digital camera to a website to share them. Interestingly, most websites can do
> very little to reduce this hassle because they only control a couple of steps
> in the process.
>
> The basic outline above is true for Flickr when it sold in 2005 and Facebook
> today. Even photo specialist sites like Smugmug pretty much follow the same
> flow.
However, I can take and post a photo directly from Facebook. The problem is
that the Facebook app isn’t JUST about taking and sharing photos – there’s a ton
of other stuff going on in that app. By the time I’m taking a picture I’ve
probably missed the moment. So I take a picture with the Camera app, then open
up Facebook at my leisure and share the photo I’ve already taken from the Camera
roll. I don’t think the process was that different – it was the *experience*
that was dramatically different. The Facebook mobile photo sharing experience
was sub-par. Instagram’s is great. And their filters can hide a lot of the bad
photography being taken(!)…
Dave’s skeptical that the real, general, answer is that mobile-first makes for a
good entrepreneurial approach. He wraps with:
> If you are looking for technology trends to invest in, mobile first is a great
> bet but you have the luxury of a portfolio approach. You can play the numbers.
>
> If you are an entrepreneur, you have one shot so, before you decide that all
> you need is an iphone app and a holding page on the web, best think long and
> hard about the actual problem you are trying to solve.
He’s right. But let’s flip the coin to the other side. If you’re looking for a
way to disrupt an incumbent company, mobile first is – in many market segments –
a fantastic way to do it. Just as being cloud-first was a fantastic way to
disrupt many other market segments. Some of those cloud-disrupters are now
vulnerable to being disrupted by good mobile-first startups. Not every problem
is susceptible to a good mobile-first strategy – but if you’re not going
mobile-first you should at least be able to explain why you’re ruling it out.
Returning to BPM: if you’re rolling out new processes for your firm, mobile
first in your process design may lead you to surprising improvements in process,
and may even lead you to disrupt competition.
Tags: BPM, David Brakoniecki
Posted in Mobile, News | 0 Comments
RELATED BPM-MOBILE POST ON EBIZQ
April 10th, 2012
The BPM-Mobile discussion migrated over to ebizQ, with the question:
> As Keith Swenson writes on Dion Hinchcliffe’s recent keynote at AIIM2012, “The
> shift to mobile computing is the most dramatic technology transition in
> history. Ever.” So how do you think mobile will continue to impact BPM?
I thought I’d share my comments here as well as on the forum:
The tactical:
* Mobile BPM user design (UI/UX) requires radical improvement.
* Process designs need to take into account location, geofencing, and other
innate capabilities of mobile phones. Currently most processes never assume
we know where someone is, physically. Nor that this person can relocate
themselves while participating in the process.
* BPM practitioners need to stay up to date with mobile tech
* BPM needs to bring the process context to mobile. Don’t just notify me of
everything. Know WHEN to notify me, and why, within this process that you’re
notifying me. (All the platforms do notifications, but who cares – what
matters is getting the right information at the right time in order to enable
you to manage your process).
The strategic:
* There may be a new BPM entrant that is mobile-first. Think about instagram
vs. facebook – which exposed that facebook’s mobile strategy was pretty poor
(HTML only, pretty bad response rate, etc.).
* Instagram’s slick native app ran circles around it.
* New enterprise applications will be built with mobile processes and BPM
capabilities (to an extent) baked in.
* Existing BPM vendors will add mobile capabilities and tooling (by building or
acquiring)
* The net result is that all of these players will be putting pressure on each
other.
BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) is quickly turning to “give me an iPhone” or “give
me an iPad”… I’d predict a lot of the enterprise applications will standardize
more often on iOS because it is the de facto standard for tablets. Hardly anyone
complains when their company gives them an iPhone to use (at our company, always
a BYOD place of work, only 2 people have elected non-iPhone… )
By providing consistent target platform for application developers it lowers
development costs – while allowing for a richer user-interface experience (same
screen dimensions, resolution, operating system, coding frameworks, etc.)
Tags: BPM, ebizQ, Mobile
Posted in Mobile | 0 Comments
IMAGINE A BETTER MOBILE BPM
April 9th, 2012
No series of posts on the cloud would be complete without also mentioning what’s
going on in mobile, as Perfect Storm Brewing, makes clear.
Ever since I first graduated from college, I’ve been working with firms who
really wanted to “enable” remote employees and traveling employees. At first it
was laptops. We wrote and deployed software that could function in sub-second
time on x486 CPUs on laptops that had less than 8MB of memory. Later, we saw a
move to specialized hardware devices with primitive stencil or touch-based
interfaces. And then we saw such ruggedized hardware running commoditized
operating systems (windows or unix), rather than a custom operating system. We
still see the vestiges of these efforts today in the field. A hodgepodge of
devices of varying capability and quality. But I can imagine a better world.
I’m imagining a world where BPM mobile apps are native, rather than HTML5.
Where the user experience is as rich as the best iOS apps (less like Facebook,
more like Paper). Where the mobile apps actually understand the business
process, and the business process understands how to leverage mobile apps –
location and notifications in particular.
It turns out there are all kinds of people out there with purpose-built devices,
and sub-par software experiences even today. Think of the delivery man coming
to your door with a portable device for you to sign for a package. You can’t
even read your own signature. And the hardware is expensive. Now imagine that
same deliveryman with an iPad.
There’s always been a motivation to better equip our field personnel. As
technology has improved, so have the tools – in fits and starts. But the last 5
years have seen the greatest opportunity for change in equipping field employees
that I can remember since the advent of cheap cell phones.
There’s a move under weigh to commodity hardware – iPads and tablets (but mostly
iPads at this point) and purpose-built software (mobile apps). A lot of custom
enterprise applications are being built as mobile apps – but most of them are
focused on the customers or consumers. They may even connect at a key point to
some internal system, but only at a point. Or two.
But can’t we do better? Can’t we provide mobile apps that really understand your
field engineering processes? That truly understand how insurance adjusting fits
in with the overall claims process? That truly understand the processes that
sales people engage with? Apps that provide the right context from the process,
and leverage the context your mobile device provides, to improve your
productivity?
And do we really want our HR processes intermingled with our sales processes and
our claims processes? I’m not convinced that we do. A fictional ACME corp
doesn’t need a single BPM mobile app – ACME needs mobile apps that make sense
for each of its critical processes – distributed to the users that make sense
for those processes. And the apps should be tailored for the processes they
interact with. Of course the processes should understand what can be done from
mobile devices (potentially everything – but potentially not).
The big software vendors will continue to ship general-purpose applications and
mobile apps – as they should – after all it is reaching the broadest audience
that is of most interest to them. But for customers that really need a tailored
experience, we can pair commodity hardware with fantastic user experiences – and
achieve process improvement at the same stroke. It is the holy grail of enabling
employees in the field to do their jobs better.
And it is all right there in front of us. All we have to do is go for it.
At IBM Impact, we’ll be presenting our approach to mobile BPM. We’re looking
forward to painting the vision of what can be accomplished with the right
tools. More to come soon…
Tags: BPM, Mobile
Posted in Mobile | 0 Comments
IS BPM GOOD FOR “TASKS FOR KNOWLEDGE WORKERS”?
April 9th, 2012
John Reynolds’ Thoughtful Programmer blog is full of good information, and once
in a while I need to call out a particularly good post for comment. Recently he
wrote about Tasks for Knowledge Workers, offering up one generalization of these
kinds of tasks as “Review and Decide”. There are others but this is as good as
any to focus on. Review the request, information, and systems, and then make a
Decision.
John writes:
> BPM tools work well for Structured Processes – where Task C follows Task B
> follows Task A – but they don’t work so well if there’s no set order for A, B
> and C – and any or all of those Tasks might be optional or might cause
> additional Tasks to be spawned. It’s possible for a Business SME to design
> these scenarios (with BPMN), but not easy.
John is right that a Business SME should not have to design this kind of
process. However, the first sentence I don’t agree with – “but they don’t work
so well if there’s no set order… ” Actually, BPMN implementations can be used
quite well to represent these cases. But a better product design (less
complicated for the business SME) is to include these capabilities in a way that
is accessible to the business SME. At BP3 we’ve implemented these ad-hoc
patterns as reusable toolkits in IBM BPM, for example, and they were not only
easy to implement, they’re easy to incorporate into other processes at either
design or run-time (without modifying the original diagram). But they do
require a deeper level of expertise than the Business SME is likely to have.
It just takes a little creativity to do this in a generalized way, rather than a
process-specific way. I’ve often said that all the noise about “ACM” was mostly
a vendor-specific limitation or a lack of imagination on the part of modelers,
and our own efforts prove that out. However, as John points out, a typical
Business SME shouldn’t have to be as creative as we’ve been. That’s where a
reusable toolkit comes in – the pattern has been generalized and turned into a
component. Essentially, there’s a very simple process for capturing
unstructured processes!
> We’ve got to make Knowledge Worker Tasks like this easier for Business SMEs to
> “Program”. Business SMEs understand these types of Tasks very well, and they
> can describe these Tasks very clearly – What’s missing are tools to capture
> their descriptions and implement these Knowledge Worker Tasks as easily as
> BPMN can capture and implement Structured Process Logic.
Exactly.
Tags: ACM, BPM, BPMN, IBMBPM, John Reynolds
Posted in Process | 0 Comments
PERFECT STORM BREWING
April 5th, 2012
Keith Swenson covered the AIIM2012 Ted Schadler Keynote in his blog, and a few
passages jumped out at me:
> He presented a slide showing how dramatically the world has changed since
> 2007, only 5 years ago. At that time there was no iPhone, no iPad, no app
> store. The smart phone era has grown from essentially zero to 1 billion
> devices in 5 years! 700 million people participate in social networks.
>
>
> Email is becoming your father’s Oldsmobile.
>
> There was a perfect storm brewing. Mobile apps are at the center of it all.
> Showed a blood pressure app that plugs into iPhone. Another of a bathroom
> scale that plugs into the iPhone. It is a reformation of engagement. We all
> need to be thinking differently how we engage customers and employees. Stop
> thinking about it as a technology problem.
It really is a perfect storm brewing around Mobile. This presentation clearly
resonated with Keith, and he captures some of the most interesting parts of it.
Mobile apps really are the center of the storm right now – it is where the
interesting changes to user engagement are happening. And just 5 years ago we
could all be forgiven for not seeing it coming. Even 3 years ago, reasonable
people wouldn’t see it. Even today, many people will insist HTML5 is all you
need. But what you need is user engagement (and whether that implies HTML5 or
not is a moot point).
Keith has a few key points to remember at the end, that include “Design for
mobile first”, and “Collaboration should be built into every application, Social
is part of the information workplace”, and “get to the Cloud”.
We’re going to see how well BP3 can execute on those prime directives in our own
efforts this year.
Tags: conferences, Keith Swenson
Posted in Cloud, Mobile, Technology | 2 Comments
EXCELLENCE IN YOUR CRAFT: JIRO DREAMS OF SUSHI
April 4th, 2012
If you are looking for a role model for excellence in one’s craft, look no
further than Jiro Dreams of Sushi– a fantastic film (Japanese, with subtitles).
I just saw it tonight and I couldn’t have been more impressed with both the
movie and the people in it. The official site says:
> JIRO DREAMS OF SUSHI is the story of 85 year-old Jiro Ono, considered by many
> to be the world’s greatest sushi chef. He is the proprietor of Sukiyabashi
> Jiro, a 10-seat, sushi-only restaurant inauspiciously located in a Tokyo
> subway station. Despite its humble appearances, it is the first restaurant of
> its kind to be awarded a prestigious 3 star Michelin review, and sushi lovers
> from around the globe make repeated pilgrimage, calling months in advance and
> shelling out top dollar for a coveted seat at Jiro’s sushi bar.
While the film dwells much on the sons of Jiro, not just Jiro himself, there is
much to admire about how the three of them have dedicated themselves to their
craft. It is several stories in one:
1. A personal story of Jiro’s relationship to his family (parents) and his
sons.
2. A professional story of a small sushi shop (10 seats!) becoming a 3 star
Michelin restaurant
3. An educational story about suhi
4. A process story about improvement
Paraphrasing, Jiro, and his son, Yoshikazu, both explain the philosophy: It is
about doing the same thing, every day, always looking to improve, to perfect, to
practice. Jiro at one point says his son is well on his way to being a great
sushi chef – all he has to do is dedicate the rest of his life to it.
From a process perspective, there’s much to take away from this movie:
Focusing on Failure Modes:
1. The inputs are carefully chosen. And the inputs are bought from the best
specialists in each fish (each specific fish, mind you), and only the best
rice is used. One of their vendors says his technique is simple: he buys
only the best fish for sale that day. If he can’t buy that particular fish,
he buys nothing. He means it. If there are 10 tunas, only one is the best.
That’s the only one he’ll buy. This is the kind of specialization Jiro is
investing in.
2. Manual (human) tasks are practiced hundreds to thousands of times, over
months or years before the end-result is served to a customer. This
practice eliminates much of the human error.
Measurement:
1. Tasting is frequent. They want to make sure every single dish tastes right
before customers are served the food. If it isn’t right – they don’t serve
that dish. Critical, direct feedback is given at each tasting, so that the
person responsible for preparation can learn and improve.
2. They eat a lot of high quality food to develop their own palate and
discernment. They need to be able to have a better sense of taste and smell
than their customers (“otherwise, how will we impress them with our sushi?”)
Process Improvement:
1. The rice cooking process may be unique (even for Japan) in terms of the
quality of the rice they buy, and in terms of the pressure applied when
cooking the rice.
2. Octopus is massaged for 40-50 minutes (trust me, our local sushi restaurants
are not doing this!)
3. Despite micromanaging the process, there are significant signs that Jiro has
delegated a vast amount of work – as well as the culture of discipline and
love of craft. Its quite fascinating to watch it unfold.
If you think you’ve dedicated yourself to your craft, watch this movie. Malcolm
Gladwell‘s 10,000 hours of practice don’t even come close to Jiro’s 75 years in
his craft.
Tags: movies
Posted in People, Process | 0 Comments
PROCESS CENTER REPOSITORY IN THE CLOUD
April 4th, 2012
Previously we’ve discussed why BPM was a bit late to the cloud, but now we’ll
turn a little to what BP3 hopes to do about it in our little corner of the
market.
THE PROCESS REPOSITORY USE CASE
In our own area of specialization, IBM BPM, we can see new use cases as a result
of new software capabilities and architecture. In Teamworks 7, and continued by
WLE 7.2 and IBM BPM 7.5, the “Process Center” was introduced to the product
offering. It represents a production system to manage your process repository.
It includes versioning, asset management, file management, and the ability to
push updates to your run-time servers (development, test, or production).
The process center acts like the development server while process authoring is
going on, keeping everything in sync. It should be treated as a production
system – much like your version control system is a production system, even
though the end-users are IT professionals. But it is also a development system
– one to which developers or administrators may need access to log files, the
file system, Websphere configuration, etc. Traditional customer IT departments
aren’t set up to support this “inbetween” mode- typical systems are either
“development” and leveraging shared resources that can interfere with its
operation at any time, or they are “production” systems in which case developers
can not access the machine directly.
Deploying the process center to the cloud is a natural fit:
* It is isolated from the variance of development server resources at most
companies
* It is available immediately rather than in weeks or months that it might take
to get CAPEX approved and machines provisioned into the Data Center
* Actual installation effort is greatly reduced
* And yet, direct developer access can be provided if warranted. If not, a
development run-time server can be set up on the fly, to provide such access
on that testbed. Or a copy of the process center instance can be spun up,
for purposes of debugging an issue.
* Outside consultants or developers can be included in the development process
without giving them access to sensitive IT resources or physical hardware.
We can spin up temporary authoring “machines” for doing BPM development and
analysis work.
* And of course run-times can be spun up on demand to allow for parallel
isolated testing of multiple process development initiatives.
It is a natural fit to put the Process Center repository in a Virtual Private
Cloud. And that’s just what we’re offering our customers at BP3 – we’ll manage
your process center like a production system, but give you all the
development-level access you need. Moreover, we’re eating our own dog food by
using this deployment approach for our own internal development efforts since
the beginning of the year, and so far it is working great – for a very demanding
set of users.
It isn’t the final state of IBM BPM in the cloud – IBM will likely see to that
in future versions of software – and we’ll improve upon our own offering. But
for customers that want to have more control over their deployments, while still
benefiting from virtualization in the cloud, this is a great step in the right
direction. More to come.
If you’re interested in our cloud deploy offering, check it out.
Tags: backstage pass, BPM, IBMBPM
Posted in Cloud | 2 Comments
RIGHT OUT OF A SCIENCE FICTION NOVEL
April 3rd, 2012
When I read and watch interviews with Elon Musk, it feels like something right
out of a science fiction novel. A rogue entrepreneur attempting to make space
travel a reality. It is pretty inspiring to see how his two firms, SpaceX and
Tesla, are fighting against long odds to succeed in very complicated
industries. It remains to be seen whether he wins in either or both cases, but
the journey is fascinating:
Meanwhile, most startups are looking to add features to Facebook, or Twitter, or
photo sharing. You can almost see the toll it has taken on Elon, despite being
inspired by the vision. Have to admire the ability to stick with it in the face
of multiple launch failures and delays for both companies. Some days I’m glad
BPM is a little easier than putting rockets into orbit.
Tags: Elon Musk, startups
Posted in News | 0 Comments
ONE OF THE BEST ARTICLES ON PRICING YOU’LL READ
April 2nd, 2012
And it is written by our good friends over at Mimiran:
> There can be only one (cue Highlander) low cost provider in any market. In
> most cases, unless you have some defensible, sustainable cost advantage (think
> Southwest airlines), this will not be you. So don’t get in a price war with
> bigger competitors. All you do is transfer money to your customers’ pockets,
> and greatly reduce your income (see the introduction for some examples). You
> have the advantage that you don’t need a huge slice of the market, so you can
> focus on a niche that perceives a lot of value in what you do. For example,
> Wal-mart can’t provide great service, but it can provide cheap bikes. If local
> bike shops tried to compete with Wal-mart on price, they would lose.
Lesson: focus on value more than price. But inversely, for the customer – do
you really want the low-cost provider or do you want a vendor that provides
great service? (they’re rarely one-and-the-same).
The other key lesson in the article is that if you’re too busy (“I have a supply
problem”):
> I like to say “you don’t have a supply problem, you have a pricing problem.”
> Many of the folks making these complaints haven’t raised prices in years. They
> are not even keeping up with inflation, let alone increases in the perceived
> differential value of their offering. Being “too busy” is a symptom that you
> are not managing demand well.
Pricing is a key way to manage demand, if you can’t fulfill all the demand
coming your way – but many people fail to see that. Your products and services
are worth different amounts to different potential customers. Find the
customers that value you more highly.
If you’re in a consulting firm, a good companion read to this is the Consulting
Math vs. Software Math post…
Tags: backstage pass, Mimiran, startups
Posted in Process | 1 Comment
BPM STILL HAS A LONG LIFE AHEAD
April 1st, 2012
I didn’t pull too many punches with my take on the whole BPM is Dead meme among
bloggers, but it is nice to see a very different take on the discussion, from
Neil Ward-Dutton. Whereas our own blog picked out specific passages to respond
to, Neil writes a concise defense (defence for Neil) of BPM without getting into
the point, counter-point:
> In my mind, though, all these shifts are doing is representing the ongoing
> maturation of the market for tools that help people improve the way that work
> gets co-ordinated and managed, through the intelligent application of
> software. You might call that something else, but I’m going to carry on
> calling that BPM technology for now.
That captures almost perfectly how I feel about the subject. The overriding
impulse of most analysts and vendors to come up with new names and acronyms for
software and tooling that clearly plays in the same space, and competes for the
same wallet-share of customers, is exasperating.
But it doesn’t mean BPM is dead. It means that these vendors and analysts are
trying desperately to differentiate. In some cases, they aren’t doing it the
hard way – by just consistently producing better outcomes for customers over a
long period of time and building on those successes. Instead, they’re looking
for the silver bullet – a marketing or sales tactic or flanking maneuver that
can get them the market share gains without the hard work of delivering on
promises.
But the fact that BPM is hard – even complicated – to deliver is a real
opportunity for software and services vendors to provide differentiated services
to their customers. As well, it is a real opportunity for BPM adopters to
differentiate from competitors with better process. Because BPM doesn’t have to
be quite as complicated as it currently is.
Tags: BPM, Neil Ward-Dutton
Posted in Process | 4 Comments
WHERE ARE THE CLOUDS IN BPM?
March 29th, 2012
LATE TO THE CLOUD
BPM, as a software category, is relatively late to the game in Cloud computing.
In fact, some of the earliest cloud BPM vendors have since gone out of business,
putting customers’ investments in models and data at risk. The most successful
BPM vendors have been among the slowest to tackle cloud computing in their core
BPM offering. But this makes sense – it is rarely the most successful or largest
firms that pioneer new deployment models or business models – it is the
upstarts. The more historically successful vendors attacked the cloud with
different functionality – focused more on collaboration and discovery, rather
than execution. IBM (and the assets it acquired from Lombardi) is no exception
with its dual strategy of BlueworksLive and IBM BPM.
But the primary reason doesn’t appear to be a technical barrier or an inability
of BPM vendors to see the writing on the wall.
WHY BPM IS LATE TO THE PARTY
No, the primary reason BPM has been late to the Cloud is that customer demand
wasn’t pulling BPM vendors that way very quickly. Customers worried about
storing their critical processes in the cloud, let alone running them in the
cloud. Customers were pulling for more integration functionality, more BPMN
support (up to a point), more powerful development environments with
easier-to-consume authoring environments. And there was demand for business
intelligence, rules, events…
In short, demand was pulling in a lot of different directions, but not that much
pull for the cloud.
But there were a few other minor factors…
1. Cloud computing was still immature. APIs didn’t always exist, or weren’t
stable. They certainly weren’t very consistent.
2. There weren’t a lot of choices for cloud computing vendors, or server
locations
3. The generally accepted definition of “cloud computing” was pretty narrow – a
multi-tenant architecture with a per-user license fee. Many customers just
weren’t interested in paying per user per month, or weren’t interested in
commingling their data or apps with others (multi-tenancy).
Everyone could see the tide would come in, but it looked to be a long gradual
transition…
INDEED, SOMETHING HAS CHANGED
That transition is proceeding apace. And a few things have changed to reduce
the friction of going to the Cloud with BPM:
1. New companies have been formed in the last 10 years that have always used
the cloud for critical systems and processes. Some of these companies are
big enough to need BPM software support for their processes, and to be able
to pay commercial licensing fees. But they want their BPM in the cloud.
2. Existing companies have moved certain core functions to the cloud – from
email to customer relationship data to sales data. The movement to the
cloud has had a gradual cumulative effect.
3. Companies can still see the cost savings of running software in the cloud.
If anything, these economics are only getting better vis-a-vis on-premise
sytems.
4. New service providers and hosting providers have entered the Cloud services
market, providing tools that allow for more robust scripting and management
of hosted cloud environments.
5. More standardized APIs and tools allow for self-serve maintenance and
provisioning, or automated provisioning.
6. Virtual Private Networks and Virtual Private Clouds are now in reach of the
mere mortal, and not just the security specialists. We can interact with
assets in the Cloud as though they were inside our network, or vice versa.
7. (Some of the) BPM vendors are making BPM in the cloud a priority.
We’re going to see more BPM in the Cloud. Late to the party, but not too late
to join in.
Tags: BPM
Posted in Cloud | 0 Comments
IF YOU HAVE CAREER ENVY, READ THIS
March 28th, 2012
Jason Cohen once again channels perfectly what a lot of people involved in
startups go through. I call it career-envy- but in the context he’s talking
about you could just as easily call it startup-envy. It is measuring yourself
against a new set of goal posts all the time – where the process of moving the
goal posts undermines your previous achievements.
This isn’t about challenging yourself to do more or better – this is about being
honest with yourself – pro and con – in your career. I’ve seen this with
friends at recently-public companies where employees have divided into haves and
“have-nots” – sometimes even people who started at about the same time but
simply were given different sized stock option grants. But you can see this
form of career envy in areas that aren’t simply monetary. Recommended reading:
> I would say “stop comparing yourself to others and just be as good as you
> can,” but high-achievers like you and me could never accept that advice, even
> if it is wise, because we’re physiologically incapable of not measuring
> ourselves by impossible yardsticks we invented and, because of Impostor
> Syndrome, by definition we always come up short.
>
> Instead, how about this:
>
> Stop comparing yourself to something that is objectively incomparable.
>
> That’s just irrational.
Tags: backstage pass, Jason Cohen, startups
Posted in People | 0 Comments
CONNIE MOORE: SELLING BPM TO THE C SUITE
March 27th, 2012
Connie Moore posted a while back on selling Business Process Transformation to
the C-Suite. She quotes Derek Miers, one of the best in the business at boiling
things down to the key points:
> “It’s all about helping the executive understand the causal relationship
> between customer (success), process (how it gets done), and business results
> (revenue growth, profit, and sustainability of the business model). They are
> all tied up together.”
And then goes on to expand on this idea. The key takeaway is to focus on
Business Outcomes – revenue, profit, market share, growth, etc. – something that
the pure services firms in the BPM space would endorse as well. Whenever we see
customers getting too far in the weeds on process stuff, we ask for the big
picture affect on business outcomes. This is a classic forest-for-the-trees
problem for process experts.
Connie argues customers come second in the minds of executives, but before
everything else. For many great companies out there, however, customers come
first (the definition of “business outcome” is about the customer’s experience
or result, not about the company’s results), and the business revenues, profits,
and growth all derive from that Customer focus.
At BP3, we start with the customer outcomes. That drives the rest.
Tags: BPM, Connie Moore, Derek Miers, Forrester
Posted in Process | 0 Comments
MORE AUSTIN-BOOSTING
March 25th, 2012
George Dearing writes for AustinStartup that Austin is well-positioned for
future job growth. He makes a number of good points about Austin’s relative
advantages and links to a few other articles with more information. But my
favorite part was this:
> Lastly, we can’t forget perceived intangibles. On a sunny and 65 degree day
> back in February my neighbor described it to me so eloquently. “Who needs
> fancy industry clusters when you’ve got this?” as both arms reached to the
> sky.
Exactly. Just don’t do that same exercise in August!
Looking backward, Austin has been tops in job growth since 2004, according to a
recent Statesman article:
> Revised employment figures released a few weeks ago confirmed the trend.
> Austin ranked No. 1 among the nation’s 50 largest metro areas in job growth
> over the past eight years. Its 140,200 new jobs represented a 21.3 percent
> increase from the start of 2004, which put it well ahead of second-place
> Houston, which had 15.7 percent job growth.
>
> For 2011 alone, Austin was
No. 2 in the nation in job growth. Houston, with
> its rapidly expanding energy sector, edged out Austin for the national lead
> with a 3.7 percent increase in jobs, compared with Austin’s 3.5 percent.
Of course, picking 2004 is cherry-picking. 2001 to 2004 were terrible years for
the Austin job market (at least, in tech), in which about 1/4 to 1/3 of the
high-tech jobs evaporated, representing a huge amount of personal income for the
local Austin economy. That contraction hurt all the industries that serve
high-tech workers as well (real estate, restaurants, service businesses of all
kinds).
Ever since 2004, however, Austin’s economy has been on the mend, subjectively –
it is nice to see the objective data to back it up.
Tags: Austin, economy
Posted in News | 0 Comments
SIMPLICITY IS HARD WORK
March 22nd, 2012
Great post from Matt Drance a while back on Components. Specifically, Apple’s
approach to components:
> Similar to the 2008 PA Semi acquisition, the Anobit acquisition highlights a
> continued priority on internalizing improvements to hardware. Most people
> think of Apple as a hardware company in the industrial design sense, but not
> necessarily in the R&D or manufacturing sense. However, the last few years
> have demonstrated that Apple is in fact very interested in controlling and
> advancing the way its components are built — not just its finished products.
> Eliminating external dependency is a repeating pattern with Apple, especially
> in strategically important areas.
Clearly spot-on analysis. Now, look at most Fortune 500 businesses. Are they
“interested in controlling and advancing the way [their] components are built —
not just [their] finished products”? Are they “eliminating external
dependencies” in strategically important areas?
Or are they, instead, outsourcing strategically important areas of the business?
I especially like Drance’s analysis of the relationship with Samsung. “This is
proprietary technology designed in-house for products that make up as much as
70% of Apple’s revenue, and it’s in the hands of a competitor whom Apple is
suing for patent infringement. It’s got to be driving Apple nuts.”
Seeing this from the other side- from Austin – this Samsung plant has been in
the works for a long time in Austin and appears to have been producing other
parts for Apple before this. But this is the first time something has really
been publicized as officially for Apple. Indirectly, Apple has driven huge
investment in Austin over the last few years, in addition to its commitment to
grow its own campus. And Apple has previously purchased chip design talent and
technology in Austin.
So Apple has a presence already – and maybe even the right kind of talent
locally – to supervise production at Samsung’s plant. Moreover:
> Just as interesting is the revelation that this new Samsung plant is located
> in the United States. We’ve been told for years that commodity manufacturing
> in the US was dead, but here we are with the heart of two industry-leading
> technology products being built there. Austin’s three-hour flight distance
> from Cupertino makes supervision cheaper and easier. Even more interesting:
> Reuters pegs the cost of the plant at $3.6 billion. That’s a lot of money, but
> not for a company with more than $80 billion in cash and an obsession with
> controlling its own destiny.
The fact that these chips are made in the US is really interesting. It debunks
all kinds of misinformation that we’ve been fed over the years about the
profitability of running chip plants in the US. And what’s $3.6Billion between
friends. The labor costs pale compared to the infrastructure costs.
The lesson here for BPM:
* Keep strategic processes, components, and vendors close.
* Exercise control and deep expertise even if you can’t fully own the process
yourself.
* Location matters- it affects supervision costs and timeliness of information.
* If you don’t control a strategic process today, figure out how to become less
dependent on a single partner for that process. How to mitigate your risks
(as Apple did by buying Anobit).
Tags: Apple, Austin, BPM, economy, Simplicity
Posted in Process, Technology | 0 Comments
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