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

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

Next up in the general session is the technology buzz panel, where "journalists, analysts, and industry experts square off on buzzwords of the day". The moderator was Gary Beach of CIO Magazine, with panelists Frank Kenney of Gartner, Jason Maynard of Credit Suisse, Rob Strickland of T-Mobile USA, and Aaron Ricadela of BusinessWeek. Their initial goal is to eliminate four tech buzzwords (one per panelist):

• Maynard picked "Web 2.0", apparently not only because he thinks that it's a bad term but because he doesn't like social networking. There was discussion around the stage: Kenney railed against the term Web 2.0 but then used the ever-overused "paradigm shift"; Strickland said that he thinks there's too many bugs in Web 2.0 and he's waiting for 2.0.1; Ricadela commented on the new business models coming out of this, although he didn't use the term "Bubble 2.0".
• Strickland picked "the business", in the context of the dichotomy between IT and the business; as a CIO, he sees himself as an integral part of the business. I wonder if T-Mobile's business users feel the same way; Maynard said that he felt that his IT department was actually a detriment to productivity sometimes, and admitted to using his own MacBook Pro and Gmail (interestingly enough, a Web 2.0 application) because IT wasn't focussed on some of the business requirements. Kenney and Ricadela both talked about aligning IT and business, which of course just points out that the divide does exist.
• Ricadela picked "business process management", because he believes that it's become a catch-all term for anything to do with business improvements enabled by technology. He blames the analysts and vendors for the confusion: given that Gartner helped to promote this term in its infancy and created a tremendously confusing landscape that in turn allowed vendors to promote everything as BPM, I'd have to agree to a certain extent. Kenney feels that the term BPM is overused but should still exist; Maynard doesn't appear to understand the distinction between BPM and packaged applications.
• Kenney picked "enterprise", saying that it's not used consistently and is often just applied as a marketing buzzword: sometimes it means "within the four walls of a company", sometimes it relates to scalability or other features of a system. Maynard points out that adding the word "enterprise"  to a software product allows vendors to charge more it, and thinks that it applies only to large companies.
• Beach finished up by picking "virtualization", which I identified yesterday as potentially just being an overused buzzword, so I'd have to agree.

They moved on to a discussion of several magazine headlines: "Is your company fast enough"; "No future in tech?" (which veered sharply into American protectionist rhetoric); various open source headlines (Maynard pointed out that open source is fundamentally changing the software industry, even those companies that are not open source); software as a service (nothing new here); and finally, can you trust analysts' opinions given that they're all sleeping with the vendors.

They finished with a lightening round with 30-second opinions on Web 2.0, gigabit everywhere, SOA, AJAX, and the future of enterprise applications.

All in all, a more entertaining panel than I've seen for a while.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 01:28 PM in TUCON • Web2.0 | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

Jason Maynard of Credit Suisse moderated a panel on investment opportunities in the new software industry, which included Bill Burnham of Inductive Capital, Scott Russell (who was with two different venture capital firms but doesn't appear to be with one at this time, although his title is listed as "venture capitalist"), and Ann Winblad of Hummer Winblad Venture Partners.

This was more of an open Q&A between the moderator and the panel with no presentation by each of them, so again, difficult to blog about since the conversation wandered around and there were no visual aids.

Winblad made a comment early on about how content management and predictive analytics are all part of the collaboration infrastructure; I think that her point is that there's growth potential in both of those areas as Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 applications mature.

There was a lengthy discussion about open source, how it generates revenue and whether it's worth investing in; Burnham and Russell are against investing in open source, although Winblad is quite bullish on it but believes that you can't just lump all open source opportunities together. Like any other market sector, there's going to be winners and losers here. They all seem to agree, however, that many startups are benefiting from open source components even though they are not offering an open source solution themselves, and that there are great advantages to be had by bootstrapping startup development using open source. So although they might not invest in open source, they'd certainly invest in a startup that used open source to accelerate their development process and reduce development costs.

Russell feels that there are a number of great opportunities in companies where the value of the company is based on content or knowledge rather than the value of their software.

SaaS startups create a whole new wrinkle in venture: the working capital management is much trickier due to the delay in revenue recognition since payments tend to trickle in rather than be paid up front, even though the SaaS company needs to invest in infrastructure. Of course, I'm seeing some SaaS companies that are using hosted infrastructure rather than buying their own; Winblad discussed these sort of rented environments, and other ways to reduce startup costs such as using virtualization to create different testing environments. There are still a lot of the same old problems however, such as sales models. She advises keeping low to the ground, getting something out to a customer in less than a year, getting a partner to help bring the product to market in less than two years. As she put it, frugality counts; the days of spending megabucks on unnecessary expenses went away in 2000 when the first bubble burst, and VCs are understandably nervous about investing in startups that exhibit that same sort of profligate spending.

Maynard challenged them each to name one public company to invest in for the next five years, and why:

• Russell: China and other emerging markets require banking and other financial data, which companies like Reuters and Bloomberg (more favoured) will be able to serve. He later made comments about how there are plenty of opportunities in niche markets for companies that own and provide data/information rather than software.
• Burnham: mapping/GPS software like Tele Atlas, that have both valuable data and good software. He would not invest in the existing middleware market, and specifically suggested shorting TIBCO and BEA (unless they are bought by HP) -- the two companies whose user conferences that I'm attending this week and next.
• Winblad: although she focusses on private rather than public investments, she makes Amazon is a good bet since they are expanding their range of services to serve bigger markets, and have a huge amount of data about their customers that allows them to . She thinks that Bezos has a good vision of where to take the company. She recommends shorting companies like CA, because they're in the old data, infrastructure and services business.

Audience questions following that discussion focussed a lot on asking the VCs opinions on various public companies, such as Yahoo. Burnham feels that Yahoo is now in the entertainment industry, not the software industry, so is not a real competitor to Google. He feels that Google versus Microsoft is the most interesting battle to come. Russell thinks that Yahoo is a keeper, nonetheless.

Questions about investments in mobile produced a pretty fuzzy answer: at some point, someone will get the interface right, and it will be a huge success; it's very hard for startups to get involved since it involves them doing long negotiations with the big providers.

Burnham had some interesting comments about investing in the consumer versus the business space, and how the metrics are completely different because marketing, distribution and other factors differ so much. Winblad added that it's very difficult to build a consumer destination site now, like MySpace or YouTube. Not only are they getting into a crowded market, but many of the startups in this area have no idea how to answer basic questions about the details of an advertising revenue model, for example.

Burnham had a great comment about what type of Web 2.0 companies not to invest in: triple-A's, that is, AdSense, AJAX and arrogance.

Winblad feels that there's still a lot of the virtualization story to unfold, since it is seriously changing the value chain in data centres. Although VMware has become the big success story in this market, there are a number of other niches that have plenty of room for new players. She also thinks that companies providing specialized analytics -- her example was basically about improving financial services sales by analyzing what worked in the past -- can provide a great deal of revenue enhancement for their customers. As a final point on that theme, Maynard suggested checking out Swivel, which provides some cool data mashups.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 07:57 PM in Enterprise2.0 • NewSoftwareIndustry • OpenSource • Web2.0 | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

After several weeks of receiving emails saying "Good news! We expect to have your account activated within the week.", I received this:

Is there something that Lombardi doesn't want me to see?

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 03:48 PM in BPM • Web2.0 | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

I just had a great time hosting the BPM and Enterprise 2.0 panel with Phil, Phil and Ismael. These three have some radically different viewpoints, which made for a lively discussion (insert graphic of me dressed as a lion tamer, complete with whip and chair).

My favourite quote from the panel, from Phil Larson when speaking about mashing up BPM data: "BPM *is* a mashup".

And from Phil Gilbert, in an email note afterwards: "Awesome... most fun I've ever had on a webinar.  OK, OK, that's a low bar, I guess... BUT it was fun."

The replay should be available soon at the same link if you missed the live version.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 02:21 PM in BPM • Enterprise2.0 • Web2.0 | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (4) | Add to del.icio.us

I'm now confirmed to head to Boston in June for the Enterprise 2.0 conference, where I'll be doing my usual live-blogging coverage under this tag. More on this as we get closer to the event.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 09:59 PM in Enterprise2.0 • Web2.0 | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

If you enjoyed the free-for-all discussion at the end of the webinar that I moderated with Colin Teubner and Jim Rudden a few weeks back, you're going to love the panel that I'm hosting next week on BPM and Enterprise 2.0 as part of the BPM in Action series. It's not sponsored by a vendor, so I was able to pick whoever I wanted on the panel, and there will be no vendor product pitches or slides -- just an interactive discussion between the four of us. Get over there and sign up.

Here's the description that I wrote for it:

As Web 2.0 technologies and concepts advance in the consumer world, they are also impacting enterprise software as users change their expectations of how software should behave. This "Enterprise 2.0" movement is impacting BPM software in a variety of ways ranging from platforms to user functionality to integration. This panel will explore the following:

• How Web 2.0 is becoming Enterprise 2.0
• BPM platform changes: the impact of browser-based tools and software as a service
• New tools and techniques for improving user participation in process design and execution
• New ways of "mashing up" BPM data with internal and external data

I picked three people to join me whose opinions I value and who I think will be interesting in this format: Phil Gilbert of Lombardi, Phil Larson of Appian, and Ismael Ghalimi of Intalio. They're all very opinionated and all have a stake in the Web 2.0/Enterprise 2.0 space: Lombardi's very cool Web 2.0 Blueprint release for widespread collaboration, Appian's kick-butt browser-based process designer for serious Enterprise 2.0 work in a browser, and Ismael's involvement in radical office 2.0 and BPM 2.0 ideas.

We only have 45 minutes so I'm going to have to keep a tight rein on the conversation to cover off our proposed subject areas, which could be difficult because I inadvertently invited two Phils to the panel ("Phil, pipe down! No, not you Phil, the other Phil!"). No "call me Ishmael" jokes, I've heard them already.

By the way, congratulations to Ismael and his wife on their new arrival. No wonder he wasn't at the Gartner conference.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 02:37 PM in BPM • Enterprise2.0 • Web2.0 | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

In the world of Web 2.0, there's always some hot new service that you have to be invited to join, then you get on a waiting list, then (after a while) you finally get an account. Remember when Gmail was launched, for example? This is a brilliant idea from a marketing standpoint, because it creates a lot of buzz around the service, with everyone who gets an account bragging about it, and everyone who doesn't, wishing that they did. From a support standpoint, it also makes sense: you can't just put 10 million people on your service the first day of beta, because it will crash, and you'll look bad.

The current hot Web 2.0 account to have is Joost, an interactive online TV service brought to you by the two wunderkids who created Skype -- I see requests for Joost invitations, which apparently only come from those already on Joost, flying around the Toronto tech community.

The second hottest new Web 2.0 account to have is Lombardi's Blueprint (okay, maybe I'm exaggerating slightly), and I'm still in that unhappy "waiting list" phase. However, their bot still remembers my name, because it sent me an email this morning to tell me that it expects to complete my account setup soon...

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 03:11 PM in BPM • Web2.0 | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

CMP's Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston on June 18-21 has opened up for registration. Topics include the changing role of IT (presumably as it becomes more commoditized and outsourced), creating a culture of collaboration, consumerization of the enterprise and others. Andrew McAfee (inventor of the term "Enterprise 2.0"), David Weinberger (co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto) and Don Tapscott (co-author of Wikinomics) are all keynote speakers.

I'm very interested to see how Web 2.0 extensions to enterprise applications (like Blueprint) are covered in the conference, as opposed to the use of social software such as blogs and wikis within the enterprise: the two faces of Enterprise 2.0.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 10:14 AM in Enterprise2.0 • Web2.0 | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

"Naked blogging" is a term that's applied to living your life transparently on the web through your blog and other social media, like Flickr, del.icio.us, Skype, LinkedIn, Library Thing and Facebook. Most of my friends around my age (which, as you can tell from many of my online profiles, is 46) are appalled at the amount of information that I expose out there, although the younger crowd that I hang with at TorCamp see it as perfectly normal, and I truly believe that if you're going to get benefit from the network effects of Web 2.0, you need to contribute every bit as much as you expect to get back.

Two weeks ago, when I had a chance for a preview of Lombardi's new Blueprint Web 2.0-like, software-as-a-service process modeller, my first reaction was "Cool! Naked process modelling!" After all, if you could model your processes online and invite people from within or outside your organization to collaborate on the design of those processes, wouldn't you expect to see some benefit from that collaboration?

Blueprint addresses some of the issues seen in current process modelling tools: too much complexity for the casual user, and too little ability to collaborate. They call it "process discovery" rather than process modelling, host it as software-as-a-service, and let you get started with a free version (limited to one process and two users) to try it out before you spring for the monthly subscription. Just go to the site, start sketching out your process, then invite others to participate in the design. Like a wiki, everyone who you invite to collaborate on your process can make edits, and you'll see their edits right away -- a true shared whiteboard paradigm. Last September, I used the term "process wiki" in a post and at a couple of conferences where I was speaking, and that's pretty much what Lombardi has done here.

They've also integrated presence into the application using the Google Talk instant messaging client: you can see if your process collaborators are online (notice the "4 Other Users Viewing" indicator in the top right of the first screenshot below), and chat with them through Google Talk. You can also use your Google Talk buddy list to invite people to join the collaboration. As a big Skype user, I'm hoping that they add other IM clients eventually.

Given what I've been doing lately around Enterprise 2.0, and seeing how Web 2.0 impacts BPM, this is one of the most exciting things that I've seen in BPM for quite a while. I must disclose that Lombardi is a client of mine, but I'd be saying the same thing even if they weren't.

The visual paradigm is that of outlining a process by specifying the main high-level activities, then the sub-activities within each activity. In fact, you see both the flow diagram and the outline view:

Notice anything weird about this screenshot? That's right, it's taken on a Mac. In fact, the Lombardi product manager who gave me the demo came into the meeting room toting his MacBook, which was not something that I was expecting to see. I've also seen it on Firefox on Windows. What better way to demonstrate platform independence? The Web 2.0 style interface is very slick, and there won't be much of a learning curve for anyone who is comfortable with other web-based applications.

You can then specify a lot more detail for the process, including participants, inputs and outputs, impact analysis information such as potential failure points and likelihood of occurrence (very Six Sigma-like), and documentation.

You can also drill down into a more detailed BPMN view of the process for detailed workflow modelling:

You can generate a PowerPoint presentation from the process model, which includes all of the additional parameters specified, for presenting the business case of the process further up the management chain. The demo that I saw generated a 60-page PowerPoint presentation with every possible bit of detail; I think that the problem would be cutting it down to size rather than the usual problem of having to find information to add to the presentation.

Once the collaboration has gone as far as it can, the process model can be exported to Lombardi's TeamWorks, using (soon-to-be-released) BPDM as the serialization format -- with Lombardi's CTO chairing the BPMI steering committee at OMG, which oversees the BPDM standards, this isn't a big surprise. You can even round-trip the processes from TeamWorks back to Blueprint when they need another round of collaborative design.

I think that their pricing is too high -- $500/month for 10 users, whereas Salesforce.com is around $165/month for a 10-user team, and is currently discounted to half of that -- but that will sort itself out in the marketplace. I suggested that their free version be ad-supported, much like the freemium business models of other Web 2.0 applications like Flickr and LinkedIn; I got a few weird looks from around the table at that point, but who knows, I may have put a bug in someone's ear.

They are almost certainly going to have requests from companies to host the application on internal servers rather than Lombardi's software as a service, although the success of Salesforce.com (especially in maintaining privacy of data) means that there's a lot of companies out there are that starting to trust the SaaS model. Looking in a completely different direction, I would love to see Lombardi make Blueprint open source, which would drive collaborative process modelling into places that they never imagined. Although it could negatively impact Blueprint revenue -- it's still possible to have revenue-generating open source, it just requires a bit more imagination -- it could serve to drive more business to Lombardi's core products.

In a year-end emerging trends article in December, I predicted both "modelling for the masses" and "Web 2.0 hits BPM". Lombardi's Blueprint delivers on both of these, and I look forward to seeing how they take it forward from here. If it's like all other good Web 2.0 software, it will adhere to the principle of constant improvement rather than monolithic release cycles.

There's a lot more to it than what I've discussed here, and if you're interested, check out the webinar that I'm hosting tomorrow entitled Are You Ready for On-Demand BPM with Colin Teubner of Forrester Research and Jim Rudden of Lombardi, in which Jim talks a lot more about Blueprint. You can also sign up for the beta program if you want to try it out for yourself; as of the end of April, it will be available to everyone. I signed up this morning, but received the following email back from Lombardi a short while later:

Dear Sandy,

Thank you for your interest in Lombardi Blueprint. Unfortunately, due to the overwhelming number of requests for Blueprint accounts, we are unable to activate your account at this time.

We will keep your registration information in our database and will contact you when we can provide you with an account.

I'm hoping to be able to pull some strings and get in the beta program sometime soon. :)

For those of you who did manage to get a beta account, go on, get out there and expose your processes!

Update: If you want to digg this, use this link. For some reason, the ebizQ URL has been reported on digg as generating spam listings, so I had to use my www.column2.com redirect to create the digg.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 10:16 AM in BPM • Enterprise2.0 • SaaS • Web2.0 | Permalink | TrackBacks (4) | Add to del.icio.us

I skipped the last breakout session of the day for a discussion with Trevor Naidoo, IDS Scheer's Director of ARIS Solution Engineering. He's responsible for the pre-sales technical activities, and used to be an ARIS customer, so is very familiar with how customers use the product and how they want to use it.

We spoke first about integration between ARIS and the BPMS products that automate processes, which included some discussion about standards. He pointed out that integration using pure standards tends to degrade to the least common denominator -- a point that I'm not sure that I agree with for all standards, although it makes sense if you picked BPEL as your standard -- which led them to take a different approach with their most tightly integrated partners, SAP and Oracle: that of "standards-based" integration, where they extend BPEL (I believe) in order to provide increased functionality. I'm not sure at what point a "standards-based" approach becomes "proprietary", although I can see the value of going this way. In any case, they're using different approaches for different vendors: "standards-based" for SAP and Oracle, BPEL for Lombardi, and XPDL for Fujitsu.

This really came around to the issue of how to get those process models into an execution engine, or if anyone is really doing it at all. Naidoo said that what was moving from ARIS to the execution engine was a "process outline", which then required some amount of work to hook it up to the BPMS engine (as expected), and that the main value is not in the transfer itself -- which could be readily recreated in the BPMS designer directly -- but in engaging the  business in the entire process design cycle. This, then, is what I suspected: that most people really are redrawing the process models in the BPMS designer, adding who knows how many translation errors along the way, because there is insufficient value to bother with the direct integration. This is not unique to ARIS; I saw the same thing at the Proforma user conference last year.

We moved on to talk about the technology. I hadn't done my homework in this area, and was really unaware of ARIS' support for browser-based design (yes, I'm on my usual rant about browser-based process modelling); they have a Java applet client for design in a browser environment, which is a pretty heavy footprint by today's AJAX standards. I'd love to hear more about their plans to put that client on a diet, which will greatly facilitate design collaboration with occasional users, both inside and outside the corporate firewall.

We finished with a discussion of how to move the process modelling story from what is usually a departmental beginning within a company up to the executive level and therefore out across the entire organization: internal evangelism, if you will, to leverage that initial 10-person ARIS project into making ARIS an enterprise-wide process modelling tool. This is addressed to some degree by one of their new "solutions" (which appear to be specific packaging and bundling of products and services), the Enterprise BPM solution which (based on information from their website) includes the ARIS Business Architect, ARIS Business Optimizer, ARIS Business Simulator and ARIS Business Publisher as the basis for implementing a company-wide BPM infrastructure. I still think that there's a fundamental disconnect in language between the players: the average business analyst or architect is likely too mired in detail to be able to present a high-level plan to the executives of their organization on why to super-size their ARIS installation, but I'm sure that the IDS Scheer sales team would be happy to help out. With Trevor's able assistance, of course.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 06:08 PM in ARISProcessWorld2007 • BPM • BPM standards • Web2.0 | Permalink | TrackBacks (1) | Add to del.icio.us

The agenda for the May Shared Insights conference on Portals, Collaboration and Content is online, with me in a speaking slot on the morning of the last day talking about the changing face of BPM.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 04:24 PM in BPM • Web2.0 | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

I'm not sure why Bryce Johnson thought that he'd have full turnout at 9:30am on a Saturday, even for something as exciting as EnterpriseCamp, but a few of us managed to make it on time. Of course, my brain is still in a time zone some where east of here and I'm waking up at 5am so it's easier for me this week.

We kicked off a bit late and the attendance was lower than the signups, but there were some great sessions (and I'm not just talking about mine). Like other unconferences, there was no set agenda, just a blank grid of time slots for sessions and a pad of Post-It notes; those of us interested in leading a talk outlined our topic verbally to the group, then posted it in an open time slot. The schedule was pretty fluid all day long, which fit well with the mood of the group and the small number of simultaneous sessions (3 at most, I think), but we still managed to fit in all the proposed sessions and finish up on time.

One cool thing that the organizers did was create icon stickers that we could put on our nametags to designate our interests: people tagging, if you will. They also provided great food (breakfast and lunch), a huge variety of herbal teas (important for us non-coffee types) and a notebook containing some Enterprise 2.0 articles and the all-important key to the people-tagging icons.

The first session that I attended was Carsten Knoch talking about bringing Web 2.0 features into the enterprise, which was a perfect lead-in to my session on a specific example of this, namely, integrating Web 2.0 functionality into BPM software. Carsten talked more in general terms about what features and techniques could be introduced, techniques for building applications, and why all of this Web 2.0 stuff is scary to the enterprise. He had a pretty comprehensive presentation, a bit unusual for an unconference, and I hope to see it posted somewhere.

I followed immediately after Carsten, and although I had the best intentions to prepare a little presentation the night before (but ended up out for dinner with friends) or at least a few notes on the subway on the way to EnterpriseCamp (but ended up chatting with a South African backpacker on his way around the world), I took the floor with a blank flip-chart and wrote four lines:

• tagging
• RSS
• zero footprint
• mashups

I then riffed on each of these, with lots of great input from the audience, with my focus on how they apply in the world of BPM but some expansion into other types of enterprise software. Great discussion: I love it when I can learn something while giving a presentation. I could have gone on for hours, except for the smell of pizza wafting in from the lunch area.

In the afternoon, I sat in on Tom Purves and Jevon MacDonald discussing adoption of Web 2.0 technology (specifically their product, for the most part) within the enterprise. That evolved into a discussion about Consulting 2.0 and a variety of other topics.

I also attended Bryce's session on tagging, taxonomies and folksonomies, which generated some really interesting discussion. The idea of creating tag relationships rather than tag pruning as applicable to Enterprise 2.0 tagging applications: you want people to be able to add tags that are meaningful to them, but if others are using different tags that mean the same thing, find some way to relate the tags.

Definitely a worthwhile way to spend my Saturday. Many thanks to Navantis and Microsoft for their sponsorship of EnterpriseCamp.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 12:22 PM in BPM • Enterprise2.0 • Web2.0 • torcamp | Permalink | TrackBacks (1) | Add to del.icio.us

Assuming that the logistics can be worked out, we'll be having an unconference edition of EnterpriseCamp in Toronto on Saturday, January 13th. You can find out more about it, and sign up to attend, here. From Bryce Johnson's description:

This is going to be a different focus then our regular events. This event focuses on enterprise software infrastructure, solutions and development. Topics could include Enterprise 2.0, Business Intelligence Applications, ECM, Collaboration, Employee Self-Service, Enterprise Search, Technology Infrastructure, Workflow Automation.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 10:20 AM in Enterprise2.0 • Web2.0 | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

Last week, we held a second Enterprise 2.0 Camp here in Toronto. Tom Purves was the organizer and also the first presenter; he has posted his notes and presentation slides and promises to post some follow-ups in the days ahead. (btw, Tom introduced me to slideshare, which I've just started using for embedding presentations in my blog posts; it's like YouTube for presentation slides. Thanks, Tom!)

I enjoyed the three presentations, which I'll cover in some detail below, but find that many people talking about Enterprise 2.0 are addressing the use of social networking software like blogs and wikis within enterprises, whereas I'm more interested in taking those concepts and integrating them into enterprise software, like BPM. As consumers become exposed to Web 2.0 applications in the wild, and the MySpace generation moves into the workforce, the expectations of enterprise workers will be raised with respect to what they expect from their software. AJAX interfaces for end-users are becoming relatively common in BPM products, but what about user-created content? A cornerstone of Web 2.0 is harnessing collective intelligence, and if you don't give people a way to do this in enterprise software, they're going to find ad hoc ways to do it that won't be captured as part of the corporate memory. I know of one BPM vendor that allows users to tag process instances as favourites, but none are allowing for a more comprehensive public tagging strategy where users can not only build their own folksonomies of tags, but also share them with their colleagues. User-created processes or at least involving more business users in a collaboration to create processes is an idea that's gaining speed, but in reality, very little of it actually occurs. There's a number of other Web 2.0 concepts that I feel could greatly benefit BPM and other enterprise software; to me, that's the second wave of Enterprise 2.0.

Getting back to the presentations, we heard from Tom with an overview of Enterprise 2.0, Greg Van Alstyne of the Beal Institute for Strategic Creativity, OCAD with a theoretical primer for emergent media, and Sacha Chua, a grad student and IBM intern, with a report from the recent CASCON 2006 conference (which I also attended).

Tom's presentation was a good level-set, since I think that there were a number of different views in the audience about what Enterprise 2.0 is, along with some number of local techies who will attend anything that has "2.0" in the name and serves beer. Tom's succinct definition "Web 2.0 + solving an actual business problem = Enterprise 2.0" gets very close to the mark, and he goes on to describe some general categories of applications and what this can mean for businesses. He also spoke at length on tacit interactions -- that ad hoc stuff that I was referring to earlier -- and how Enterprise 2.0 can leverage tacit knowledge to provide competitive advantage.

An interesting issue that came up during the conversation after Tom's talk is the "blank wiki" problem: how do you get people to start participating in ways that they have never participated before? This is especially true in corporate environments, where there is not (typically) the anonymity of the internet and there are political agendas floating around. There were a number of ideas about seeding a collaboration tool, such as creating some initial wikis that contain obvious but minor errors to encourage people to learn how to edit them in order to fix them, but that begs the question (to me, anyway) of how the seed data impacts the path that emerges.

Greg Van Alstyne was up next, with a presentation discussing how Enterprise 2.0 must emerge from the needs and activities of the users. Emergence, or emergent behaviour, is when new and complex patterns develop from underlying (and sometimes seemingly unrelated) components. It's really a complement to design: where design is top-down and imposed by the designers, emergence is bottom-up and created by the participants. He gave a great example of this, which I also know because the same technique was used at my university: no pathways were initially built between buildings, but the entire complex was planted with grass; after several months, the common pathways had "emerged" from the grass and were paved. The associated quote was something along the lines of "how do we know where to build the paths until the people show us?" The same is also true for software, enterprise or not.

Sacha Chua finished the evening with a discussion of social networking software in use within IBM. Belying the big blue exterior, IBM appears to have a warm, fuzzy inside, full of employee blogs, wikis and social bookmarking. Who knew? I've met Sacha on several occasions, and she's a very passionate advocate for what social networking tools can do within an organization, such as flattening the hierarchy and providing a sense of knowing the other 325,000 people in your company even if they're geographically distant. She admits that the active participation rate -- those that actually contribute content -- is about 1%, but that's a substantial community when you look at the relative numbers, and as she says, you have to learn to love the 1% that you have rather than worry about the 99% that you don't. IBM is developing some of their own social networking software, such as Dogear social bookmarking, which is an internal equivalent to del.icio.us. I'd love to find out if they're planning to roll this out as a customer product, but no one at IBM seems to be able to give me an answer on this.

One final comment that I heard from Bob Logan, a colleague of Greg Van Alstyne's: "I don't believe that there's an inside and outside of an organization any more." [Someone else in the audience immediately butted in that they thought this was wrong, to which Bob replied "All generalizations are wrong." :) ]  The concept of increasing porosity in corporate boundaries has been happening for years, in part due to technologies like BPM: more outsourcing, integrating suppliers as part of the supply chain, and exposing the progress of internal processes to customers. There's still a distinction between inside and outside, but it's getting fuzzier.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 04:59 PM in Enterprise2.0 • Web2.0 | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

I've posted a downloadable version of the slides from my presentation on Web 2.0 and BPM from the BPMG in London a couple of months back, but here it is shared via slideshare. You can go through the slides in place below using the controls below the slide, or click on the slide to take you to the larger view on the slideshare site.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 12:15 PM in BPM • Web2.0 | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

For those BPM vendors out there who say that you can't create a fully-featured browser-based process modeling tool: YOU'RE WRONG. Appian does it, they do it well, and if you don't get moving on this soon, they'll kick your butt.

I was going to just stop there, but that would be mean, so I'll continue on with a more complete review of the Appian 1-1/2 hour, open-the-firehose demo that I received last week via Webex, compliments of Phil Larson (director of product marketing) and Malcolm Ross (über demo god) at Appian.

In case this is the first time that you've read my blog, let me iterate my view that a browser-based process modeler is the way to go if your goal is to lower the barriers to enabling process modelling and design across an enterprise -- this is one of the ways that Web 2.0 is impacting BPM, as I discussed in a presentation at the BPMG conference earlier this year. Appian is the only mainstream BPM vendor that provides a lightweight (dare I say, zero footprint?) browser-based process modeler; the only other mainstream vendor that even has a browser-based process modeler is FileNet, but it's a rather weighty Java applet that downloads with some degree of trouble, in my experience. [btw, if you want to debate the term "mainstream BPM vendor" with me, first of all check if you're anywhere in Gartner's BPMS Magic Quadrant except for the "niche players" quadrant, or anywhere at all in Forrester's Human-Centric BPMS Wave.]

I'd never had the Appian corporate overview until this session, and I found it quite telling that 3 of the 4 founders were from Microstrategy, a business intelligence vendor. Analytics and reporting are baked into everything in the product, including the user interface: all of the grid-based UI screens such as inbox views are actually report views driven straight out of their own reporting/analytics engine, which makes it easy to do things like switch any view to a chart (if it makes sense to do so). It also means that KPIs and business thresholds can be easily built into a process and seen in a number of different views, not just a siloed BAM dashboard, including viewing process execution stats right in the modeler while you're viewing the model. This makes for a more seamless integration between design, execution, monitoring and analytics than you'll find in many vendors' products, although some customers may find a proprietary reporting and analytics engine, as well as their proprietary and built-in rules engine, to be problematic in the face of corporate standards for these types of platforms.

Although nothing to do with process design, but very cool and Web 2.0-y, is the ability for a user to flag a process instance or a task within a process instance as a favourite. Although this isn't quite the full process tagging paradigm that I've written about previously and talked about in my Web 2.0/BPM presentation, it's a great start.

I won't talk too much about the specific functions within the Appian process modeler, except to say that it does everything that I would expect from a process designer, and more: full BPMN-compliant modeling including more complex constructs such as ad hoc activities (i.e., those that aren't attached to the process flow, see section 5.2.3 of the BPMN spec if you want to understand what this means); the ability to chain activities in a process so that they're locked to the same user and present them as steps in a wizard-type interface rather than having to reopen each sequentially from a task list; a full forms designer that will be released next month; import/export to XPDL (which allows you to model offline with Zynium's add-on to Visio and interchange models with the Appian process modeler); different views and capabilities within the process modeler for business analysts and developers; and web services introspection and mapping. And it does it all in a completely AJAX environment, although due to support for VML but not SVG, it's not supported in Firefox yet. Furthermore, all you need to cross the firewall from the modeler to the server is port 80 (i.e., standard HTTP) or port 443 (for HTTP over SSL).

If Appian really wanted to kick some butt, they'd create the browser-based equivalent of a free process modeler download: a free process modeling site exposed on the internet, available for anyone to sign up and try it out. Who would download and install a process modeling tool to try out if you could have the same functionality available online?

I've heard the comment from a couple of BPM vendors that a full AJAX process modeler is "hard". Duh, of course it's hard; if it was easy, everyone would do it. Appian started out with a Java applet process modeler, then ended up building their own AJAX library of JAVA Struts objects and moving over to AJAX in 2003 -- two years before the term "AJAX" was even coined. They've invested a huge amount of time to make their browser-based process modeler every bit as functional and responsive as a desktop application, and it shows. It reminds me of the quote about how Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did, except backwards and in high heels: yeah, it's hard, but it looks great.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 04:10 PM in BPM • BPMN • Web2.0 | Permalink | Comments (9) | TrackBacks (3) | Add to del.icio.us

Here's a cool twist: Dion Hinchcliffe, whose Web 2.0 writings I have often referenced in the past, has been using his Flickr account to hold the graphics that he uses to illustrate his blog posts. The twist this time, however, is that he's actually turned this "Seven Habits of Highly Effective Web 2.0 Sites" graphic and its description into a mini blog post. Since I get a feed of all my Flickr contacts' new photos in my RSS reader, I see this just like any other blog post. Of course, his description also points you to the full article on his real blog.

Very Web 2.0.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 01:10 PM in Blogging • Web2.0 | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

A great webinar on Web 2.0 just finished on ebizQ, which is not normally the place where you'd see a lot of pure Web 2.0 stuff unrelated to integration technologies. You'll be able to see the replay within 24 hours at the same link.

David Mitchell Smith from Gartner is giving a great overview of Web 2.0, particularly how it impacts business. Be sure to download the PowerPoint slides, there are great notes attached.

His bottom line: denial is pointless (I would have said "resistance is futile", but that's just the geeky me coming out), Web 2.0 is happening and you'd better get on board. He even talks about mashups and lightweight integration protocols, blogs, and other things that I don't normally hear from the type of Gartner analysts that I deal with.

Christopher Crummey from IBM also spoke, and instead of being the usual vendor product pitch, he had some interesting slides on Web 2.0 for business, and particularly how IBM is using some social networking/Web 2.0 technologies internally, such as blogs and customizable portals. He wove in information about their products that support this, but it was done in a pretty unobtrusive way. I've spent a bit of time with some IBM'ers learning about their internal uses of social networking, and it's pretty progressive stuff -- I think that my former colleagues at FileNet may find that their internal collaboration takes a huge leap forward now that they're part of Big Blue.

The only downside of this webinar is that the two presentations went so long that there were only a few minutes left for questions, then some sort of technical difficulty resulted in total dead air until after the scheduled end time. I bailed at 3 minutes past the hour, and more than 30% of the audience had done so by that time as well; I'm assuming that there was no Q&A after all.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 01:04 PM in Web2.0 | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

My Web 2.0 and BPM podcast is now online at the Office 2.0 Podcast Jam. Enjoy.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 11:36 AM in BPM • Web2.0 | Permalink | TrackBacks (4) | Add to del.icio.us

This past weekend was Canadian Thanksgiving, so I was off for four days at the cottage. Now, I'm blogging in a hurry while I'm waiting for my airport taxi to arrive. However, I'm not headed for San Francisco; in spite of the hoopla about the Office 2.0 conference this week, I've decided not to attend in favour of going to Proforma's Vision 2006 conference in Las Vegas. Ismael belatedly offered me a speaking spot at Office 2.0 on a technical panel, but it didn't really fit what I felt that I had to offer and I declined. I probably would have attended anyway, just to float in the buzz, and I do like San Francisco a whole lot more than Vegas, but Vision 2006 is much more aligned with what I do and write about.

I haven't been a big user of ProVision in the past, although I think that it's a great product. There's much more importance being placed on process modelling and enterprise architecture in my consulting practice these days, and the conference has a great lineup of BPM speakers.

I'll be blogging from the conference, assuming that there's any sort of decent connectivity. The hotel information said that they had dialup internet in the rooms (eeek!), so if that's all that's available, I'll be hunting around for an internet cafe close by.

Although I won't be at Office 2.0, I have contributed a podcast to the Office 2.0 Podcast Jam about Web 2.0 and BPM -- a topic that I spoke about recently at the BPMG conference in London. Subscribe to the Jam's podcast feed and listen to all the podcasts, there's some great ones being published all week.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 02:11 PM in BPM • ProformaVision2006 • Web2.0 | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

A great week away, and now I'm digging into all the news stories, blog feeds, email and client work that I didn't get to while swanning around the European countryside. Quite unpredictably, it was warm and sunny in London, and rainy in southern France; I posted a few photos of France here. In spite of the rain, it was lovely in Tourouzelle, where my friends live; she is now selling real estate in the area and it's very tempting to consider a little place in Languedoc for vacations. In a weird economic twist, it took longer and cost more to take a taxi + bus from my friends' home in Stoke Poges (near Heathrow) to Stansted airport to catch my flight to Carcassonne, than it did to make the flight itself.

The few days since the conference has given me a chance to think more about the Web 2.0/BPM convergence, and coincidentally, John Evdemon was back in touch with me at the end of the week to talk about co-authoring a paper on that subject. I'm very much looking forward to that, since collaboration with someone smart like John would definitely improve the ideas.

I also had a chance to catch up with Ismael Ghalimi, who had invited me to participate in a panel discussion at his upcoming Office 2.0 conference (to be fair, he made his original invitation before the firestorm about the dearth of women speakers at the event); it appears that my acceptance email went astray and he assumed that I wasn't interested, so I may not be there after all.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 12:50 PM in BPM • Web2.0 | Permalink | Comments