Ryan Coleman, another friend of mine from the TorCamp community, led a discussion on language translation and the impact on the sort of interacting with the global community due to the premise of wikinomics. Although it's easy (and arrogant) for those of us who are native English speakers to just ignore other languages and pretend that everyone speaks English, the fact is that if you're message isn't well-understood, you'll end up losing business or creating inefficiencies within your organization. At this point, translation services is a $10B business worldwide, and growing.

He gave some examples of evaluating the context and content to determine whether it needs to be translated, and the degree of care that needs to be taken, before going through the different options for translating your business materials.

One option is to crowdsource your documentation: have your user community write the manual for you. This requires a passionate user base, and can be unpredictable in terms of timing and coverage, as well as of inconsistent quality.

Another option is machine translation, but as you'll know if you've ever used Google Translation, the quality can be total crap with low-end solutions. There are high-quality (and higher-priced) professional systems, but these require extensive training and still require review of the output.

Another option is to use internal resources, namely your own staff, who presumably understand your products and services, but who are now diverted from their usual job which tends to create a high cost of lost opportunity. Since these are not professional translators, the quality can also be questionable.

Professional translators are the final option, and best for high-quality, consistent translation. They can use tools to store translated phrases so that there's a translation memory of a document; when a document changes, only the changed portions required re-translation. The downside, of course, is that this is very expensive, and the initial translations can be time-consuming especially if you have a lot of specialized terminology that the translator needs to learn.

There are a number of hybrid approaches that combine these options; all of them will combine people, process and technology in some proportion, and the ultimate choice will depend on both the content and the context.

Ryan listed a number of other points to consider:

• Synchronization between versions, including maintaining dependency relationships
• Location and access to content repository
• Workflow and time sensitivity of translation, including proofing/review cycle

He had some thoughts on what's happening between translation systems and content management systems, particularly for large websites that must be maintained in multiple languages. In the past (and likely still a lot currently), a content management system would just spit out a document to be translated, then accept it back in afterwards, without any real sense of how the translated content should be handled. Wikis, of course, are even worse since it's less mature responsibility and there's not, in most wikis platforms, any considerations for maintain multi-language versions of a wiki.

Ryan's company, Clay Tablet, has created a piece of middleware that sits between the different types of translation systems and the content management systems, whether the translation is being done by a machine translation system or a company that provides human translation services.

That's the end of the formal sessions of Enterprise 2.0 Camp; it's 2pm and we're decamping, so to speak, to the bar across the road for lunch and a continuation of the conversations.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 01:56 PM in ECM • Enterprise2.0TTW | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

My pal Mark Kuznicki is discussing Toronto Transit Camp as a case study on open community innovation that started with the TTC issuing an RFP for a new website and ended up involving the Toronto blogosphere and local transit geeks in an open discussion about what the TTC website should become in order to best serve the community. This all happened in a short time period: the RFP went out in December; the Toronto blogosphere had a call to action on January 1st; two days later Adam Giambrone, the youthful chair of the TTC, signaled that they were open to any ideas generated; within a week Mark and a few others had picked up the flag and started organizing Transit Camp; and Transit Camp happened on February 4th. The way that the Transit Camp organizers communicated this to the TTC is "we're doing this, and you're welcome to participate as equals", although this was likely a bit too radical for the TTC culture since they were more passive listeners than active participants; they're still pretty hung up on owning their own intellectual property rather than opening up their data and branding for use by the community in some way.

Transit Camp was labelled a "solutions playground" -- no complaining allowed -- and involved a number of different activities, from BarCamp-type interactive discussions to a design slam, and several TTC execs showed up including Giambrone: a clear indication that TTC was ready to start tapping into the energy and ideas being created in the community. At the end of the day, all parties were seeing the shift from a previous combatitive stance to a collaborative relationship between the TTC and the community, creating an entirely new model for engagement and communication. It resulted in the openTTC.ca open source project, and provided for peer-production involvement in future generations of the website.

Mark uses the term "open creative communities": barrier-free groups of individuals with a common interest, producing ideas and inventions. He saw a number of factors that contributed to the success of Transit Camp: people attended for both discovery and play; it created an intersection of communities that touch various aspects of TTC and its community; and it gave people like Mark and the other organizers an opportunity to practice community leadership. He had a couple of great references in his presentation, such as Cherkoff and Moore's CoCreation Rules and Benkler's commons-based peer-production.

He sees communities as naturally-occurring social systems demonstrating emergent properties, but also points out that you can create an intentional community with the right framework and rules.

Unfortunately, there was no real written record of Transit Camp (obviously, I wasn't there blogging :) ) so it was difficult to bring the ideas forward in any sort of formal way to the TTC later; this may have impacted their acceptance of the ideas as much as the inherent cultural inertia. However, it's a great model for allowing a community to engage (particularly) with a government or quasi-government organization. There was a great deal of discussion in today's session about what would motivate the TTC to get involved in the ideas generated by Transit Camp, particularly those that involved ceding partial control of planning and branding to the community, but a lot of people miss the point of co-creation: remember that the reason that IBM invests in Linux open source development is because it's way cheaper than developing an equivalent operating system on their own. The real long-term benefit of co-creation is the new possibilities that are generated by including people outside the organization in the innovation process, but it's often necessary to hook them with the economic arguments first.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 01:12 PM in Enterprise2.0TTW | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

Sunir Shah, formerly of SocialText and now with FreshBooks, led a session on achieving adoption, debunking the "if you build it, they will come" method of customer acquisition and retention. There's nothing in most of his session particular to Enterprise 2.0 -- it's pretty general marketing 101 for product vendors -- although he does touch fleetingly on adoption of social software. His presentation focussed on how to get people and, eventually, companies, adopt (and therefore buy) your commercial software; I was expecting something more along the lines of how to encourage the adoption and usage of social networking software within an enterprise once that platform is already deployed.

An interesting discussion that came up was the difference between customer relations and customer community management, starting with when a group of customers becomes a community. Usually there will be some tools that vendors use to facilitate the formation of a community, but ultimately there needs to be customers who care enough about what they're doing with the product to form the nucleus. Blogs and forums are good starting points for community, since both allow for content creation by both internal and external participants; blogs typically have the content authored inside the vendor's company with comments added by customers and other external parties, whereas forums are typically more egalitarian.

I think that Shah really wanted to do an unconference-like session, but came with a full deck of slides. He stopped about 15 minutes in and asked if people wanted to have an open discussion or have him continue the presentation, which (of course) resulted in him continuing his presentation: most people are basically lazy (me too) and will take the default veg-out route rather than rousing themselves to a discussion. Although there's nothing in the concept of an unconference that specifically bars formal presentations, I always get a lot more out of unconference sessions that have just enough presentation to provide structure, then some format for encouraging audience participation. The idea of BarCamp is that everyone is a participant, and I expected to see more of that in Enterprise 2.0 Camp, too. That could be the ultimate conflict in Enterprise 2.0 Camp: if you get real enterprise people to attend, as opposed to just those of us who live in Echo Chamber 2.0, they're likely not used to the contributory nature of an unconference and just think of it as a day-long seminar where they're passive listeners.

What's really funny is that James Walker's session on OpenID in the enterprise is going on at the same time in the other corner of the room, and I've heard both of the presenters mention Facebook applications within the last 5 minutes: this new developer platform is certainly the focus of a lot of discussion, although it will take a while to see if it really has legs.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 12:16 PM in Enterprise2.0TTW | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

David Sean Lester is leading a session on Communication 2.0 (I think), or the use of digital media as an inherent part of Enterprise 2.0. He has a nicely prepared presentation with lots of lovely graphics, but his presentation is a bit stilted and he tends to read directly from the slides (reducing his own value in the presentation), plus there's some superfluous video and audio clips interspersed, and I find my attention drifting during a lengthy clip about the alphabet. Aside from the inherent weirdness of someone who entitles himself with three names, Lester doesn't seem to be at all comfortable leading the session.

This was supposed to be an unconference format, yet we're all silent gazing up at a multimedia presentation (except for a short hands-on game of scrambled scrabble). And because we only have one room and this is a somewhat noisy multimedia presentation, there was a decision not to run a concurrent session so we're all here...

Lester's thesis on the alphabet was thought-provoking: how the alphabet has become embedded firmware rather than software, whether that's good or bad from a creativity standpoint, and how switching from the printed word to multimedia tends to make us return to the spoken word. [He uses the term "digital media" or "digital bits" instead of multimedia, although technically the electronically printed word is also digital media; what he's referring to is visual and audio digital media.]

His ending point informs us (no real surprise) that his company can help you to bring this vision to your own company, although it's completely unclear by the end of the presentation what exactly this vision is. Their website claims that they do things such as "multi-session interactive facilitated learning experiences" and "visual map design of corporate brand activation model" for their clients. This is communication?

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 11:18 AM in Enterprise2.0 • Enterprise2.0TTW | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

Our second breakfast speaker was John Bruce, CEO of iUpload, which is apparently going to undergo a name change in a few weeks. He was previously with the Documentum group within EMC, although not (I think) with Documentum before the acquisition. iUpload creates enterprise social software, that is, a platform for blogs, wikis and other social networking channels for use within an enterprise. They offer only a hosted SaaS solution rather than something that can be installed within the firewall, which might be a bit of a barrier for some enterprises who still don't get that SaaS can be just as secure and have the same degree of uptime as their own data centre. He made some great points about all the things that you need to think about when implementing social networking applications within the enterprise: workflow, permissions, control, metrics, integration, security, compliance, identity management, versioning, reporting.

He also discussed this in the context of a common Web 2.0 content engine; not a surprising approach for someone coming from an ECM environment, and I'm sure that we'll be starting to see many of these social networking tools creeping into mainstream ECM offerings before long. In that view, issues like security, user administration, integration and metrics are consolidated in the common engine, and blogs and wikis are just distribution mechanisms for the content.

There was a question from the audience on what metrics exist for measuring the benefits of enterprise social networking applications; Bruce had one example of a hotel chain CEO's blog where they tracked clickthroughs from the CEO's blog post on a particular hotel to the specific hotel online booking form through to an actual booking, although he admitted that many enterprise social networking applications are implemented because it's an executive's pet project. Given what I saw in the Avenue A|Razorfish intranet wiki project last week, there's lots of places where a hard ROI could definitely be established in terms of cost savings of wikis over standard web page publishing.

Anthony Williams joined back in for the Q&A, and had an interesting comment on the organizational impacts of social networking in the enterprise: he sees boomers as the senior management in organizations today, and gen X as the middle management who are actively resisting all of this new-fangled Web 2.0 stuff that the net gen is trying to bring in because it threatens their burgeoning fiefdoms. There is justice, after all.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 09:43 AM in ECM • Enterprise2.0 • Enterprise2.0TTW | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

I'm at Enterprise 2.0 Camp today, and Anthony Williams is the first breakfast speaker. He's giving the Wikinomics lesson in short -- how we're undergoing an economic transformation because of the collaborative nature of value creation that's happening due to both Web 2.0 internet applications and social networking principles being introduced into the enterprise. He covers the four basic principles: peering, openness, sharing and acting globally; since I read the book fairly recently, this is all still pretty fresh in my mind and it's great to hear it from the author.

I like his discussion of openness, where he shows the move from companies hiring all their own talent internally, to outsourcing of some business processes, to a true open market for talent. This is a critical area of overlap between BPM and Enterprise 2.0, since BPM has been enabling business process outsourcing and will continue to be a key technology for supporting an open market: if you can find a grope outside your organization, whether local or a half a world away, that has superior skills to deliver some aspect of your business process, you need to be able to easily include them in your value chain. He also talks about organizations creating an ecosystem for others to add value to their base products: everything from SalesForce.com's AppExchange to Facebook's new application platform. In some cases, there's a more active collaboration with other companies; in others, it's the prosumer doing their own thing and giving it back to the community.

He talked about Science 2.0 in the context of sharing, with the Human Genome Project and other similar projects pooling data and computing power. Open source development also falls under the sharing part of wikinomics, with companies like IBM contributing developers to Linux development that is turned back to the community. It's not completely altruistic: a more robust Linux community benefits IBM because they sell more hardware and services to run it on, and the amount that they contribute to Linux development is about 1/10 of what they would spend developing and maintaining an equivalent proprietary operating system (say, OS/400).

Williams described how to get started with Enterprise 2.0 internally, through the use of internal blogs and wikis, which put me in mind of the Avenue A|Razorfish intranet wiki that I heard about last week at the PCC conference. It's a good way to get people used to the concepts, while at the same time working out the governance issues before any of this information is exposed on the public internet.

Tom Purves put today together mostly as an unconference, with a few minor changes: first, there's some "name" speakers at breakfast, and second, we all had to pitch in $50 for the day, but we're at the Toronto Convention Centre so I wouldn't expect that we'd be getting everything for free. Still a great deal, and I'm looking forward to the rest of the day.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 08:59 AM in Enterprise2.0 • Enterprise2.0TTW • Web2.0 | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

Colin White continued on after his RSS presentation to give a wrap-up of the entire conference. Considering that he's the only thing standing between people and their flights (or the pool, in my case), it's pretty sparsely attended. I'm staying in the room to avoid the Häagen-Dazs that's on the coffee break table outside; after 4 conferences in 7 weeks, I have "conference bulge" and need to get back to brown rice and broccoli for a while.

He makes the point, as he did yesterday, that the audience has changed dramatically from previous PCC conferences, both in terms of their technical focus and the external-facing nature of the portals that they're building. Uh-oh, he just said "Portals 2.0", a sure sign that he's trying to Web 2.0-ify the somewhat less glamorous field of portals.

He points out the problem today of multiple portal environments: every big vendor has a portal platform, and they all want you to use theirs if you use any of their other products. At some point, you need to reduce the number of portal environments or find some way to federate them.

There was a lengthy discussion about the vendor presence here. There were a few major portal vendors who were not in the showcase; I suspect that this is a fairly small conference for many of the vendors and it's just not worth their marketing budget. White said that they're revisiting the idea of allowing vendors to present, possibly either in short demo sessions or other forums that are not marketing in nature.

At the end of it all, I'm left wondering why I'm here as a speaker. BPM is pretty peripheral to the topic of PCC (although my session was well-attended), and I was slotted in on the morning of the last day, when likely most of the other speakers have already bailed out. Since Shared Insights is only covering two nights of hotel in my travel expenses, I wasn't here to attend and blog about the entire conference, but was here only for yesterday afternoon and this morning. I wasn't invited to participate in the speaker one-on-one sessions (where most of the speakers made themselves available to attendees for 30-minute sessions on a sign-up schedule), so feel a bit like a second stringer on the speaker roster. I think that the original interest was around a blog post that I did some time ago about Web 2.0 and BPM, which leads me back to my earlier comment about how they're trying to Web 2.0-ify this conference; possibly I was part of that effort. In any case, my area of expertise is much more suited to the Shared Insights BPM conference series, so maybe I'll end up speaking at one of those some day soon.

In the mean time, it's off to the pool.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 07:42 PM in SharedInsightsPCC | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

My session on the changing face of BPM went pretty well, except for one guy who said that I was wrong about pretty much everything :)

Today finishes early, so I'm at the last breakout session, Colin White discussing using RSS in the enterprise, and the broader subject of using web syndication to deliver content to users. It's a bit distracting because he has exactly the same English accent as someone on my wine club board; I keep looking up and expecting to see my friend Bernard (who doesn't even know how to spell RSS) at the front of the room.

White is looking at this from an architectural rather than implementation viewpoint, and focussing on enterprise rather than internet data sources: a standardized and lightweight XML-based integration protocol. He spent an undue amount of time explaining generically what RSS feeds are and how internet syndication works in various RSS readers; is there anyone in this fairly technical portal-savvy audience who doesn't already know all this? He then moved on to the differences between RSS and Atom and the specific tags used in an RSS feed; 30 minutes into the presentation, we still haven't yet seen anything to do with RSS in the enterprise.

Eventually he does get to enterprise uses of RSS; no surprise, one big use is to have it integrated into a business portal, although the XML can also be consumed by various search tools, including ETL to capture the data and load it into a data warehouse or content management system -- something that I hadn't thought about previously, but can be done with tools like Microsoft Integration Services. He points out how RSS is one piece in the integration puzzle, which is essentially what I've been saying with respect to using RSS feeds of process execution data as one way of providing visibility into processes.

White covers the different types of feed servers: external, internal, and hosted SaaS. Interestingly, NewsGator is now in all three areas, with both an enterprise server and an on-demand solution that can aggregate and syndicate internal as well as external content, as well as their well-known external internet version. That gives a variety of ways that a feed server can fit into an enterprise environment: either an external feed server providing only the external feeds, or an internal/hosted feed server that can handle both internal and external feeds. This has the advantage of reducing network traffic, since the feed server caches the feeds, as well as providing filtering and monitoring of content that is consumed.

I'm really aware of a push to give PCC a very Enterprise 2.0 flavour; having not been at any of the previous PCC conferences, or even the first half of this one, I don't know if this is a new bandwagon that they're leaping on, or something that's a logical progression of where this conference has been in the past.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 07:39 PM in BI • Enterprise2.0 • SharedInsightsPCC • Web2.0 | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

I skipped this morning's taxonomy/folksonomy smackdown featuring Seth Earley and Zach Wahl -- I just wasn't up for that much testosterone this early in the morning -- and went to the best practices track to hear about how AvenueA|Razorfish implemented their internal wiki. I'm speaking next, so if this session isn't sufficiently riveting, I'll duck out early to review my notes.

Donna Jensen, their senior technical architect, took us through how they use a wiki as an intranet portal. She spent some amount of time first defining wikis and discussing benefits and challenges, particularly when used inside the firewall. She made a crack about how Ph.D. dissertations will be written on many of these points, which isn't that far from the truth: things like encouraging active versus passive behaviour. And, although she claims that they're breaking down behaviours tied to organizational silos, she admitted that no one can comment on the CEO's blog although all others are open territory. At some point, even the top level executives have to learn that if they're going to commit to Enterprise 2.0, it has to permeate to all levels of the organization: no one should be exempt.

The platform that they used was MediaWiki (the software used to create Wikipedia) on a standard LAMP stack, giving them a completely open source base. They also use WordPress for internal blogs, maintaining the commitment to open source. Although they did do some customization, particularly in terms of creating templates such as project pages, they took advantage of many freely-available third-party extensions for functionality such as tag clouds, calendaring and skins. They use Active Directory for security, and allow access only internal or VPN access: no external access or applications.

AA|RF put in the wiki with only a technical VP and a part-time intern, pretty much out of the box, and found that it wasn't adopted. They did another cut with Jensen as technical architect (part-time) and a couple more interns, and arrived at their current state: no project management oversight, no content management system, and no creative designer, with the whole thing implemented in about 2,000 person-hours. As a web technology consulting company (although with little Web 2.0 experience), they can get away with this, but you may not want to try this one at home. They used agile scheduling, and eventually brought in some rigorous QA. Jensen feels that their only real mistake was not bringing in a create designer earlier, since the wiki is apparently pretty technical looking. They haven't yet put a WYSIWYG editor so everyone still needs to work in WikiText, which is likely a bit of a barrier for the non-techies.

Jensen talked about a few byproducts of the wiki adoption, such as the incremental upgrade model that tends to come with open source or SaaS products, rather than the monolithic (and often disruptive) upgrades of proprietary software. She also talked about how many IT departments won't use open source because it makes them unable to turn to someone who is compelled to help them -- in other words, they have to take on the responsibility of finding a solution themselves. Another byproduct is the shift towards open source, and the savings that they can expect by replacing some of their current software platforms and their hefty maintenance fees with open source alternatives.

In their wiki environment, any kind of file can be uploaded, all pages (except the home page) are editable by everyone, and any content except client-confidential information can reside there. I really have to wonder how this would work if they upload a massive number of files: at what point do you need to add a content management system, and how painful is it going to be to do that later? Their wiki home page shows del.icio.us and Flickr feeds, internal blog feeds, Digg items and recent uploaded documents. One audience member asked if that meant that if anyone in the company tagged a public web page, that it would be included on the home page; there was general shock around the room and wonderment that you could do this without having some centralized body approving such content before it was surfaced to the rest of the company. I tried not to laugh out loud; is this such a radical idea? Obviously, the last year of being immersed in Web 2.0 has changed me, and I start wondering which of these things that I would adopt if I were still running a 40-person consulting company. As the session goes on, the same question about how user tagging on the internet drives their intranet home page keeps coming up from the audience over and over.

What I found interesting (and I'm probably blowing their whole game by publishing this), is that they're using public Web 2.0 tools to feed part of the home page: if something is tagged AARF on del.icio.us or Flickr, it shows up there. For Digg, however, you have to be a friend of AARF to have your items show up. Jensen said that she'll be changing the AARF tag to something unguessable, although if you know how to track items and users through del.icio.us or Flickr, it wouldn't be that difficult to figure out their new tag. She also said that they had run some analytics on whether these tags gave away any secrets about what they're currently researching, and found that the mix is too varied for any patterns to emerge.

The wiki is a portal in a very real sense, which was a bit of a revelation to me: I didn't previously think of wikis as portals. Everyone has their own people page which they can format and populate as they wish, and which can include their recent file uploads and blog postings. On any page, adding a "portlet" is just a matter of copying and pasting a snippet of PHP code, including copying snippets of code such as the <embed> code provided by YouTube for every video on its site.

They've done some cool things with blogs as well, such as having mailing lists corresponding to blogs, and sending an email to that mailing list will auto-post it as a blog entry on the corresponding blog.

Jensen had some great ideas for wiki adoption, often centred around "wikivangelists" getting out there and helping people. I especially like the idea of the "days of wine and wikis" events. :)  And they're getting some great adoption rates.

I had to leave just before the end: she was running 7 minutes overtime and I had only 15 minutes between sessions to get to my own room to set up. It was hard to tear myself away, however; I found both Jensen's presentation and the audience feedback to be riveting.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 07:35 PM in Enterprise2.0 • OpenSource • SharedInsightsPCC • Web2.0 | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

Apparently there was no wrap-up session yesterday, so the last session today wrapped up the past two days. Colin White, who has been running this conference for 8 years, was joined by three of his regular presenters: Shawn Shell of Consejo, Tony Byrne of CMS Watch, and Zach Wahl of Project Performance. The discussion was pretty open; I'll try to attribute to the correct person as I document it.

In looking at what has changed at the conference recently, White found that 2/3 of attendees were building external-facing rather than internal-facing, which he feels to be influenced by Web 2.0. Shell found the audience to be more technical and tactical, and very focussed on building portals to connect with customers and employees. Byrne commented on how layered that portals are becoming, sometimes with several portal products being used simultaneously, and how the sheer diversity of integration technologies is making a more complex portal ecosystem. He feels that many organizations are out-growing some of the lightweight tools provided by portals, such as document management, and thinks that traditional portal vendors are having problems figuring out how to do Web 2.0 in their products. Wahl mentioned a higher caliber audience (by which it appears that he means "more technical", however frightening the implications of that statement), and sees that the outward-facing portals that are being developed provide a stronger tie-in to ROI.

They then moved on to audience questions, and I can't attribute the responses to any of the four participants.

Q: How are organizations using blogs?

A:

• Attend the Razorfish session tomorrow for a case study. [I did]
• It's still a "cautious" activity for organizations, and is often still a top-down corporate communications "fake blog" from C-level executives rather than true blogs.
• Blogs are useful for technical organizations [I scratched my head over that one, although I admit that one of the most successful organizations that I've seen using blogs internally is IBM]
• Many people inside corporations "don't have anything to say that's universally consumable". [This statement made me cringe; it totally misses the point of blogs]
• A corporate ethos of content sharing can provide the right environment for blogging.

My conclusion: half of the 4 speakers don't get blogging.

Q: How much of Web 2.0 is hype versus reality for the enterprise?

A: "There's some organizations for which this isn't going to work". [The speaker quite erroneously equated Web 2.0 in the enterprise with publishing corporate content on the public internet]

Q: What are the future directions in PCC?

A:

• There's an increasing diversity of products rather than consolidation in the market, leading to more competition.
• Major vendors, such as Oracle and BEA, are leapfrogging technologies to meet new standards and stay competitive.
• The dynamism in PCC right now is in the add-ons, such as BPM, rather than the underlying portal technology. [This resulted in a specific discussion about how BEA's BPM is driving portal sales, although I'm not sure that's true]
• Portal vendors are moving into the add-on market to take more of the enterprise pie.

There was also a discussion about getting started with search and taxonomy: for example, using the Google search appliance as a starter for search/taxonomy, and the need for a simple start to taxonomy in particular. We finished with a brief discussion about the perceived dilemma of SharePoint proliferation: is it out of control or a necessary state of departmental document collaboration?

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 07:31 PM in ECM • Enterprise2.0 • SharedInsightsPCC • Web2.0 | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

Seth Earley gave a presentation on taxonomy governance; he's obviously a Very Important Taxonomist, and made sure that we knew it by having his flunky deliver his Starbucks Cafe Americano to him during the presentation instead of just grabbing a coffee from the service provided by the conference right outside the room. Yes, I'm cranky, I just flew 5 hours to get here and don't have a lot of patience for a prima donna who wastes my time during the presentation talking about how he needs his 4 shots of espresso. Grrr.

Earley appears to be an anti-folksonomist: he believes that tags should be part of a controlled vocabulary, and that folksonomies are really only appropriate for identifying candidate terms, that is, terms recommended for admission to the change management process that would promote a tag into the formal taxonomy. The implication is that users aren't qualified to define new tags/terms, but that it requires a "tagging expert". Presumably like him.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 07:31 PM in ECM • SharedInsightsPCC | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

I arrived in Las Vegas late this morning for my presentation tomorrow morning, just in time for lunch at the conference. Sometimes, timing is everything.

For the first afternoon breakout session, I sat in on Craig Roth of the Burton Group discussing how to pick between modes of communication and collaboration. His main premise is that we often use the wrong tools for communication and collaboration -- where e-mail is likely the most widely used and the worst -- and he presents a chart for figuring out which method to use for which types of interactions.

This chart, and using it, formed the bulk of the presentation, and it was pretty interesting. Basically, it has four quadrants, with divisions by "communication" and "collaboration" on one axis, and "asynchronous" and "synchronous" on the other axis. For example, synchronous communication channels includes IM, telephony and audio/video chat; asynchronous communication channels include e-mail, RSS feeds and alerts; synchronous collaboration channels include web conferencing and whiteboarding; and asynchronous collaboration channels include wikis and discussion forums. It sounds a bit complicated, but it's actually quite elegant and obvious when you see it.

He then overlays a decision flowchart on the 4-quadrant chart to show how you decide which quadrant that you should be in, then which tools in that quadrant to use. For example, the initial decision is "purpose of interaction", where "telling" puts you into the communication half, and "collaborating on goal" puts you into collaboration. Once you're in the communication half, the next decision is "when are responses expected"; either "now" or "today" puts you into the synchronous communication quadrant, with different channels for each of those two responses, whereas "over time" puts you into asynchronous communication. There's a number of tools and channels that he doesn't include here, which he still considers to be under the radar; surprisingly, workflow is included in that group, although it's not clear what he means by that or why it's under anyone's radar.

In general, his quadrant chart could be a pretty useful tool, although I find some of the distinctions by content type to be a bit fuzzy. He has some great recommendations on battling dysfunctional behaviours and getting people to use some of the new tools as well.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 07:29 PM in ECM • SharedInsightsPCC | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

This came to me via the AIIM Toronto chapter, but is being put on by IQPC: Content Week Canada, June 18-20 in Toronto. Maybe they should call it Content Week Toronto?

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 11:56 AM in ECM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

I've just returned from 6 days vacation on Canada's east coast, and Monday is a holiday here as well so things will be quiet here until I hit the Shared Insights Portals and Collaboration conference later this week in Las Vegas, where I'm speaking on the changing face of BPM.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 10:00 PM in Blogging | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

In advance of the big Boston Enterprise 2.0 conference in June, we're having a one-day Enterprise 2.0 event here in Toronto on May 29th as part of Toronto Tech Week.

The day will start with a breakfast seminar "How Enterprise 2.0 is Changing Business" by Anthony Williams, co-author of Wikinomics, and John Bruce, CEO of iUpload, an enterprise social media company. The rest of the day is EnterpriseCamp, with participant-led workshops in an unconference format.

Only $40 for the breakfast seminar or $50 for the entire day; you can sign up here if you want to get a taste of Enterprise 2.0 and participate in an unconference. I might even lead a session. :)

If you're really into *camping, there's also a Toronto BarCamp (TorCamp) on the previous Saturday, May 26th, which will most likely be on the University of Toronto downtown campus.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 04:16 PM in Enterprise2.0 | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

From Markus Strohmaier of the Know-Center Graz, information on this September's I-KNOW (International Conference on Knowledge Management), including a special track on Task and Process Exploration and Modelling with the following objectives:

In contrast to the well researched and applied top-down approaches to business process modelling and management the “Task and Process Exploration and Modelling (TPEM)” tries to find answers to the following guiding research questions:

• To what extend is knowledge work capturing possible? Barriers? Challenges?
• Can knowledge work be modelled or derived from usage data? Do knowledge work patterns exist and how can they be automatically discovered?
• What is the impact of usage data analysis on knowledge work support and business process modelling and management?

I've been seeing some interesting things with BPM vendors lately about deriving process patterns from usage data, both for the purposes of automating decisions and to suggest decisions to a human operator; there's a lot of interesting research going on in this area, and some is starting to manifest already. Deadline to submit a paper is May 21st.

Markus is a Column 2 reader who I met face-to-face when he moved to Toronto last year for post-doctoral research; he's now headed home to Austria.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 02:25 PM in BPA | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

I had a recent comment that the feed for this site is not working properly. If you're having trouble with the feed, it could be that you were using a feed directly from the site rather than the FeedBurner version of the feed that I have in the sidebar -- check your feed location and update it to the FeedBurner version, which is definitely working.

I use FeedBurner for my feed since it adds in a number of widgets at the bottom of each feed to make it more useful to readers, such as the comments count for the post and a link to post it to del.icio.us. It also presents an easy subscription page when you first visit the feed, optimizes the feed for your particular feed reader, and even provides a way to subscribe by email. It helps me out by showing me how many people are subscribed to the feed and which readers that they're using.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 01:10 PM in Blogging | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

I mentioned that I was having some problems with my column2.com email address, and I finally figured out what the problem was: in playing around with Google Apps for my domain, I ended up forwarding that email to a mailbox that I wasn't actually checking. D'oh! At least all the mail wasn't lost, but now I have an extra 80 email messages to respond to from the past three weeks.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 11:02 AM in OffTopic | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

There's a webinar going on right now (12 Eastern) on ebizQ about which comes first, BPM or SOA, featuring Colin Teubner of Forrester. I like his agenda point: "Why SOA needs BPM (and not vice versa)".

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 12:06 PM in BPM • SOA | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

Last session of the conference, and it was a tough choice: the ALBPM Experience track was featuring a talk about BAM, but since I'd already covered this in the past two days, I decided on the performance tuning session. Unfortunately, 10 minutes into the time slot, the Q&A for the previous session was still dragging on; I took this as a message from the conference gods that my time here was done and ducked out to write this wrapup post before I leave for the airport. I'm back in Toronto for a week catching up on real work (the sort that actually pays, as opposed to this blogging gig) so blogging may be light for the rest of the week. My next conference is Shared Insights' Portals and Collaboration in Las Vegas later this month, where I'm speaking on the changing face of BPM.

It's been an interesting experience attending two (competing) vendors' user conferences back-to-back: TIBCO last week, and BEA this week. Since this week's conference was only a subset of BEA's customer base -- those that use ALUI and ALBPM -- it was less than half the size of last week's TUCON, but I found myself at both conferences having to make decisions between what to see in any particular session since there was a lot of good content at both. Since both of these vendors are from the more technical integration space, and gained their BPM products by fairly recent acquisitions rather than organic growth (Staffware in the case of TIBCO, and Fuego in the case of BEA), the conferences were still quite focussed on technical rather than business attendees. TIBCO, having a head start on the BPM space by a couple of years, probably did a bit better at addressing the business part of the audience, but both they still have a long way to go. I contrast this with FileNet user conferences that I've attended over the years, which have a much higher percentage of business attendees (by my assessment) and many more topics specifically addressing their needs.

The reception that I had at both conferences was nothing short of amazing. My hosts made sure that I had everything that I needed to work productively (although there wasn't much that they could do about the crappy wifi in either location), access to the people who I wanted to talk to, and wined and dined me around town in the evening -- my diet starts tomorrow. Special thanks to Jeff and Emily at TIBCO, and Jesper and Marissa at BEA for being the point people during my visits, although there were many others involved at both vendors.

Just to finish up, I've been noting the logistical things that make attending a conference a lot better for me. Not to sound like too much of a prima donna, here they are:

• Wifi. Free wifi. In fact, I would go so far as to say that technically-oriented conferences should only be held in hotels that offer free wifi throughout their hotel, both in public areas and rooms.
• Power. Although less important than wifi, because I can run for a couple of hours without it, the last thing that I want to do is have to switch from blogging to paper note-taking because my battery dies during a session.
• Tea. Hot. Preferably green.
• T-shirts. What is it with all the fancy paper notebooks being given away as conference schwag this year, with nary a t-shirt in sight? All I know is that if I go home without a man's large t-shirt from the conference, I hear about it for days. Particularly this week, when I'm missing his birthday to be here.

I have to say, both TIBCO and BEA failed me on the t-shirt requirement. ;)

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 11:56 AM in BEAparticipate • TUCON | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

Brandon Dean of BEA talked about how to use BPM for compliance and improved visibility into processes. I wrote a course on compliance and BPM recently, and I was interested in how they're seeing this roll out amongst their customer base.

Regulatory compliance (e.g., SOX) and any sort of commercial compliance (e.g., SLAs) or organizational compliance (e.g., internal KPIs) have many of the same requirements: processes need to behave in a consistent fashion, and any exceptions have to be handled using a standard method. Measurements on how well that the process is meeting its stated compliance goals are critical to understand whether or not the underlying business process is compliant. This, of course, plays directly to the strengths of BPM: providing a platform for standardizing and, where possible, automating processes; integration of multiple systems; consistent exception handling; security on the process steps and a comprehensive audit trail on who did what, and when; and monitoring and reporting for visibility into the processes and proactive alerts when they start to wander out of compliance.

Dean covered on how to position BPM for compliance, starting with a great categorization of organizational types ranging from companies that already have compliant processes but just need a better audit trail, to those that are actively trying to find ways around compliance. He made a point that I also discussed in my compliance course: if you implement compliance on a regulation-by-regulation basis, it's a lot more expensive and time-consuming. In fact, I used a quote from a Gartner report from 2004, in the middle of the SOX gold rush:

Enterprises that choose one-off solutions for each regulatory challenge that they face will spend 10 times more on compliance projects than their counterparts that take a proactive approach.

 He went through a number of case studies and how their compliance was facilitated by BPM:

• Dental insurance claims processing, which started out as a completely manual process that had no audit trail and didn't enforce standard rates and practices. Using BPM, they not only had some processes decrease cycle time from 3 days to 8 minutes, but they were able to meet HIPAA compliance requirements.
• Trade processing, where the SLA was not being met and they were risking losing the ability to execute trades. BPM allowed them to set alerts on trades that arrived but didn't complete for some reason, so that any manual intervention required could be performed in time to meet their SLA. This also allowed them to do follow-the-sun processing for more intelligent human resource allocation.
• Residential mortgage processing, which wasn't able to track requests for special handling in loan origination, and was causing them to lose customers. Using BPM, documents were automatically rendezvoused with waiting processes, and the processes presented for work at the point when they were ready to be processed rather than having people track the missing documents manually. This also automated feedback to the brokers to submit the necessary documents to reduce the wait time. A major gain was in making sure that all the information was gathered in a timely manner, and not presented for processing until all the information was available.

Although I think that Dean's definition of compliance is a bit stretched to include both customer SLAs and internal KPIs, his points are valid for developing many types of business cases for BPM.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 10:57 AM in BEAparticipate • BPM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

First session of the last morning, Eduardo Chiocconi of BEA and Rob Wald of JPMorgan Chase talked about the ALBPM UI: what comes out of the box, and what you can build yourself.

Out of the box, ALBPM has three user interfaces alternatives:

• HiPer WorkSpace, a full user workspace with menus based on their permissions, a view of their inbox, and views of any instances that the user opens. It uses CSS if you want to change styles, and can be customized further in terms of removing buttons and other controls.
• JSR-168 portlets for any standard portal environment, such as WebLogic.
• WorkSpace Extensions WorkList Portlets that can be plugged into ALI and provide additional integration functionality over the standard portal interface, such as integration with the ALI Collaboration environment.

They're working on consolidating these interfaces in order to reduce the user learning curve.

If those don't work for you, then you can create your own user interface, either browser-based or rich client, using the available APIs. For building web clients, many of their customers have used JSP to re-code the entire user interface, then used servlets to access the engine. Alternatively, you can use Struts or JSF/AJAX. All of these can use their Java-based process API, PAPI, or the web services version, PAPI-WS, to retrieve instances from the engine, or WAPI (a servlet-based API) to execute interactive activities such as screen flows.

For rich clients, they're seeing a lot of .Net development that uses PAPI-WS to retrieve instances, then create the UI. It's also possible to use Eclipse or Swing to build rich user interfaces that call PAPI directly. This is more complex for interactive activities, but there are ways to work around that.

To sum up, there are three public APIs:

• PAPI (process API), which is a Java implementation. If you're working in a Java environment, this provides the tightest integration and best functionality. It manages multiple process engines transparently, and does instance caching on the client side to reduce latency in connecting to the engine -- a critical performance factor.
• PAPI-WS is a subset of PAPI that operates as web services (SOAP), although this is being extended in the near future to provide the full functionality of PAPI. There may be a .Net version of PAPI in the future, but for now you have to use PAPI-WS if you're developing in .Net (e.g., ASP.Net), and can also be used from any web service client. Right now, PAPI-WS is part of the HiPer WorkSpace, but will be decoupled as a self-contained web application in the future. It's also possible to expose processes directly as web services, as we heard in an earlier session, which provides another point of integration from a web service or .Net development environment.
• WAPI, which is a servlet API that can be used to launch the UI of an interactive activity at a point in the process, which can't be done in PAPI or PAPI-WS.

With any custom UI, there's always the question of single sign-on. With the WorkSpace Extensions WorkList Portlets in ALI, that's handled natively; in the HiPer WorkSpace and JSR-168 portlet implementations it requires some customization, although there is a single sign-on login servlet provided with the JSR-168 portlets to make this easier.

Getting to the specific JPMorgan case study, they created a custom user interface since, like many large companies, they want integration with other applications in their environment and want more control over the look and feel of the interface. It's possible to just create custom JSPs and use them in the standard work portal framework, which provides a great deal of control over the UI without completely rewriting it, but this wasn't sufficient for many of their applications. What they ended up doing was creating a completely custom inbox using Struts/JSP/GWT with PAPI: one example that he showed was using Struts and AJAX via the Google Web Toolkit to manage financial reconciliation processes. They're also using IceFaces, an open source RenderKit implementation of JSF (as a replacement for Struts) that supports AJAX to create a visual drag-and-drop components for use in an IDE such as Eclipse. Since JPMorgan is dedicated to the use of open source, they're doing some innovative development that's not seen in most corporate environments, but maybe should be. They're also using the JSR-168 portlets in a more standard portal implementation, and building rich clients with Eclipse.

On the back end of their implementation, they've found that some of the PAPI protocols don't work well over wide-area networks, such as between their US and Japan operations, so they do quite a bit of preloading of the PAPI cache.

JPMorgan has implemented ALBPM as a centralized shared service in order to provide efficient use of both human and server resources: centralized code and best practices on the human side, and a single ALBPM server handling 10 applications without difficulty.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 10:56 AM in BEAparticipate • BPM • SoftwareDesign | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

Eduardo Chiocconi of BEA gave us a technical view of the ALBPM BAM functionality: what's available out of the box, the extensions, how to create customized dashboards, security, and a bit of the architecture underlying it all so that we have a bit of an understanding of what happens in the underlying services and data stores when a custom key performance indicator (KPI) is defined.

Like every other BPM vendors' BAM, ALBPM's BAM is visualized as a set of dashboards that show KPIs for the purpose of monitoring the health of a process and early problem detection. There are some out-of-the-box dashboards including widgets such as gauges and charts attached to a data source, and the ability to create custom dashboards. As we saw in the architectural view this morning, there's a BAM database to collect and aggregate the analytics data from one or more process engines, plus external data sources if you want a combined view. There is a single BAM database for each directory service, and an updater service that executes regularly to pull data from the associated engine database(s) to the BAM database. Data in the BAM database is very granular -- down to the second, if required -- but is flushed out as it ages, typically after a day. The OLAP data mart, which has the same data as the BAM database and is updated by the same service, is much less granular and is not automatically purged; this is used for historical analytics rather than the near-real-time requirements of the BAM database.

The out-of-the-box dashboards are instance workload, percentage workload by organizational unit, performance (e.g., end-to-end cycle time) including drill-downs to more granular levels, or a unified dashboard with all three of these measures. Surprisingly, these widgets are not currently provided as standard portlets, but can be wrapped into a portlet if required.

Most organizations will want to define their own KPIs and create their own dashboards: KPIs can be defined by a business analyst in the Designer as dimensions (e.g., time or geographic aggregation) or measures (e.g., averages and other statistical aggregations), and can be based on standard process variables or business variables. This causes a new column to be created in each of the three main BAM database tables to capture the necessary data for the three display widgets for that measure or dimension.

It's also possible to specify the points in the process where the KPI data are captured and sent to the BAM database in addition to allowing the automatic update process to occur, giving it a sort of audit functionality. Internally, the BAM data are generated from the process engine's audit trail, so you'll have to have auditing enabled for all of the processes and events that you want to track in BAM (in many cases, you would turn off auditing for processes and events that don't require it in order to improve performance).

ALBPM allows for role-based security access to the BAM dashboards, so that only specific roles can see them.

Future directions are to allow ad hoc dashboard creation and move to event-driven BAM, although that will require some architectural changes to the underlying database and services in order to handle the increased load that will result from allowing everyone to roll their own analytics.

The more I look at it, the less than I'm convinced that all the BPM vendors should be developing their own BAM like this; I think that there could be a market for a BAM product that can connect to many different BPM products as soon as we get some standardization around the process engine audit trails that are typically used to populate BAM databases.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 03:10 PM in BEAparticipate • BI | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

Jesper Joergensen gave us BEA's view of how BPM is changing business and the future of BPM. Actually, he starts out with Gartner's view of expected market growth (hockey, anyone?) and how BPM is becoming more and more a part of organizations' productivity improvement initiatives as it moves from opportunistic to pervasive adoption.

There's a number of obstacles to BPM adoption, however, many of them cultural:

1. The ivory tower of process expertise, where a few process experts are doing the modelling. Easy-to-use modelling tools like ALBPM are helping to change that, but my opinion is that we need to have more pervasive technology to enable the shift, and that's going to be web-based, like Appian's process designer or Lombardi's Blueprint process discovery tool.
2. The ROI barrier: many current opportunistic BPM projects are low-hanging fruit in terms of ROI, but projects need to deliver faster and cheaper in order to implement processes with a lesser potential return.
3. Getting beyond just system-to-system orchestration and adding human-facing steps to the process. Stop thinking of those processes as "human-interrupted" and accept people as necessary actors in BPM-automated processes.
4. Managing complexity and scale.

Jesper went on to discuss a number of areas where practices and technologies need to evolve (note that this is not a statement of where ALBPM is going, just how he thinks that the BPM market needs to change):

• Web-based process modelling (which I obviously agree with).
• improved standards and interoperability, especially between a vendor's own tools if they have multiple tools for discovery, modelling and design.
• Automated process discovery based on monitoring (which I saw recently in a vendor demonstration but can't at this moment recall which one), where historical trends in manual decision-making are used to suggest automation of certain decision points.
• Better integration of BPM and BI, since many products currently have very separate BPM and analytics environments that don't integrate well.
• Standardization and service-enablement of process data; I think that BPRI may help with some of the standardization, but it likely needs to be taken further in terms of how process instance data and be extracted from a process engine via RSS feeds or other integration mechanisms.
• Process decision support, e.g., making suggestions based on historical decisions, and potentially raising exceptions if the current decision doesn't match the past trend.
• More open process flows to allow for dynamic changes to the process flow at runtime, even if they weren't anticipated at design time.
• Social computing functionality, such as tagging.
• Better integration with SOA and ESB.
• Enterprise-scale process execution and management to allow for end-to-end cross-departmental processes rather than the more common departmental BPM implementations that we see today.

We're in agreement on a lot of things on this list, and I'm looking forward to how some of these ideas might creep into the product in the future.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 02:21 PM in BEAparticipate • BPM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

Last session of the morning was Mateo Almenta Recca of BEA and Kunal Shah of Citigroup talking about advanced process modelling -- specifically process exceptions -- in ALBPM. Exceptions can be either system exceptions, such as a service being unavailable, or business (user-defined) exceptions, such as an account being closed. System exceptions are typically handled through automated retries and/or transaction rollbacks, whereas business exceptions are modelled into the process by the process designer.

Exception handlers can be built into the process at either the individual activity, group (similar to a BPMN transaction) or process level. Exception handlers at an activity appear just as an alternative path out of that activity, although an exception is typically invoked by a timeout or other non-decision activity instead of an explicit decision at that point. Exception handlers at the group level are shown connected to the group wrapper boundary, as in BPMN transaction exceptions, and process exception handlers are visualized as disconnected from the process but on the same model.

All exception handlers can take one of three basic actions: abort the process and go to the end of the process, go back and retry the step that threw the exception, or skip the step that threw the exception and move on to the next step in the process. The back and skip functionality is always at the activity level: an exception at the group level that causes a "back" instruction from the exception handler would return to the specific activity to be retried, not the entire group; "skip" would skip the activity but continue on to any later activities in the same group. This was counter-intuitive for me and I asked specifically about that: I would have expected that a group would be treated more like a BPMN transaction wrapper, such that a retry or skip would apply to the entire group, not the specific activity. Exception handlers can be automatic or manual steps: an automatic exception handler might perform some related transaction rollback in another system before aborting a process, for example, whereas a manual exception handler might allow for data repair before retrying the failed step.

They then talked about compensation flows, which seems to match the BPMN meaning of a compensation, in that it reverses a completed activity or group of activities. This isn't so easy as just rolling back any changed data values in the process instance, since there may have been external systems updated that now need to be rolled back to an earlier state, or non-transactional activities such as sending an email. Compensation flows are used when you can't use automatic rollback because an activity executed successfully, but can also be called by exception handlers. Visually, these appear very similar on the process model to exception handlers, in that they can be attached at the activity, group or process level. Since groups can be nested in a process model, the compensation flow for a group will invoke the compensation flows for any groups nested within it as it rolls back the entire flow of the group.

They finished up with a short Citigroup case study on how they handle trade exceptions in their back-office processes. Although most financial trades are handled straight through with no manual intervention, they handle 2000 trade exceptions each day. From designing a number of similar transactional BPM implementations, I know that there's huge financial risk if you don't handle your exceptions in a timely manner: market fluctuations that occur after the trade is accepted and priced but before it's completed are purely the risk of the financial institution, not the customer, so it's key to get the exceptions resolved as quickly as possible. Citigroup has implemented this as process-level exception handlers that log the exceptions and pass them on for manual review. In most cases, the exception handling process is just a matter of some manual data repair and the trade is resubmitted to the automated process, although some trades are cancelled from within the exception handler.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 12:07 PM in BEAparticipate • BPA • BPM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

I started my day in a session about what's coming up in future versions of ALBPM; unfortunately, most of the information hasn't been publicly released, so you'll have to wait to read about it at a later date. BEA will be holding BPM steering group meetings in July, so if you're an ALBPM customer and want to get involved in defining future versions of the product, this is your chance. I'd love to sit in on these, although I can't imagine the size of the NDA that I'd have to sign first.

I'm back listening to Mariano Benitez with an architectural overview of ALBPM for administrators and operators; I think that he's nervous now based on his reaction to my post yesterday. :)

We're going to cover the components of the ALBPM solutions, the enterprise infrastructure, and the deployment alternatives. I'll leave out a lot of the technical details since it would only be of interest if you were actually digging into ALBPM at this level in order to plan a deployment, in which case you're probably in the room with me right now.

In short, an ALBPM project can be made up of many processes, where a process consists of the process flow, points of integration and the presentation layer. Also associated with a process are the roles used by the process (which map to enterprise security), service endpoints, and deployment methods. ALBPM allows you to define the organization as it pertains to the business processes: participants and groups, organizational units, and roles.

Taking a look at the ALBPM enterprise infrastructure, it's (not surprising) three layers:

• There's a number of data sources, including a directory repository (which maintains configuration information about the deployment as well as organizational models used both in process definition and for authentication), the engine back-end database for all information on work in progress, historical instance data archived from the work-in-progress database, a real-time BAM data store with one day's worth of data aggregated for dashboard views, and an OLAP data store for more complete historical analytics. Either Oracle, MS SQL Server or DB2 can be used for the data sources, and although multiple execution engines don't require a separate database for each, they do require at least a separate schema. For performance, however, I would assume that you'd tend to split any production engine data stores and the analytics data stores onto separate database servers for performance reasons.
• In the middle layer is the main process execution engine -- the heart of the system -- plus a few other services such as data warehousing to load the analytics data stores. There are a number of basic services provided by the engine that are used to execute running process instances; no big surprises here on an architectural level if you've seen the process engine of other BPM vendors, although every engine has its specific advantages.
• Layered above the engine are various web applications, such as the main Workspace UI application that can be used both for processing and monitoring work. Listening to highly-technical engineers talk about user functions is always pretty funny: Benitez refers to the action of processing work as "invoking instance operations", so you can be sure that he's not going to be writing any user documentation. To be fair, I used to talk like that when I wrote code, too.

We unfortunately had to rush through the deployment scenarios, but saw that it's possible to deploy ALBPM either as a standalone BPM box or in a J2EE container (simple or clustered).

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 11:27 AM in BEAparticipate • BPM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

It seems like my column2.com email forward was not working properly, and at least some email sent there has disappeared into that great bit bucket in the sky. If you've sent me something recently and didn't hear back, try it again, I've reset the forward and it's working now. If that fails, my first name at kemsleydesign.com is my direct address.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 08:50 AM in OffTopic | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us