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| Sandy Kemsley |
Column 2The archive of Sandy Kemsley's blog on business process management, enterprise architecture, business intelligence and technology in business. |
« July 2006 | Main | September 2006 »
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August 30, 2006
That's a lot of process modeling... I've posted previously about Savvion's free Process Modeler, and yesterday they announced that there have already been 55,000 downloads of it. Of course, I'm sure that some of those downloads are like mine, still waiting to be really taken for a test drive, but there have to be a lot of people who are taking advantage of this by getting some of their processes in order. Now, if we can just have a Web 2.0, browser-based process modeler...
Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 10:48 PM in
BPA
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| Process 2006 Upcoming.org event listing I've added an Upcoming.org event list for the BPMG Process 2006 conference. If you're going to attend, add yourself to the list.
Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 10:43 AM in
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Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 07:26 PM in
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| Upcoming BPM conferences I've been negligent in my blogging lately, in part because the weather in Toronto has been absolutely beautiful -- our summers are short enough that you really have to get out there and enjoy it while you can -- and in part because two important people in my life have been moving house (one of them in with me) so I've been spending much of the last two weeks packing and moving boxes. However, the sumac bushes are starting to change colour, indicating that fall is on the way and it's time to get back to some serious work. One project that I'm working on is my presentation on BPM and Web 2.0 for the upcoming BPMG conference in London on September 18-20th, which gives me a chance to spend a few days in one of my favourite cities. I attended the conference last year and it had a lot of great content; the agenda for this year looks to be shaping up well and I'm looking forward to sitting in on some of the sessions. If you're at the conference, please drop by to say hi. If you're going to be in the US instead of the UK during that time, you can attend BrainStorm's BPM conference in Washington DC on September 19-20th. In fact, if you're interested in joining ABPMP, there's a special deal available where you'll get your ABPMP membership for free (a $100 value) if you register here by September 1st and specify the priority code ABPMPDCNON when registering. We're still planning to launch the ABPMP Toronto chapter with an event sometime this fall; if you're interested in this chapter, please join our Yahoo group which acts as a mailing list.
Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 04:22 PM in
ABPMP
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Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 07:25 PM in
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Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 07:22 PM in
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Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 07:21 PM in
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Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 07:23 PM in
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Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 07:23 PM in
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Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 07:21 PM in
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| Spectrum Radio on the FBI case file debacle I've been a member of IEEE for over 20 years, and browse the periodicals that arrive at my door monthly, but have just become aware of the content that they offer to members and non-members on Spectrum Online. I've downloaded a number of the podcasts from Spectrum Radio and thoroughly enjoyed the two-parter about the enormously expensive and unsuccessful FBI case file project (I'd love to link to it directly, but they have a stupid Flash interface that doesn't allow that, so you'll just have to find it on the Radio page). IEEE actually had to litigate to have the report about this project released under freedom of information laws, and the software experts in discussion on the podcast dissect the report and talk about what went wrong as well as lessons that can be learned for any large software project. Interesting that a company that has CMM level 5 certification can end up developing a $170M project with no proper requirements, no enterprise architecture, and a number of other things that seem like no-brainers for any large software project. Worth listening.
Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 11:27 AM in
EnterpriseArchitecture
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Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 07:20 PM in
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| Process 2006: BPMG's annual conference A follow-on to last May's conference, BPM 2005, is Process 2006. I'll be headed to London for the conference next month, but this year I'll be speaking on the impact of Web 2.0 and social networking on BPM: mashups, tagging and more. From the abstract that I sent to Steve Towers, the conference organizer:
Specifically, I want to talk about some of the characteristics of Web 2.0 and how they will directly impact BPM within organizations: tagging, and the idea of a user-generated folksonomy for categorizing information; user-created content, including their own processes; collaboration; rich user interfaces for web-based applications; RSS feeds and similar subscription models; and lightweight integration models such as we're starting to see with web mashups. The conference agenda doesn't have my session's title (Steve suggested "Web 2.0 = BPMS 2.0 ?") or description, but that will all get sorted eventually. Should be fun, except for the fact that I may be unable to carry my laptop with me (and I'm unwilling to put it in checked baggage). I'm not afraid to fly, but I'm terrified of spending 7 hours on a flight with no laptop or iPod!
Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 05:07 PM in
BPM
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Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 07:23 PM in
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Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 07:21 PM in
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| Windows Live Writer I saw a post about Windows Live Writer, an offline blogging tool, on Rick's blog a couple of days ago, and decided to try it out. So far, I'm pretty impressed, although I haven't used any other offline blogging tools so don't have much to compare it to. I do like that it integrates seamlessly with all three of my blogs: this one, which is uses Movable Type, my personal blog, which uses WordPress, and my wine club blog, which uses Blogger. I now have virtually the same interface for posting to all three blogs, and can even edit previously published posts. It also sucks in all the categories from each of the applicable blogs, so I have my full list of categories for tagging. I'm sure that I'll manage to break it soon, and will be ranting about it by week's end, but so far I'm still having fun.
Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 12:54 PM in
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Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 07:20 PM in
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Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 07:23 PM in
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Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 07:21 PM in
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| Just feed me Email newsletters: the web 1.0 of permission marketing. How many of these do you subscribe to? How many that you receive do you actually read? I receive a number of email newsletters each day, almost all on the subject of technology in some way, but I have to confess that there are over 300 of them sitting unread in my email, dating back many months. I read these selectively, usually sorted by sender, during times when I have no internet access, such as on long flights (although that practice is now under review if I'm not allowed to bring a laptop on board). RSS feeds, on the other hand, are the ultimate web 2.0 form of permission marketing: I subscribe to feeds that I want, without passing along any personal information that might result in unwanted spamming to my email. I read them online using Bloglines when I'm connected to the internet (which is almost all the time), and since each entry typically is a single subject rather than a collection of topics that I would find in an email newsletter, I can quickly go through them and figure out which ones that I want to spend more time on and which that I want to delete. What this all has to do with BPM is that a number of the BPM portals (Business Process Management Group, Business Process Management Institute and Business Process Trends) don't syndicate their content using RSS, but make you sign up for email newsletters. A couple of exceptions are BPMEnterprise.com, and ebizQ (which hosts this blog), a broader-based integration-related site. A good percentage of you read this blog via the RSS feed -- many through the Feedburner feed that provides some extra widgets on each post -- so I know that you appreciate my complaint.
Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 06:53 PM in
Rant
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| Comments on the IBM-FileNet acquisition Questions and comments about the IBM-FileNet acquisition have been coming at me since last Thursday when it was announced, asking for my perspective -- many people know that I was FileNet's Director of eBusiness Evangelism in 2000-01, and that FileNet is still an occasional client of mine, and I also have a number of friends and colleagues who are current or past employees of FileNet. As a shareholder, I'm also monitoring the stories and stock price online to see if it looks like another suitor might jump in -- with the current price running higher than the offer price, the market seems to be indicating that that's a possibility, or at least a pipe dream. To clarify my "speechless" state of last week when this news was announced, I wasn't surprised that FileNet is being acquired, since rumours of acquisition were rampant even when I was at FileNet and before; I'm just surprised that it's IBM, since I always figured that it would be Oracle. Phil Ayres has a thoughtful post on how all the IBM and FileNet pieces might fit together, but I'm not convinced that FileNet's content management has much of a future within IBM. I found Connie Moore's (Forrester) comment interesting (in this article, among others) that BPM is FileNet's "crown jewel" -- I agree with her sentiment, but think that's it's a bit of a hidden gem, unfortunately. I listened to two of the conference calls on Thursday: a very brief one for investors (it was over before I got on it live, but listened to the replay later; for a conference call about the acquisition of a content management vendor, it was pretty content-free), and a longer press call. Ambuj Goyal, the GM of the Information Management unit that will be eating FileNet whole, delivered the usual blah-blah about how the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, how FileNet partners will benefit from an "enhanced ecosystem" and how IBM will preserve and enhance customer investments in both companies' platforms. Yeah, right. He also referred to FileNet's BPM as "content-centric", which means that there's some pretty fundamental misunderstandings by people how matter about the current state of the product. Then Lee Roberts, CEO of FileNet, started with "we're all very excited about this announcement", and I swear that I could hear the rigging on his platinum parachute twanging in the background. During the Q&A, Roberts said that both he and Ron Ercanbrack (FileNet's president, to whom I reported when I worked there) would be moving over to IBM -- it's worth noting that they're both former IBM employees -- and that "a vast majority [of FileNet's workforce] will migrate over to IBM". He also said that the cultures of the two companies are very similar, words that could only come from a former IBMer, I think. FileNet employees: resistance is futile! Prepare to be assimilated! Bruce Silver also caught the conference call and had a few comments, and Cote from Redmonk did a mindmap of the calls. Tons of interesting commentary all over the web:
I also received a hilarious comment from someone I know at FileNet: "Back in the liberal ‘70s of my youth, working for Big Blue was your worst nightmare! What a long, strange trip it’s been and now I am one of them -- wake me up!!"
Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 01:00 PM in
BPM
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Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 07:20 PM in
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| BPM 202: Knowledge Management & Collaboration I checked in on today's BPM webinars by Appian (through their BPM Basics site). Some good things in the webinar series if you're relatively new to BPM, and a good amount of content that is not specific to Appian. This one is Fundamentals of Knowledge Management and Collaboration Functionality; they also have one on Fundamentals of Process Management Functionality (available now for replay) and Fundamentals of Analytics Functionality (upcoming on September 14th, but you can sign up at the link). There's an earlier BPM Primer webinar, which I poked a bit of fun at in an earlier post because of some of their marketing hype. There's a schedule for other ones in the future that you might want to check out as well.
Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 02:35 PM in
BPM
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| IBM buys FileNet I did not see this coming (thanks to Elizabeth at ebizQ for tipping me off). [Disclosure: FileNet is a customer, and I'm a shareholder. I still didn't see it coming.] Back in 2000-01, when I worked for FileNet as their BPM evangelist, there were always rumours swirling around about someone bigger buying them out. Usually Oracle was named as the potential suitor, but never IBM as they were too directly competitive, particularly on the content management side. From FileNet's press release (IBM doesn't have one out yet as of 9am Eastern), the plan is to:
These are only my speculations as an outsider; I have no inside information and knew nothing of the transaction before it hit the wires this morning. All in all, I'm still totally speechless.
Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 09:17 AM in
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| Today's webinar: The Business Value of BPM Great webinar on the business value of BPM and BPM standards today on ebizQ, and I'm not just saying that because I'm one of the speakers. :) The full replay should be available tomorrow at the same link. If you attended the live seminar today, there was a technical glitch just before the Q&A where we had a bit of dead air, so if you dropped out at that point you can go back tomorrow and hear the full replay. In listening to the replay, I realize that I talk WAY too fast -- I was conscious of the short time that I had for my part of the presentation, but this has always been a criticism when I make presentations and I have to force myself to slow down, especially when introducing a lot of new information such as the alphabet soup of BPM standards. As weird as it might sound, I get excited talking about this stuff and tend to talk faster.
Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 01:22 PM in
BPM
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Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 07:26 PM in
Links
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| Traffic blips I noticed a blip in my blog traffic on August 2nd, and I'm never sure what causes that although I did post 4 times that day about subjects as varied as the TED talks videos and how Ventana shouldn't really be talking about BPM. Today, I caught up on some of my podcast listening and discovered that James Governer mentioned me in the Redmonk Radio podcast that day, too. So far, my scientific analysis proves that if I blog four times per day and Redmonk mentions me in a podcast, my traffic goes up. ;)
Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 12:58 PM in
Blogging
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| OMG vendor directories OMG now has a set of directories of vendors that offer products and services related to OMG standards, including BPM (because of BPMN and other emerging standards). It's free to have your company listed here, even if you're not an OMG member.
Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 10:21 AM in
BPMN
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Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 07:21 PM in
Links
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Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 07:21 PM in
Links
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| BPMN and XPDL illustrated If you're not using a BPM modelling product that outputs to XPDL and want to get an idea of what it actually looks like, some of the vendors are posting samples of their BPMN/XPDL for interoperability testing on the WfMC forum (you may need to be a member to see the posts, but it's free). For example, here's the sample from Global 360.
Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 10:57 AM in
BPM standards
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| New(?) del.icio.us feature I use del.icio.us for bookmarking sites that I want to remember, and I use a cool feature to post each day's links as a blog post. A while back, I learned about the "for" tag in del.icio.us, where if you tag an item with "for:username", that item appears in the "links for you" section for that user on del.icio.us, which they can also subscribe to in their RSS reader. In other words, you can tag a site using del.icio.us specifically for another person to look at. Today, when I was tagging something, I noticed a new section in the tagging screen: usually there's just "recommended tags" (how most other people have tagged this link), "your tags" and "popular tags", but now there's also "your network", which lists the for: tag for each of the people who are listed as being in your del.icio.us network.
Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 10:05 AM in
Blogging
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Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 07:20 PM in
Links
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| Stats that never seem to go away I've been watching statistics like this ever since I started in the BPM/document management field over 15 years ago, and they never seem to really go away. These ones were published by AIIM earlier this year: 400 Hours -- Number of hours per year the average employee spends searching for paper documents. (Source: Datapro/Gartner Group) The last one puts me in mind of a contract that I did a few years back for a manufacturing organization. A very old company, they were converting their engineering drawings (some dating back 100 years) and aperature cards [a pre-historic storage medium that consisted of a piece of microfiche embedded in a computer-readable punched card containing the indexing information] to scanned images, eventually to be redrawn as CAD files, and implementing some basic change request and approval workflow. I had an internal company email address, as I often do when working with customers, and one day was copied on the following mass internal email: Found: an aperture card, reference #xxxxxx, on the road between building A and building B. You can be pretty sure that this is one of the misplaced ones.
Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 09:29 AM in
ECM
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Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 07:21 PM in
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| Independent BPM vendors navigating dangerous waters A recent article in Intelligent Enterprise, Content and BPM Vendors Swim Among the "Whales", talks about how the independent BPM vendors are faring amongst the big guys like Microsoft and Oracle. Open Text's strategy of using the big guys' products as infrastructure to build their own products on top of makes a lot of sense, although it will be difficult for some of the other independent vendors to follow suit. There's always the chance, of course, that the big guy in question will just build their own version of what the independent is doing, but there's always room in the market for a company that's nimble and innovative. The article also mentions the CentraSite community and some of the innovative things that Savvion is doing with their ProcessXchange, both of which I've blogged about previously.
Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 05:02 PM in
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| Bifurcating BPM, Batman! My reading is a bit behind due to my recent travel, and with my feed reader sitting at just under 3000 unread items, I tend to ignore the magazine feeds in favour of reading blogs. Today, I went back through the unread Intelligent Enterprise items and found The Bifurcation of Business Process Management, which has very little to do with bifurcation except for one sentence in the summary; probably the editor just likes the word. ;-) I don't agree with everything in this short report from Ventana Research: they state that BPM is still in its infancy, but suggest creating a 3-year architectural blueprint for BPM; if the technology truly is immature, then a 3-year plan would change so quickly as to be obsolesced within a year, wouldn't it? Also, the phrase in the recommendations, "BPM technology, by failing to maintain pace with Web services technologies, is not ready for prime-time enterprise SOA applications" is a generalization that I just don't believe to be true. I'm left with the impression that the author is not all that knowledgable about BPM, which doesn't leave a particularly good impression about Ventana.
Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 04:58 PM in
BPM
• SOA
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| UI coolness I've been watching the TED videos recently, and there's some very interesting stuff (who knew Al Gore could be that funny?), but this one of Jeff Han displaying a new type of user interface is amazing. If you're interested in data visualization, check out the Hans Rosling one as well.
Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 08:24 AM in
SoftwareDesign
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| Webinar: the business value of BPM standards Although labelled "The business value of BPM", this is really a webinar on BPM standards as a wrap-up of the recent OMG BPM Think Tank, which I blogged extensively about. Since I was at the Think Tank and have a lot of opinions on the subject of BPM standards, I'll be presenting at this webinar (as opposed to my previous role as moderator) along with Connie Moore from Forrester and Jeanne Baker from OMG and Sterling Commerce. Connie will be covering the business value of standards, Jeanne will be doing a wrapup of the Think Tank, and I'll be doing an interactive discussion between the three of us on the future of BPM standards. Being a presenter on this webinar prompted me to finally update my bio on the ebizQ site; a few people who I've met lately assume that I work for ebizQ, which I don't, so this should clear it up. The webinar is on August 9th at noon Eastern, and you can sign up here.
Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 05:18 PM in
BPEL
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| Pega SmartBPM 5.1 Yesterday's Intelligent Enterprise included a review by Derek Miers of the new Pegasystems release, which includes an AJAX-based portal for process "development" as well as runtime environments, although the actual process design appears to be done in Visio. Please, all you BPM vendors, just stop telling us that it's too hard and give us zero-footprint, browser-based process designer! There's also a laughable understatement at one point: "Although a business user will probably be unnerved to see the underlying Java code exposed in the configuration dialog..." -- no kidding!
Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 05:05 PM in
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