Kofax and Forrester research have released some interesting numbers on BPM market size.  Like most vendor sponsored research, its a fairly ego-centric view of the universe.

Apparently, there are three main areas of the BPM market - Multichannel capture, BPM and, most intriguingly, Smart Process Applications - and all are set for a solid growth over the next three years. Obviously, Kofax is the market-leader in all three.

Here are the headlines:

via Kofax

The Capture and BPM segments seem to be more or less what they say on the tin.

BPM is defined as:

The BPM market includes traditional BPM, dynamic case management, and integration centric BPM solutions. Forrester states that it is in a late growth phase and focused where business processes are considered chaotic, broad, and burdened with content. 

via Kofax

So, the BPM line is probably is pretty good proxy for the current BPM and case management markets.

The Vertical Smart Process Application Market

Interestingly, the 'Vertical SPAs' market seems to be industry specfic applications that require the flexibility of a BPM solution.  I assume, since Kofax is considered a market leader in the Vertical SPAs, that most of this sector is not new vendors but existing BPM vendors that have industry specific assets or expertise to deliver processes faster.

This interpretation reflects what I see in the market with most BPM vendors trying to sell solutions, not technology, with various degrees of success but capture tends to be an established market with different buying trends and vendors.  A more accurate picture of the competitve marketplace is probably to group BPM and vertical SPAs together and leave Capture as a separate market.

I'm sure that many of the Capture vendors would like to reposition themselves in the BPM and SPA market but in reality few have made the transition.

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So, Michael Dell and Silverlake Partners are taking Dell (the company) private by buying all of the outstanding shares for $13.65 per share in cash.. Much of the tech press is looking for meaning in the transaction.

Here is a typical section from Carter Lusher at Ovum:

Dell going private makes strategic sense. Dell is in the midst of a wrenching transition from a supplier of commodity hardware, mainly traditional PCs, to a supplier of enterprise-grade IT infrastructure. Dell’s ambition is nothing less than offering the entire IT stack with supporting services. While this transition has been going on for several years, there is still much that has to be done. Unfortunately for Michael Dell and his executive team, they are trying to make this transition as a public company with the albatross of meeting the next quarter’s earnings expectations hanging around their necks.

via Ovum — Emphasis is mine.

This strikes me as being a strange interpretation of events: Dell needs to go private simply because it is going through big changes.

Sorry, can public companies not change? If so, why is Dell going private after several years of transformation?

Let’s look at some other examples.

• Apple has launched some world-changing products over the last few years. In every case, funnelling massive investment into secret projects before publicly unveiling them. The whole time, they were a public company.

• IBM has almost completely redeveloped its BPM product offering over the last three years. Slimming and simplifying the portfolio from over 15 products overlapping and confusing products to just 4.

In both cases, the performance of the existing business was strong and consistent enough that Apple and IBM could make these operational investments as a public company without being punished by the market but Dell is a different case. Not because of the change in strategy but because its underlying business is eroding.

Again, Carter Lusher writes:

Dell has been making the transition from PC company to enterprise IT infrastructure supplier for several years. In fiscal year 2005, “clients” (desktop and mobility) comprised 67% of Dell’s revenues. Through nine months of fiscal 2013, that number had dropped to 50%. However, the gradual reduction process hit a major problem due to the increasing popularity of smart devices (tablets and smartphones) that appears to have cut into sales of traditional PCs. In the first nine months of FY 2013, Dell’s client revenues dropped by 13% year-over-year, accounting for almost all the reduced revenue of Dell overall.

via Ovum

Public markets bring transparency and transparency brings scrutiny.

Enterprise buyers and investors should both be worried about Dell because their business is under pressure driven by changing consumer preferences. If anything, going private is going to exacerbate this situation by removing information from the public sphere that could be used to dispel this doubt.

Secrecy brings doubt and uncertainty.

So, why do it?

Michael Dell and gang at Silverlake are good business people and they see an opportunity here.

Taking the business private is about money, plain and simple.

Right or wrong, Dell and Silverlake think that the public markets are punishing Dell the company more than it deserves. Knowing what he knows on the inside, Dell thinks that he can make more money by buying the business at this price and finishing the transformation.

Will he have more control? Maybe – That depends on the deal with Silverlake. But, this is about the money and it will be interesting to see if Dell or the markets have put a better price on the business.

So, here’s the prediction: Dell will either IPO (again), be sold or will be gone in 3 years.

The target is $24.4 billion. Good luck to them.

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I’m a keen watcher of Appian.

As one of the last pure play BPM vendors and an early innovator, their financial results could be indicative of the bigger trends in the industry. I’ve blogged before my pleasure at their success and my frustration with their lack of transparency.

Their 4Q12 headlines are all pointing in the right direction:

• Q4 was a record performance and 2012 was a record year
• Total Q4 orders for 2012 doubled from Q4 orders for 2011 and grew more than 40% over Q3
• In 2012, Appian achieved record highs in terms of total orders, total revenues, license orders and license revenues
• 2012 was a year of 98 new customers — 1/3 of which opted for a cloud deployment
• Opening new offices in Paris, Melbourne and Singapore

All stellar growth, all relative numbers so there is no real way to figure out how well they are actually doing in absolute terms.

Some questions that would interest me:

• The significant uptick in Cloud deployments is an predictable trend but without knowing the absolute number of customers, its a number without context. It’s not the directionality of this trend but its acceleration that’s interesting.

Are cloud and on-premises licenses a like-for-like comparison. The results make it sound that way but I would have expected smaller average order size on the cloud orders …

• What does their churn look like? How much of this software is shelfware and how much is supported by successful implementations?

• How many customers (or even what percentage) are using Appian’s highly-innovative mobile offerings as part of their solution? Or, put differently, how much of the mobile solution is driving thought-leadership but not results?

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Last week's Dreamforce conference confirmed Salesforce as a global powerhouse.  

With over 90,000 attendees, Salesforce convinced the City of San Francisco to close the road outside the Moscone convention center to create a city-in-a-city (See James Governor's blog for a good description).  

I didn't attend the conference but, as Dreamforce filled my twitter stream, it sometimes felt hard to escape.

But, that got me thinking:  Where is Salesforce in Europe?

Certainly, in the UK, where I live and work, Salesforce is a player in the CRM market but I rarely see them in the broader market for cloud services nor do they seem to have the same profile in the Enterprise that Dreamforce would imply. 

To sanity check this postion, here is a quick comparison between geographic revenue segmentation for Oracle and Salesforce:

It's an interesting picture -- Salesforce and Oracle derive nearly the same percentage of their revenue from Asia but Oracle is twice the size in Europe.  

There are a lot of reasons why this is perhaps an unfair comparison but both businesses are large and diversified enough that there should be some relevance.  Yes, Oracle has a hardware business but Sun is hardly a shining jewel in the Oracle crown and Heroku is the cloud-equivalent of a hardware business, isn't it?

What does it mean?

At first glance, this seems counter-intuitive.  After all, the whole point of the cloud is that it can be deployed anywhere.  Shouldn't it be easier for the cloud-provider than the on-premise software and hardware vendor to spread out evenly across the globe?

Here are two reasons why I think that Salesforce might be suffering in Europe:

1. Acquisitions - Both Salesforce and Oracle have made a lot of them over the last several years but Salesforce has tended to acquire US-based start-ups for up-in-coming products (Heroku, Rypple, etc.) while Oracle tends to buy customers (how many CRM and HCM products do they have?).  The result is a strong US-bias in Salesforce revenue and ecosystem.
2. European Privacy Laws - I think that the national laws related to storing personal information work against cloud providers in Europe.  In many cases, they really mean that you need local in-country data centres or rather a several parallel cloud infrastructures to cover Europe.  This dynamic might be changing the attractiveness of the European Market for Salesforce.

Those factors are just idle speculation.  If anyone has any concrete insight, I'd love to hear it.

Does it Matter?

I think that building a stronger European Business should matter to Salesforce a great deal.  These markets are in flux today and, as they settle, winning market share will become both harder and more expensive.  

People in Europe are using cloud services, just not Salesforce cloud services.  Disrupting these incumbents will cost money - in terms of marketing to drive organic growth or acquisitions to buy markets.  In the short term, the fast growing AsiaPac market and the more mature US markets might be easy pickings but you need to be strong in Europe if you are a business with global ambitions.

On a selfish note, I like a lot of the services Salesforce offers.  I'd love to see more of them around the UK market.

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Connie Moore at Forrester tweet a good chunk of her product briefing with OpenText today.  Some good stuff in there.

OpenText BPM - How's it going to work?

#OpenText will address all types of #BPMS—branded OpenText BPM (a converged product comprising Process360, Case360 and Metastorm BPM).

— Connie Moore (@cmooreforrester) September 13, 2012

#Open Text BPM isn’t just a product to upgrade to. becausethey are combining#BPMS products, customers can migrate in modules.

— Connie Moore (@cmooreforrester) September 13, 2012

They'll kill stuff off RT @souvikbonnerjee: @cmooreforrester how will they manage bringing together global 360 and metastorm? #bpm #bpm12

— Connie Moore (@cmooreforrester) September 13, 2012

I think so & also to get specific modules they lacked RT @souvikbonnerjee: @cmooreforrester then why acquire? Customer base?

— Connie Moore (@cmooreforrester) September 13, 2012

Cloud and Social - When is it coming to OpenText BPM?

#opentext will roll out cloud in Q4 2012 and social in Q1 2013 for #bpms

— Connie Moore (@cmooreforrester) September 13, 2012

What's it mean?

Back in February and based on their earning's call, I guessed that the BPM product roadmap might look like:

• 2012 will be a year of product development to bring the products together and create a coordinated roadmap
• The combine BPM product line will be integrated with the rest of the Opentext business in 2013

From these tweets, I'd say that's still pretty accurate.  

I see the announcement that they will enter the social BPM space in Q1 as being the end of the 'banging the products together' phase of the roadmap and the point where they are starting to build new features.

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Here's a great little story on AllthingsD from Ben Haines, the CIO of Pabst Brewing, on their adoption of SaaS analytics provider, Tidemark: 

Haines had built out systems running IBM’s Cognos, but said that it can be years before it’s up and running and tuned enough to deliver data you can actually use. “We don’t have that kind of time,” he said. “Most people run their companies on spreadsheets because their business intelligence applications haven’t kept up.” It used to be that Pabst would have generated about 400 different reports that different execs would have to have, and people might read them, they might not, and when they did, they had to hunt for the data they needed to do their jobs.

via AllthingsD.com

I'm passingly skeptical that Tidemark has a magical solution to the problem of spreadsheet overload but Haines makes an excellent point.

If you are in charge of IT and a significant part of your business is running on a maze of spreadsheets or any other office productivity software, you are probably failing.  You need to find a way to get the business the right tools because 500 spreadsheets is definitely not the answer.

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There is an abundance of advice on how to run a smooth process discovery session:

• Be organised
• Find a sponsor
• Focus on the end-to-end solution
• Find all your stakeholders
• Be prepared
• Etc, etc, etc

In this post, I want to focus on some of the ‘unwritten’ rules of process discovery but first its probably worth a short comment on objective of a process discovery session.

The obvious definition is to ‘discover’ and document a process so that it can be improved or automated. The meeting is a really about effective requirement gathering but the unspoken objective of the meeting should always be to build momentum and confidence in the transformation agenda or in the project.

If you have done your homework right, the people in the room are key stakeholders that need to buy-in to your efforts for you to be successful. Process discovery sessions might be the first time you are in front of them. Many might resent being there – often they have been told by their boss to attend. Some might be senior decision-makers whose time is valuable – you need to build credibility that time they give you will be spent effectively.

Achieving these ‘soft’ objectives while still getting the process discovered and documented takes practice and preparation but also a bit of showmanship. Done well, it sets a positive tone for rest of the project.

Here are some tips that I have found effective for getting the meeting going in the right direction.

Tip 1: Work in Pairs

No matter how well-prepared or how experienced you are having two people in the room to run a facilitation definitely helps keep the meeting going. I like to have a ‘talker’ and a ‘doer’ – Some one to engage the participants and some one to run the tool and model the process. It is very difficult to do both and have a smooth meeting. In the best of all possible worlds, the two can both fulfil either roles so they can switch if required.

Because I work with IBM BPM, my objective is often to have an executable prototype of the process at the end of the session. The tool is brillant making this possible but there is always going to be a point in time where someone is going to need to declare a complex variable and to do a bunch of boring data binding. None of the stakeholders want to watch this activity but its hard to under-estimate how powerful have a working prototype at the end of the first session is for creating confidence in the rest of the process. Two people working together can make this happen.

Tip 2: Make it Visual

People consume information different ways so make sure you provide it in lots of different ways. Nothing is worse than a three-hour session of looking at a spreadsheet of requirements on a big screen. It’s boring and people simply don’t consume the information in a useful manner and, if they aren’t consuming it, they are not providing useful feedback. Shortening the cycle time to useful feedback is the key metric to consider if you are trying to measure your effectiveness in process discovery.

Here are some techniques that I have used to keep the session moving and effective:

• Draw the process (on the whiteboard or in a tool)
• Draw the screens or UIs (again, on a whiteboard or in a tool)
• Stop the session and go watch someone actually doing the work – Nothing makes it real like seeing people doing it
• Use kanban boards or similar techniques to understand the work

The important thing about all these techniques is that it engages people in different ways and hopefully makes the session more interactive. Done well, they should make the session productive and, at least, interesting to all participants. In some cases, it might actually make it fun.

Tip 3: Choose your tools wisely

If the process discovery is part of the implementation of a BPMS or similar technology tool, using the tool becomes a central feature of discovery session. Often, this is just a bad idea.

The choice of tools, or even the use of any tools at all, should be judged by the audience and objectives of the session. There are no hard-and-fast rules here but some guidelines I use when planning for a discovery session:

• Some times old-school whiteboards and flip charts are the best choice — They are accessible. Everyone can use them without training and they are fast to use. It often allows people to focus on the process, not the technology.
• Modelling tools (visio, blueworks live, nimbus control) are only useful if they are in use in the organization. Otherwise, they tend to be a distraction.
• If the authoring environment of your BPMS is good enough to code on the fly then you can often end the day with an impressive playback or the lessons with working code. This is great for credibility and confidence in the broader team but requires real skill, discipline and some luck to pull off. If you aim for a working prototype, ensure you have a credible fall back position.
• If proof of technology is one of the points of the discovery session (if you are in a pre-sales cycle) then structure the session to show off the technology.
• The use of a wireframing tool (Balsalmiq, for example) as well as a modelling tool can really bring the session to life. Again, if you can do this in your BPMS so much the better.

Importantly, all these tools if you use them should feel natural, engage (not distract) the participants and help you achieve something tangible.

The People are the Point

The stated objective of any process discovery is to document a process. There is a lot of a great advice out there on how to do that – This post contains none of that wisdom.

The unstated objective is to get a group of people galvanised to change an organisation. Hopefully, this post provided some ideas about how to bring the project to life for people and have some fun along the way.

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Apparently, the UK is less process aware than other matures markets.

As a guy that makes a living out of the UK BPM market, all theories are welcome ...

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IT groups find themselves at a strange crossroads these days.

On one hand, the importance of technology in business has never been more accepted.  Consider this graphic from IBM's 2012 CEO study on the external factors that CEO's worry most about:  

via IBM

On the other hand, IT seems to have lost control of the technology agenda and the respect of their business counterparts.  This study from Forrester Research is a good summary of the problem:

via Forrester by way of the Salesforce Cloudblog

It's a bit hard to read but further to the right is how IT executives think of themselves and higher is what business executives think of them.  

It's pretty grim reading.  

Here are some highlights:

• While nearly 60% of the IT executives thought that they did a good job collaborating with business, almost 20% are obviously mistaken since the equivalent business score is around 40%.
• 2 out of 3 business executives did not think that IT reivewed projects with them effectively, communicated clearly on project prioritization or managed IT operations effectively.  And, the list goes on.
• On the 12 dynamics included, the business executives only thought that IT was doing a good job most of the time (greater than 50%) on 1 element:  Owning and Managing applicaiton architecture and life cycle

The Word is Credibility

All in all, this adds up to a lack of credibility.  Business leaders simply don't feel as if they can trust IT executives to own technology decisions entirely.  

Importantly, this challenge is probably as much about the growing importance of technology as the poor perception of IT in large organizations.  Business leaders are more critical of IT now than in the past becasue they are more dependant on technology to adapt to an ever changing marketplace.

There is no sliver bullet to rebuilding the credibility of IT but the Forrester research, also, points to some low hanging fruit:  Communicating effectively on project prioritization isn't even a technology problem.  It just boils down to good communciation with the rest of the management team.

IT deserves to sit at the big table because technology is important.  But, leading that group requires, well, it requires leadership.

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The whole article is worth a read but here's the conclusion that nails it:

Many managers in organizations with traditional functional hierarchies want the benefits of agile –without disrupting the status quo. Not going to happen.

via Esther Derby

Agile might be a better way to build software but its also hard and the hard part starts early.  You have break your organization to rebuild it. 

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I’ve blogged before about the how the argument of cloud security has already been decided.

HR systems are increasingly hosted in the cloud so the security conversation needs to move from is the cloud secure to how do we deal with our employee records being in a multi-tenanted database on someone else server.

A Computer Weekly article this week confirmed the trend with a couple more big name wins for cloud HR provider, Workday. Here’s an interesting quote from the HR director of Direct Line on their adoption of Workday:

We continue to make good progress on our transformation plan,” said Mark Martin, HR director at Direct Line Group. “We are continuing to build capability with our systems and we have chosen Workday as our core HR system and an integral part of our HR transformation strategy.

via Computer Weekly

No mention of security concerns.

Far from it, the message is that ‘our core system will be in the cloud and it will help us with our transformation plan’.

Where the innovation is coming from …

The general trend in HR tech seems to be that almost all of the new entrants who are winning marketshare from (and getting acquired by) the old guard are cloud based providers. Here’s a quick hypothesis on the relationship between innovation and the cloud:

The cloud allows you to deploy your system and optimize it for 1 platform. You can ensure that all your customers are on 1 operating system, on 1 database and on 1 chipset because you are selling a service, not a software to be installed. The net effect on your business is that you can focus your scarce brain power on making the best product possible and not on porting the technology to and supporting different platforms.

If you want to catch the market leaders like PeopleSoft and SAP HR then building out your product set has to be the priority.

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So, in the week of the Facebook IPO, surely there is nothing to add to the mountain of analysis already produced about the big event and the trading weakness in the stock over the last couple days.

Perhaps, two charts straight from Google Finance, to provide an interesting contrast.  

First, Facebook compared to Apple, Google, IBM and Hewlett Packard.

• Facebook is the smallest business in absolute terms on the list with the exception of beleaguered Hewlett-Packard.
• Facebook trades at the highest relative valuations - P/E and Price-to-Sales - of any company on the list.  Even Apple only trades at 13.6x P/E while Facebook is at 99.6x.
• Perhaps unexpectedly, IBM trades at nearly the same relative metrics as Apple and Google.

Overwhelmingly, that chart makes Facebook look overvalued but here is another chart:

This chart compares Facebook to probably its closest publicly traded rival, Linkedin. The most striking aspect of the chart is how close the price-to-sales ratios are for the two businesses despite their dramatically different market capitalizations.  Given that social media should still be in growth stock as opposed to mature business territory, revenue might be the statistic most scruntized by investors.  

If so, perhaps there is some method to madness of the last few days afterall.

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So, last week, Progress Software announced a retreat of sorts from the the BPM market.

Having purchased Savvion BPM and a clutch of other products to make Responsive Process Management (RPM), they have now announced the divestitures of Savvion BPM, the Sonic ESB and 8 other ‘non-core businesses’.

The analyst coverage has already dissected the transaction. If you are interested, I would recommend Neil Ward-Dutton’s post and the Forrester post written jointly by three of their analysts.

Both view the strategy as risky.

Here is a substantial section of the Forrester post that tells the story:

Progress isn’t falling apart; rather, the company is making a second attempt to grow into an integrated enterprise vendor — this time with less baggage. In its first 25 years, Progress was a portfolio company selling technical components to other vendors. There was no “whole greater than the sum of the parts” for the company. The first attempt to weave Progress’ portfolio of products into a set of high-value enterprise solutions collapsed under the weight of all of those products, many of which were commoditized and not growing. Now Progress will focus on just three areas.

The transformation strategy is the same: Use products that generate strong revenue and profits but grow slowly (Open Edge) to fund investment in products with strong growth potential for the future (Apama with Corticon, DataDirect). The focus is just tighter this time.

via Forrester Research

I’m not so sure that this is a plan to build anything. To me, it feels to me more like an exit strategy.

A Plan for a Sale

The problem with portfolio businesses like Progress is that they are unattractive acquisition targets unless:

1. You want to own the whole portfolio which is unusual.
2. The value of 1 asset in the portfolio is so great it justifies the hassle of dealing with the rest of the portfolio, in which case its not really a portfolio company at all.
3. The strategic value of some part of the business justifies buying everything and getting rid of the businesses that you don’t want. This is similar to the second point but is more driven by the synergeries with your existing business.

Progress probably would have struggled to fit into any of these categories. The core business delivered $361 million of revenue in FY2011 but the 10 non-core products delivered $172 million. – meaning that no single business dominated the portfolio and there is a lot of businesses in the mix.

Forrester continues:

The catalyst for Progress’ shift: activist investor Starboard Value LLP. Starboard’s public letter to new Progress CEO Jay Bhat laid out the ugly financial picture the company had become. PRGS rose substantially after the announced strategy shift, as you’d expect from the promise of a cleaned-up balance sheet. But the hard challenges of future growth remain. [… The Open Edge Product] remains primarily interesting to long-time Progress ISVs, not the broader market. Persuading the wide world of developers to even consider OpenEdge will be an immense task.

via Forrester Research (Emphasis added)

This makes sense — It’s difficult for the business to unlock value through a trade sale so it has undergone a second strategic restructuring under pressure from an activist shareholder group.

What is less certain is the endgame.

The analysts have assumed Progress have made some bold and risky decisions to reposition themselves in the market. I might agree but for a different market.

After the announcement, the core Open Edge product group has a clear value proposition for a strategic buyer – You would be buying an aging but cash generative business.

Similarly, the non-core businesses often have highly regarded technology and growth potential. Others are niche products but profitable.

Suddenly, every part of the business has more obvious potential buyers.

So, here is the prediction:

The non-core businesses will get sold and spun-out over the next 12 months to clean up the balance sheet and Progress itself will get acquired in 2013.

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At a Bonitasoft seminar today, the presenter made a great statement about their approach to the portal in their product.  

Paraphrasing from my notes, it ran something like:

The portal called the user experience is ugly - why?

100% of customers change the portal so we spend the time making it configurable, not pretty, since we are sure that you will change it anyways.

Great plan - I don't how configurable Bonitasoft actually is but I like the honesty around the product development.

The logic is also completely true.  I don't know any customer that wants your vendor-branding on their BPM solution and more vendors should work on giving customers the tools to create great user experiences.  

Afterall, the portal is usually the first sight the end users will have of the system and where they will spend most of their time.  Making that first impression a great one makes everything else easier.

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Over the last week, I have managed to spend a couple interesting hours with Bonitasoft, the opensource BPMS.  

What follows is not a full blown review.  It is more of a couple of random observations and perhaps an insight into what aspects of product development will be increasing important to enterprise software in the future.

Who am I to have an o pinion?

The time I spent with Bonitasoft was completely motivated by my desire to see something new.

It was not part of a formal vendor evaluation for either my employer or a client.  I think this is important to understand.  I was following my curiosity, not looking at it to solve a specific problem.

I had a productive afternoon with it.  

In about three hours, I managed to get it installed on my laptop, build a small process and integrate it with Twitter using an pre-built connector. 

I, also, encountered some problems. To start, here are the good points:

• The installation was easy on my Win7 laptop and its obvious that some thought went into making the application fit on a normal laptop and install elegantly.
• I was impressed by what installed:  Not only did I get the development studio but a runtime environment (jetty and solr, I think) also installed so I could run my processes as I built them.
• The 'getting started' tutorial was very useful - although I only skimmed it then started doing my own thing.  I did refer back to it a couple of times and always found it useful.  A great endorsement for the product is that I usually needed to go back to the document for fairly specific items (how to set up a variable).
• The out-of-the-box portal looks like it was styled by Darth Vader in red and black but worked well to let me see my process working quickly.
  

  See the full gallery on Posterous
• I liked that running a case from the portal (called the User Experience in Bonitasoft) would run the human interaction in the portal but that the same code could also run in a separate window (see the gallery above).
• I felt confident that integration points (called connectors) could be built by developers but reused by business users since I used an out-of-the-box one to send messages via Twitter.  Here's the test account I used if you are interested.
• As you would expect, some things were not where I would expect them.  For example, the conditions coming out of a decision gateway are added to transitions, not to the gateway itself. I would prefer that logic all in one place - complex gateways must be a nightmare to check but even in these circumstances it was relatively straight-forward to understand what to do.

Overall, I managed to install and get the product working for me in a couple of hours without needing to talk to a salesguy.  A very positive experience.  Obviously, I wasn't developing custom integrations or deploying code to a production system.  I didn't it set it up for a team to collaborate on a project but it was fun to get started.

Unfortunately, I had a less positive experience when I opened Bontia Studio a few days later to show a coworker my little experiment.  The studio worked fine but runtime environments simply crashed and would not reset from inside Bonita Studio.  Eventually, I found a forum article telling me to manually delete certain directories on the file system and restart Studio which worked fine.

From the forum, it was obvious that others were having the same problem.  Its the kind of problem that the open source community is brillant at resolving so I'm sure the next release will take care of it.  But, it is also the kind of problem that the open source development community is tolerant of and the business user community less so.  Business users just expect stuff to work and work well.

Bonitasoft is still installed on my laptop which is probably the highest praise I can give it but it, like the rest of BPM, is not quite ready for a pure business audience.

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Last Thursday, I managed to catch the last 30 minutes of the AIIM's Infochat on the topic of 'How are Social, Local and Mobile Tools Revolutionize Business Processes'.

I'm a not a regular in then AIIM community but I'm glad I made time for the topic and chat.  It was a great exchange with some highlights worth repeating.

Find your problem then pick your tool

During the tweet jam, Bryant Duhon asked for a list of processes that could be improved with social media tools.

Generally, a wide gamut of cases management use cases were offered but here was an exchange on the tweetchat which I think got the dynamic exactly right:

in this context, that's closest, but really, #socbiz gamut RT @dajb2 what is the def of Socmed being used here? Any collab tool?#infochat

— Bryant Duhon (@bduhon) April 12, 2012

@dajb2 @bduhon Backwards. What #socmed tools are good in patient care?#infochat

— Christian Walker (@chris_p_walker) April 12, 2012

Get a tool to solve a problem rather than get a tool then find a problem.

The Value of Automation

The last question of the tweetjam was on the role of automation in 'the collaborative business processes of knowledge workers'.  I love this question because increasingly conventional wisdom holds that knowledge workers are an elite brigade that work in an unstructured and nonrepeatable way -- That their value is their expertise and there is little place for automation in their life.

This view is completely wrong.  Automation of the right types of work at the right time can help everyone and knowledge workers are no exception.  

Here's the example I gave on twitter yesterday:

For example, if someone as to rekey the same mortgage application into 4 systems.Automate the rekeying, not underwriting. #infochat

— David Brakoniecki (@dajb2) April 12, 2012

I think that this is a fairly typical situation with knowledge workers.  They might need technology to help them collaborate on difficult problems but they definitely would like technology to rid them of tedious and repetitive tasks so they can spend more time on the challenging parts of their job.

How much of a doctor's time is wasted on insurance paperwork and not patient care?  Or, further medical training?

Automating the tedious to make time for the important is usually a good first step in any process-centric project.  It, also, tends to be popular which generates buy-in and adoption and long term success.

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So, Mobile BPM is a hot topic this week with Scott Francis publishing a lengthy blog post over at BP-3 and a mobile BPM question over at ebizQ.

Two element of Scott’s blog post from earlier in the week really resonate with me.

It might not be your knowledge workers …

Scott starts:

It turns out there are all kinds of people out there with purpose-built devices, and sub-par software experiences even today. Think of the delivery man coming to your door with a portable device for you to sign for a package. You can’t even read your own signature. And the hardware is expensive. Now imagine that same deliveryman with an iPad.

via Scott Francis

Generally, I think that mobile BPM is about the context. Is a mobile application helpful and intregral to the process or just cool? Scott’s example a perfect place where a great mobile experience would improve both the customer and the employee experience.

Too many proponents of mobile BPM focus on the desk-based office workers who are increasingly bringing mobile devices into the work on BYOD schemes. There are a multitude of good mobile first use cases around these workers but equally there are lots of bad use cases.

If your office workers work predominantly in front of a computer, the value proposition of great mobile experience when they will mostly be interacting with your process on their desktop is probably little more than technical debt.

It’s all about the context ….

He also writes:

And do we really want our HR processes intermingled with our sales processes and our claims processes? I’m not convinced that we do. A fictional ACME corp doesn’t need a single BPM mobile app – ACME needs mobile apps that make sense for each of its critical processes – distributed to the users that make sense for those processes. And the apps should be tailored for the processes they interact with. Of course the processes should understand what can be done from mobile devices (potentially everything – but potentially not).

via Scott Francis

Again, context is king when deciding to go mobile.

I was recently involved in a process where we implemented a mobile-only user experience for one particular role in the process. Most of the process participants needed to work for long periods of time and at their desks to complete their tasks but the senior management wanted to review and approve tasks on their Blackberries. The interesting part of the process design was that the senior managers were unlikely to ever log directly into the system from their computer but were more than happy to review things on their smartphones. Everyone else, needed a keyboard and access to other information on their computers to be productive.

So, the appropriate use of a mobile can be different for different people even inside of the same process. One-size fits all implementations let vendors check the mobile box on the Gartner or Forrester vendor evaluations but don’t necessarily fill the needs of real customers.

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So, Facebook came of age yesterday. No longer content with tactical acquisitions for technology or teams, it bought a potential competitor, Instagram, for a $1 billion.

Several of aspects the deal are interesting: The timing (so soon after a round of funding and the launch of Instagram’s Android app), the valuation (eye-watering) and the deal logic (why did Facebook do it?).

Commentators all over Twitter and the web are offering a wide range of opinions on all of these topics but there is one that I think they consistently misunderstand: the logic of mobile first.

As usual, Om Malik provides some astute analysis of the deal and Facebook’s motivations:

Facebook was scared shitless and knew that for first time in its life it arguably had a competitor that could not only eat its lunch, but also destroy its future prospects. Why? Because Facebook is essentially about photos, and Instagram had found and attacked Facebook’s achilles heel — mobile photo sharing.

and, again further on:

In other words, if there was any competitor that could give Zuckerberg heartburn, it was Systrom’s posse. They are growing like mad on mobile, and Facebook’s mobile platform (including its app) is mediocre at best. Why? Facebook is not a mobile-first company and they don’t think from the mobile-first perspective. Facebook’s internal ideology is that of a desktop-centric Internet company.

via Gigaom

I suspect that Om gets the deal logic right but I’m less convinced by the overwhelming importance of being a mobile-first business.

A Problem of Cause and Effect

Instagram was getting traction (if not revenue yet) with a mobile first solution because it was solving a different problem than many people might think.

The problem with photo uploading for every site on the internet has always been the hassle of getting your photos from your digital camera to the cloud. Here is a pretty standard running order of events from 5 years ago or less:

1. Take photos on your digital camera
2. Transfer photos to your computer
3. Edit or process photos as required
4. Upload the photos to the cloud
5. Tag and release them for public consumption

It’s a lot of steps and a fairly big hassle to actually get photos from your digital camera to a website to share them. Interestingly, most websites can do very little to reduce this hassle because they only control a couple of steps in the process.

The basic outline above is true for Flickr when it sold in 2005 and Facebook today. Even photo specialist sites like Smugmug pretty much follow the same flow.

Collectively, they have tried various gimmicks to make it better like creating bulk uploaders and embedding photo editing tools into the site to allow the user to avoid off-line editing.

Here’s the thing: The main source of hassle is transferring your photos twice (camera >> computer >> cloud) was unaddressed until now.

Instagram was cunning and correct in being mobile first, not because mobile first is always the right answer, but becasue it was solving a problem that was only possible with the rise of smart phones. A smart phone lets you take pictures, edit them and upload them without switching devices at all.

Obviously, other businesses are also looking to take advantage of this development as well but for whatever reason Instagram got traction. 30 million users worth of traction. Interestingly, 30 million people thought that the utility of Instagram sufficient to outweigh the network effects of just using Facebook.

Could facebook have built the same functionality? Of course but it never occurred to them as important or being a problem they needed to solve until 30 million people demonstrated it. This is the advantage of being a focussed start-up trying to solve one problem really well rather than a social networking monolith. In fact, I would argue that to be successful Instagram needed to be more than mobile first — It needed to be mobile only.

This is the nature of the problem they were solving. Think of a different problem. Sharing files between devices. Dropbox, Box and other have similarly revolutionized that market but mobile first would have never worked for them. They needed to do mobile and desktop at the same time because the files you want to share are on your desktop.

Start with the problem. Then, worry about the solution. Cause and effect. Of course, the prevalence of smartphones make mobile the answer more often than ever before.

VCs and Entrepreneurs: what is good for the goose …

If mobile first isn’t always the answer, why do smart and prominent commentators and VCs like to talk about it?

Simply because the trends are driving new opportunities to analyze and invest in. These mobile technology markets are less settled and will probably provide a disproportionate number of VC winners over the next several years.

If you are looking for technology trends to invest in, mobile first is a great bet but you have the luxury of a portfolio approach. You can play the numbers.

If you are an entreprenuer, you have one shot so, before you decide that all you need is an iphone app and a holding page on the web, best think long and hard about the actual problem you are trying to solve.

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There are the people who will use the system everyday as part of their job and then there are the people who are paying for it.

Quite often, this dynamic and how you manage it is the difference between success and failure in a project.

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In a columns in Forbes, Forrester Research puts out a barrier to cloud adoption and IT flexibility that I haven't heard before:

This CIO started our conversation by saying, “Matt, all you market analysts suggest the biggest cost benefit of cloud computing services is reducing headcount associated with administering commodity IT services – what you fail to understand is it often costs us more to make jobs redundant in my company than it does to keep people.” Yes, many of our clients are very direct with us – and she said it with a great accent, which stings even more. For this client, the inflexibility of labor laws and the power of labor unions is a far bigger constraint to her IT agility than is the complexity of IT systems or internal processes. Clearly, if you can’t recognize the benefits of an IT investment in a reasonable time period due to factors that exist beyond IT’s control, it’s not a strategy.

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