Thinkervine

Career shifts: From module experts to process experts

fays — Sat, 26 Sep 2009 14:07:28 +0000

Most business application consultants and experts have a high emphasis in one aspect of the solution (say finance, controlling, HR, CRM), sometimes, they even go to higher focus (marketing campaigns within the CRM) but very few of them would know what happens in the next phase of the process. They usually work in a blackbox mode knowing the input they’re getting from previous phase, how to process it before serving it to the next phase.

This has worked pretty well due to the widely spread practices in the implementation of processes within monolithic solutions. These processes were also mostly fixed as companies rarely looked forward constant process innovation to keep up with the pace of competitivity. But today, the world’s changing. Processes are being executed across the solution boundaries and even across the company’s boundaries, they may be re-engineered at several phases to match the company’s strategy on the market.

If we take the computer manufacturing industry, the usual process would be “Manufacture the equipment -> ship to dealers -> Select the equipment (customer) -> Pay (customer)“. DELL has drastically changed this process, which earned them a highly competitive advantage at several levels. The process has been changed to “Select the equipment -> Pay -> Manufacture the equipment -> Ship to customer“. At this point, DELL has improved at least on two main points: exit the dealers, reducing the number of intermediates and they don’t need fully manufactured stocked equipment. Basically computers are stocked in warehouses in a pre-assembled state. Assembling might even be transfered (outsourced) to Supply Chain providers. At this point, they’re having a direct contact with the customer, tightening the relationship, and they’re increasing their profitability (fixed costs reduction).

For solution experts, this has a major impact on the way they usually implement the process. They need to have a complete understanding of the impacts of the re-engineering on their blueprint. How they shift from a data receiver from process step 3 to a data source for step 2.

For this purpose, the experts will require to have a broader knowledge of what they are implementing, how’s their part is being integrated within a wider scope, what happens in every phase and then they should shift into a full understanding of the process end-to-end.

So if you wonder how you can update your skills ? What you should look at ?

I say, forget modules and go end-to-end process: Order to Cash or Procure to Pay. With today’s technology and solution maturity, processes tend to have tighter integration between them. They are not just merely tables and transactions, but there’s a real logic flow orchestrating each step of the process.

Coupled with the Business Process Experts/Champions/Owners, the consultants will seek into bringing a higher value to their customer/company by optimizing the execution of the process at every step with a coherent and comprehensive understanding of the impacts of each action and decision.

In an SOA approach, the isomorphism between the process and the services will lead to create fine grained components which are then assembled altogether into composite applications. This leads to a tighter integration of components (logical point of view) as a service might as well execute operations in a project and finance systems.

While there might still be confusion among SAP practitioners on the ability to go from a modular perspective to the end-to-end perspective, this change will be driven by the market evolution and the solution architecture anyways. The idea is that rather than being an expert on 10 FI processes while you usually implement 4 of them. The skills evolution roadmap would guide you through the different stages of your process implementation within the other modules/solutions, hence fully leveraging your training and expertise on all areas.

This full fledged knowledge of the process will also provide a new empowerment that will allow experts to drive the innovation to reflect the business requirements or even anticipate them, as this is where the real value lies.

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Why do Business Applications need a RIA ?

fays — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 10:40:55 +0000

With the advent of Web 2.0, web applications, thin applications and Software as a Service have lead to a fast development of Rich Internet Applications, in particular the user interface (UI) and usability. Whether they are based on AJAX, Flex or Silverlight, they all have a common purpose: provide an improved user experience through a thin client, at least comparable to fat client’s if no better.

Along the years, many software providers looked forward porting their current business applications to web based platforms, mainly for easing the maintenance, avoiding client deployment. These platforms, mainly based on J2EE technologies, were mostly made of static display, although the content was generated dynamically. On the usability level, users have gone from bad to worse. We all know business software has never been sexy. In addition to that, people now had to deal with constant refresh of pages for every action, increased wait-time while data was submitted to the server, as HTTP is not an optimized protocol for transactional applications.

On the other side, developers had to deal with issues like supporting several platforms (combination of browser/OS), new security aspects on uncontrolled layers, harder user acceptance.

The transition from fat client to thin client has merely been a mess for most software vendors. Reason ? This transition has been mainly technical and product managers have forgotten the main brick: the users.

Any change must under-go a global user acceptance. Especially when it comes to business software, that’s something people will use constantly on a daily basis for their work, you need to make sure to have a wide adoption and make it mainstream. For this purpose, the change must be user-centric.

RIA have the advantage of being naturally user focused. They tend to improve the user experience, allowing a more interactive approach with the web application, unlike HTML.

To the users, RIA comes with its own set of benefits:

Increase productivity
Enable an engaging, interactive user experience without page reloads or refreshes
Provide real-time data management
Allow users to interactively visualize and manipulate complex data more effectively and easily (drill-down, drag and drop…)
Assisted inputs (interactive search, predictive typing…)
Optimized screen layout (reduction of complexity)
Keep pace with the users expectations. The UI for their business software are now aligned with those of their daily personal apps (E-Mail, Social Networks, Document sharing…)

On the other side, by creating a custom rich front-end, developers can have a better enablement of the process centric aspect of the application. This becomes even more important when the process goes above a simple application boundaries to be executed onto several platforms. Screen flows can be designed and organized according to the business process requirements while providing a uniform UI for all the process steps. Screens can be drastically reduced by automating the values of some fields and make them transparent to the users.

With RIA, companies are now able to address most of the users current issues with business software which are mainly:

It is very complex
It looks like crap

Through rewrapping their main processes into RIA, companies might increase their user productivity through this mix of process centric (screen flow) and user centric (usability) interface. Some software vendors now tend to understand that and are extending their frameworks to support new technologies that would allow them to enable this into their portals and mashups (SAP has introduced the support of AJAX and Flash islands).

But just above the technical aspects of the technology, the complete product/project management chain must be educated on the value of these new user interfaces.

Are social media services reliable ?

fays — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 03:46:04 +0000

Many social media services launch upon a genuine idea. Something most users will need, use, adopt.

They go for a mock-up and raise the required funds in order to complete the project and head for the go-live, after a mid-long beta period. Due to the Web 2.0 and social media frenzy, most ventures and business angels are willing to take the risk, even though the business model is not entirely defined, going for a “We will find a way to make money from that”. Here lies the biggest issue, either for the start-up owners and their employees, for the investors and even more for the users.

Most of these services start on a freemium model. Means, you don’t have to pay anything to use them. Some of them will rely on advertizing to get some pennies while others will try a true way to monetize the service (selling a service, selling goods, subscription model).

The second half of start-ups will most probably get away with a great revenue model, provided they have a good product and know how to market it. The first half, on the other hand, has to face wild waters.

We see start-ups going dead everyday. Latest of them, being tr.im, which is shutting down on December 31st. 2009. Since Twitter has promoted Bit.ly as the prefered URL shortener, Nambu could scarcely build a user base big enough to justify the time and effort they put in a service, they could barely if not monetize. Yes, the reality behind is just this. The service is genuine, useful, you’d adopt it, but you’d never pay for it, and you’d certainly wouldn’t want to have more ads in your pages.

So how much trust can you throw into these services ? Could you just go adopting them, putting them in the center of your daily work and hope they find a way to get a healthy revenue and survive ? Some of them might get lucky and get bought by Google, Yahoo! or Microsoft, but most of them will not.

The odds get higher for services building their model around another free service.

Dozens of services have emerged around Twitter. Twitter is useful, twitter is great, twitter has millions of users, but Twitter doesn’t make money. What would happen to all these dozens of companies if suddenly, for an odd reason, Twitter was to shut down ? They’d just go R.I.P with no other plan-B to support them ? Of you course, you’ll tell me Twitter cannot go down, there’s no way it does, it is so popular, but I’d say, so were Yahoo!, AOL or Second life only a few years ago, and see where all are headed, fighting for survival, mainly through partnerships or shutting down some of their services.

So are social media services reliable ? I would say, they are, but only for those who have a strong revenue model or that are supported by a company that has enough cash flow to allow them to survive. Any other service might be just hazardeous to use, at least, for centric business purposes.

We have moved!

fays — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 07:51:35 +0000

Thinkervine has migrated from its old host OVH to Media Temple.

The migration has been successful but if you notice any issue, please do not hesitate to report it through the contact form. This migration is completely transparent to you and nothing needs to be done on your side.

This new service should behold its promises and provide a sound infrastructure for this blog. Wishing you all to continue to enjoy our content. We are currently working on enhancing your experience by bringing fresh new concepts.

We thank you for your faith to Thinkervine.

Is the Cloud a safe place for your children ?

fays — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 12:40:36 +0000

With the recent events around the Twitter information leaked by a hacker, the cloud computing security topic has become a most discussed trend on the web.

Just like any other hot topic, this one carries its lot of confusion among the interesting point of views that are being brought by each party.

The first source of error is that noone seems to agree on a definition of Cloud Computing. This almost resembles the SOA debate, surprisingly (or not), you will find the same players behind.

So what is the Cloud Computing ? Answers are various: Platform, services, applications, technical resources, combination of all of these. This debate alone deserves a specific post. For the sake of this article, I shall propose a simplified view. We will define Cloud Computing as a platform allowing to provide a service (aka: through an application, which is not necessarily SaaS), allowing it to dynamically adapt to the usage (in terms of resources, composition of services, platform evolution).

Many services are hosted on a cloud. Whether you’re using Gmail or Google docs, Twitter, Amazon’s AWS or Otherinbox, you’ll end up crawling in the cloud even if you’re not really aware of it. While several companies are outsourcing their infrastructure to public clouds, many questions get arised on the liability of these kind of applications. Is it safe to use them ? Is it safe to host anything on a cloud ?

For any enterprise, security is a primary stake she needs to deal with. Security comes at several levels:

Infrastructure security (Network, Firewalls)
Data security (access rights, encryption)
Application security (access rights, logic, implementation flaws)

These top level areas will dig deeper holes when it comes to their implementation, especially if you’re looking forward an ISO 27002 (and possible SOX) compliance.

Any company that is designing/implementing an application should take a thorough testing process to ensure that there is no compromising possible. But, as we all know that zero-fault application are just fantasy of a lured mind, hence there’s always a level of exposure at some point of time.

Now is the Cloud more secure than another platform ? I would say that being on a cloud would only make a difference if your application is being used internally on a local LAN (or only accessible through a VPN), hence it is not exposed to the world.

So let us come back to the Twitter case. At no point of time, there had been a compromising of the Twitter application nor infrastructure security, nor was the case for Google Mail (Gmail). The hacker only used the “forgot your password” feature to guess the answer to the security question. That was basically the same as doing social engineering. The problem is rather at the user level. Making the answer too easily guessable by anyone.

Of course, the process of simply guessing the answer to a question, on a one word basis, is a huge flaw, but this is an application design issue. Whether you host it on a dedicated server at your favorite ISP, or you host it on your own datacenter and have it exposed to the world, won’t make any difference. The hacker would still be able to retrieve the password and from there gain access to other services.

Now, as we are all using application on clouds, a lot of data gets potentially exposed. But again the exposition is only bigger than the one for applications used internally. This is a prime reason why enterprises are still reluctant to host/use Business Apps (Financials, CRM, HR) on Clouds. They will want to have a full control on their platform, from network access to data storage.

Having this level of exposition, the security framework for applications must be reinforced in order to minimize any possibility of gaining non authorized access and compromise user data. This exposition, should also come with a proper training of the users with all the basic requirements for security usage (Password policies, Social engineering). Currently, there are no security standards that will ensure the safety of your data. Ideally, you would have to combine password authentication with some kind physical check, like a token generator (eg: RSA SecurIDs), which would be the only way to make sure the person getting logged is the rightful owner of this account. At subscription time, if you own a SecurID for example, you’d be able to provide your card info to allow you authenticating to the site using it.

So is the cloud a totally safe place for your children ? I would say no. But it is not any more dangerous than any other kind of hosting or application. All you have to do is trust your providers will do their best to ensure your safety.

Otherinbox : One year later

fays — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 18:28:39 +0000

About six months ago, I have written this post to talk to you about Otherinbox for Gmail. Now, I have been using this service for nearly one year and I would like to give a feedback on my usage over these last twelve months.

For a starter, let me refresh for new comers and those who don’t know OIB what this is. Otherinbox, is fresh start-up, based in Austin (TX) that provides a service to automatically organize your inbox. No need to create filters and rules to keep a decent inbox and avoid a 6 months backlog, Otherinbox filters your e-mail on the basis of the receiving e-mail address. It lets you create a custom domain (.otherinbox.com or your own domain name if you have one) to which you associate your e-mail accounts. This empowers you with the ability to use create on-the-fly addresses when registering to a new service, removing you the strain of creating the addresses before. This service also comes as a great way to identify who’s spamming you, hence you don’t need to use that old “no-spam” address we all used to have.

So over the year, Otherinbox has improved on several levels. First thing, as any brand new product, there were few bugs, but where Otherinbox deserves an A+ grade is their dedication and quick response to the users requests, fixing the issues in order to avoid harm and inconvenience to the users.

On the other side, they have been working hard in order to bring several new features:

? Spam filters. Now your e-mails are all scanned and spams are automatically discarded.

? Otherinbox for Gmail: If you’re willing to keep your Gmail account and still use it as a primary account for your contacts, no worries. Otherinbox has come with O4G. This service will scan your new e-mails and it will automatically archive them in your OIB account following built-in rules for recognition and grouping. Nothing is deleted on the Google Mail servers, e-mails are just endorsed with the label “Otherinbox”. Few months laters, the integration with Yahoo! Mail has been provided as well.

Following the same philosophy of autopilot e-mail, they have provided automatic filters to organize mailing lists subscriptions (Google groups, Yahoo groups, Craiglist…).

You e-mails are accessible through a regular ajaxed web interface but you can also have them delivered through RSS on your favorite aggregator.

If you’re willing to use Otherinbox from a fat client or from your mobile, you will have to sign up for a Premium account (20$/year) which will provide you access all your e-mail using IMAP, the Premium version will also allow you to see messages that have been on your inbox for more than 30 days.

Last and not least, Otherinbox technology is now compatible with most browsers on the market including IE, Firefox, Chrome and Safari.

But Otherinbox is not stopping there. They are working hard on bringing new features and improving the experience. The roadmap includes enhanced mobile versions (you may check the iPhone version), coupons and full list of your receipts.

Otherinbox has really helped throughout the year with this powerful on-the-fly email. Either when subscribing to a service, when networking with people, or just when I had to enroll for specific registrations (hotels, premium memberships, clubs, coupons). I didn’t need to think about being spammed anymore or that I would have to manage any unwanted e-mail. The only thing that I was thinking about was being creative when providing the new e-mail address.

Oh and by the way, this is just my personal feedbacks and I am, in no way, affiliated to Otherinbox, but you have any specific questions, you may ask them on Twitter.

What makes you a good Entrepreneur ?

fays — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 15:52:50 +0000

After a full year of down-turn mode due to the recession, companies are starting to see the light again. There are some emerging trends of business recovery, enterprise strategists and entrepreneurs are re-engaging new projects in hope of transforming opportunities into cash.

Being an Entrepreneur or Intrapreneur almost comes back to the same thing. Come up with a bright idea and convince the audience to get sponsporship. Leading the project development to a productized state. Market the product, build a faithful community of consumers. Manage the product lifecycle, spin-off the business plan and enrich the catalog. Be competitive and be able to have a quick-spin reaction to face competitors.

But what makes a good entrepreneur ? What makes some of them successful and sustainable ? While others have to face failure ?

We are not going to discuss the intrinseque qualities the entrepreneur should behold in order to drive successfully his business. We will rather try to lay down, from a management perspective, what are the good deeds that will lead to a prosperous company.

At the beginning, there was the idea. Then the idea was nurtured, matured, shaped and eventually a product or service came out of it. A market research would then help define the relevance of this idea and how it would be adopted by consumers, which leads to building a solid business model that will eventually convince investors, around a table, to rise funds.

Although this process seems straight-forward, it is rarely the case. First of all, entrepreneurship is scarcely a one-man thing. The entrepreneur needs to define what skills are required in order to create his inner circle of trustees. The people that will help him through the process, provide him with the appropriate advices and critics, and mentor him. Collaboration is the key word, here. An entrepreneur should not be afraid of involving his friends, family and professionals in order to collect feedback about his product and roadmap thourough the development cycle. This should help him refine the concept until reaching the best-of-the-breed state of release.

An entrepreneur needs to be adaptable. He might come up with a great idea at first but then realize that by the time it comes to the market that it would be outdated or irrelevant. You can take the example of Seesmic, a web 2.0 startup in San Francisco, which started with micro-video blogging and sharing. Recently, its founder, Loic Lemeur, seeing that the market came to a saturation state in addition to changing habits, he decided to give a U-turn to the company and Seesmic relocated around Seesmic Desktop, a tool that allows you to update anf follow Twitter and Facebook status messages. Another example is The Next Big Sound, who realized mid-way that they could come up with better ideas, which they presented to their advisors. This daring move, reinforced the trust from the investors and these guys came out with a genuine concept for signing new musical artists.

For this purpose, the entrepreneur needs to constantly screen his audience, screen the market, aggregate the information and go through a constant decision process. This does not mean he has to turn-ways every dire tides but that eventually it would be about time to come up with the next big idea to reinforce his position on the market. Although processes will help industrialize most of the tasks to handle lean costs, he will still need to be agile enough in order to react to the market.

B2C interaction goes mainly through communication. It is very important for an entrepreneur to endorse his company and his products. Trust in a product and trust in a company go through trust in the person that runs that company. Recently, a study by McKinsey(1) showed a recession in trust in big corporations, due to the lack of transparency and the focus on stakeholder’s interests versus a customer focus organization. The Apple case is good example of how its CEO, Steve Jobs, endorsed every product that was released, demonstrating how this was a break-through product that everyone needed to own. Another example would be the Digg case, where Kevin Rose started a live cast called Diggnation in order to comment the popular stories on Digg. The combination of the platform and the show made a good audience capture in an environment where Digg-like services started to pop-up every week.

The good counter-example of this would really be Facebook. Despite its popularity as a social network, Facebook failed to have a good community management and strong endorsement by its founder, Mark Zuckerberg. This lead to serious crisis management when it came to the privacy terms of service or the recent issues with click fraud. However smart were the moves they have adopted at a later stage, the scars will stick to their skin.

At last, an entrepreneur needs to create an ecosystem around his company. A company should be able to leverage its partnership circle in order to provide by severals means the best customer experience. Reliable partners are key to the success of a young blossom. A partner could either be a managing partner or a business partner (third party service providers).

Managing partnerships is essential in the company’s life. A partner could either be a bliss to the enterprise or a stagnant and dysfunctional strain that needs to be managed on a day to day basis. Due diligence will often help you go through this but before creating a new relationship, you will have to assert the benefits of this relationship. Which value do you get from this new business link ? What are his previous performances and do they serve you right ?

A good knowledge of your partners will not only help you prevent deadlocks but will also allow you leverage at best the capabilities they could bring to you. They will help you assemble this whole set of competencies, services and networks in order to come-up with a valuable service for your customers.

Launching a new project does not only require a bright idea and strong commitment from the entrepreneur, but it is also the right combination of a smart and wise management, risks and taking on the exciting challenges with the appropriate people.

(1) The 10 trends you have to watch – Beinhocker, Davis, Mendonca – Harvard Business Review – July/August 2009 – p. 57

Facebook is going Facetwit

fays — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 22:58:39 +0000

Facebook has reinvented the social networking, beating in popularity all its predecessors (MySpace and Bebo). It has long lived as the poppy cheery Social Media company and then came Twitter. Micro-blogging. Follwers and not friends. Search. Live stream. Easy access URLs.

Facebook didn’t see the threat coming until it was there. Even since, Facebook has made a huge work trying to catch up with Twitter. It changed its (long controversed) new home page to include live stream, it then included Vanity URLs. Recently, Facebook introduced the universal status, allowing people outside Facebook to see your status.

Now the new feature Facebook has come up with is… Followers. Yeah, highly innovative feature, it’s been there since 3 years on Twitter but anyway.

It is now activated by default and allows people to add you not as a friend and access your complete profile, but as a person to follow including your status updates into their new stream, as an opt-in system.

For privacy reasons, you can either choose to keep it on or de-activate it (Settings -> Notifications).

Let us analyze this new feature introduction and how it has been introduced.

Facebook has made no announcement to the introduction to this feature, hence users are not notified that their streams are public by default and that anyone can subscribe to them (understand by this: your boss, unwanted public). This is a major issue especially when several UE agencies have asked all major social networks to have a better control on default privacy options.

Second, I barely see users subscribe to other people’s feeds. The whole Facebook architecture is not meant for that. Profiles are heavy and full loaded with pictures, applications and other things. People are barely solely interested in incognito’s status updates within the whole flow of information they are already getting. Either be friends or wander away. Hence, I seriously doubt there will be a serious adoption of this feature by Facebook users. This is highly unlike Twitter where the Following/Follower system is as the essence of the service, and where you have applications that allow you to manage your stream, which is not Facebook’s case.

Furtherly, how do you decide wether you want to subscribe to someone or not ? Will you be provided with a history of the statuses ? Can you make a profile search based on criterias just as Twitter does ? Will the friend suggestion engine take into account subscriptions as a fan on the base of people you are following and not just those you are friend with ?

On the contact list level, how do you manage your fans ? Can you see them and search through them ? Can you block them ? Are you notified when someone adds you as a fan ? Ideally if Facebook wanted this thing working right, as soon as you have fans, you’d have a spin-off of your profile into a real fan page to which people subscribe. Your statuses would then be broadcasted to the fan page and hence to your fans.

Facebook is most probably driving a bad strategy right now. Instead of pursuing the innovation quest, just as it successfully did during the last years, it is now plunging into the catch-up competition, which means you’re already second to introduce the feature. These guys should step to the next running field and have lead the competition instead of trying to imitate their fellow entrepreneurs.

What’s a browser ?

fays — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 21:45:41 +0000

Guys from Google have been asking people in New York about a definition of a browser and the difference it has from a search engine. As you can see most people, although, they’re using the Internet on a daily basis, just can’t tell. Watch this video:

The dev team releases their jailbreaking tool for FW 3.0

fays — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 17:11:57 +0000

Yesterday, the dev team has released its activation and jailbreaking tool for the newly released firmware 3.0 from Apple. But as pwnage tool only runs under mac, PC users had to wait until this morning when they released redsn0w which provides the same capabilities for the iPhone 2G, 3G and iPod Touch original and 2G.

So, if you’re looking forward jailbreaking your phone, you can check out the redsn0w release post.

After downloading the tool, READ the mentions on the dev team blog. Then you’ll be able to execute the MO as described hereafter:

- Unarchive the zip file into a directory

- Run iTunes 8.2

- Connect your iPhone or iPod Touch to your computer and make sure iTunes recognizes it

- Switch to DFU mode

- Run redsn0w from the command line using: redsn0w

- Wait until you’re receiving the message that your device has been jailbroken

There you go but be aware that jailbreaking your device voids your warranty.