Enterprise 2.0 Success

These are some notes based on a post at eWeek.com by Renee Boucher Ferguson. He discusses some of the experiences that Web 2.0 Implementers had so far.

Can we think of it only in companies with young workforces?
Apparently it is not only about age it is also about the type of the company. It seam if you are a tech company there is more chance to be successful in your web 2.0 strategy and implementation. In companies like Cisco and Motorola, the initiative is supported by over 40 people as well. However in an insurance company over 40 people don't have so much interest to produce web 2.0 based content.

How to make it more successful?

Increasing the awareness of the employees and teach them how web 2.0 can help them in their day to day business activity would be a very good strategy.

I have experienced this approach in another scenario when I thought an accountant how useful an spreadsheet could be for him and now he even use that for stuff that does not make any sense to me!

First build your platform and then announce it.
The industry experience tells that it is better to first have a good solid platform and then ask employees to use it as opposed to make them struggle with something half baked in an ad hoc manner.

SAAS vs In House
It seems this approach is also better from management perspective.
Finally there is a discussion about whether SAAS makes more sense for Web 2.0 or in house development and there is no obvious result.

I personally think it depends on the size of your organization if you are a huge company and into tech then in house development might make sense while if you are small and tech is not your core competency then paying 150$ per year per team might be more reasonable.

Enterprise 2.0

In a definition that I just came across on Enterprise 2.0 Conference website.
Enterprise 2.0 is not only change in the technologies that are used in the organization but also change in the culture of the organization. So yes, technologies help you to work differently, however if you don't want to work differently they just become and obstacle for you. It's like you introduce an online calendar and organizer to and executive that still likes to work with small notes in his pockets!

I suggest you to take a look at this definition. Some of the interesting transformation that has been specified are:

Hierarchy -> Flat organization
Centralized-> distributed
Scheduled-> on Demand

I would also add function oriented -> process oriented

Process Discovery a Paper by Lombardi Software

I am reading "Process Discovery" by Lombardi that I have downloade from www.bpminstitute.org. Here are my notes and comments on the paper that I share with you:

Note: Process Discovery:
Prioritizing the target processes for BPM project through stockholders conversation about
"goals,
responsibilities,
problems and
Processes"

Comment: this is a name anyway but I don't like it to me process discovery is more of a finding out processes that we do in our business operation and they are not known to us. Is that possible? Yes since many of the processes are grown just in a natural way and not in a systematic way and they are not documented. I have seen this in a health care case study. To be honest nobody knows what's going on in the process it is just something in the head of the physicians and other involved parties.

Let say process prioritization in my term "process discovery" in Lobardi term. Then is this an important task in a BPM project?
Yes for sure. BPM projects can be very huge and risky and go to the south if there is no prioritization in place.

I guess the introduction of the paper has been written by someone else because the definition of the "Process Discovery" in the rest of the paper is something that you more expect form the name:

" Describe your company's key processes" and find out information about them.

The challenges on the way to do this task are:

" 1: Getting More People Involved"

Processes are usually cross departmental and spread around the organization . Don't stick to couple of key people to discover them.

In another part of the paper it is mentioned that "Daily Workers" might have the best information that you are looking for.

That is definitely true, especially for natural grown human-centric processes.

"2: Getting the Right Information"

Workflow information is not the only thing you want you need " key activities, responsibilities, problems affecting performance and key goals that this process affects"

"3: Prioritization"

Find out the answer of "What first" or "What next" question.

"4: Leverage"

Turn the documented process to executable ones.

One important point that is mentioned in the paper in this section is process implementation is not your last step. BPM is an iterative approach and you have to always do the steps from discovery to implementation to be always successful in the project.

Problem with current options :
In the eye of writers of this paper the problems with current systems are:
Business Process analysis (BPA) tools:
1) They are complicated and complex for business users.
2) Significant Investment required

3) No clear consensus on key problems
Comment: I am not sure how true is this one about IDS Sheer's tool I am reading a book that describes some of the features and capabilities of ARIS methodology and they seem good to me. I have not tried the tool yet. I hope I get the chance to do that and then I'll let you know. However some of the features that they have like "Process Portfolio Quadrant". Btw, we are planning to use URN to implement this :)
4) Integration with process execution engines is also hard

BPMN Process Modelers:

1) too complex for most users:

Comment: I don't think BPMN is complex!

2) They don't provide collaboration option

3) Do not help with prioritization

Office Tools: (Vision, Power Point, etc)
1) Do not enforce a consistent structure to the information
2) inconsistent and unstructured output
Comment: I was looking at Visio 2007 process modeling tool the other day there are some enforcement and checker mechanism in place and at least it enforces the BPMN. However that's true there is not much of a semantic behind Visio templates. I have to look at Visio 2007 in more detail though.

What Lombardi offers?

They offer their application as SaaS which is good from some perspectives. (e.g. collaboration) It is a Wiki based software I assume.

One of the downsides for SaaS especially when it comes to processes that can be the competitive advantage of business and they might not trust to SaaS. Btw, I have to read about trust issues in SaaS a bit if anyone has a good source I appreciate it.

I have submitted a request to evaluate Lombardi's Blue print.
I'll update you if I get the chance to do it.

Human-Centric BPM vs. Integration Centric BPM

I was reading this post by Bruce Silver. He explains the differences between human centric and integration-centric BPMS. He compares them from the technical point of view and points. Here are the main different that he believes they have.

 
 

Human-Centric BPMS	Integration-Centric BPMS
Synchronous messaging	Asynchronous messaging
Don't care about exception handling	Do a good job for exception handling
Just support simple data objects	Support complex data object mapping
Tend to provide and easy modeling environment that used both by IT and Business users	Does not have an integrated modeling environment
Does not support SOA properly	True support of SOA

 

Web 2.0 in practice – putting together a project plan

I just tried to use some collaboration features of web 2.0 applications for putting together a project plan with one of my colleagues at university.

Well we started very eagerly with Microsoft Groove. I guess we did not have enough knowledge about value proposition of the Microsoft Groove. Our perception was like we can share a document and work on it together and we were so happy that we no longer need to go to the university during the weekends like they way we always. However after 1 hour we realized that Groove is more of a file sharing program. Although it can be used to provide what they call it a work space for a project it cannot be used for working collaboratively on one document at the same time. However it can be used for keep all the team members sync with others are doing individually. Then we tried to use MS oneNote. To be honest with Microsoft rivals, oneNote is a great tool and I really like it at least when I work individually and gather notes for my research or anything else. It has a very interesting feature that enables you to share a live session and start working on a document collaboratively. We tried it for almost one hour it was great but after that … the problems started to appear. I not still sure was it oneNote or something else that cause couple of crashes on my friends PC and then we always got disconnected and got this message that network is not available. Anyway, after a bit of challenged we moved to Zoho Project. I guess although it is very interesting you find it a bit more complex that required for a simple project plan. We built couple of millstones and task lists but I guess my friend did not find it useful. What I don't like about Zoho project is it is not integrated with Zoho Writer! Yes that's correct. Even if you want to log on to Zoho Writer you have to register one more time and create a new account!!! After trying Zoho we move to google documents. O God, it is slow and you feel you are in nineties in terms of editing capabilities. Anyway after couple of days of challenge, we went to school today and finished our work in physical world as opposed to virtual world. Do you guys think web 2.0 is mature enough that businesses can count on it? I mean, me and my friend both of us are computer and internet savvies and we could not finish a simple 4 pages project plan using collaborative features, how come we expect an office worker to do that?

Blogging right from MS Word 2007

I guess this post is somehow against Web 2.0 practices that we are talking about it here in this blog J however experimenting Blogging right from MS Word is something that I wanted to do. Well, I guess so far it's been easy to setup the thing and get it to work. When you click on new post for the first time, you get a pop up that asks you whether you want to setup your blog or not. Then it is just one easy step of entering your username and password. You can also specify an Image server provider as well. They only problem is after you setup your account you get this another pop up that tells you, using this method for blogging someone might be able to read your information "including username and password" which is a bit scary for me.

Let's move on to the functionality. Well, I guess one of the things that I like about this method of blogging is that you can also do it when you are not online which makes it simple in many cases. One of the things that I don't like about blogger is the fact that when you right a draft the post date would be actually the data that you wrote you initial draft. I like the post date to be exactly when I post it. The background spell check is also interesting. I guess this one is not specific to MS Word it would be a feature in all offline blogging tools.

I like the fact that you can also manage your account and have several blogs. Editing functionalities are also cool specially the fact that you have the headings to use very handy.

Now let see why I am writing this in a Toward 2.0 blog J. Well I guess I sometimes realize that having offline capability is also important. So the whole idea of just being online is still a bit problematic and it would be till couple years. We still don't have enough maturity in online productivity systems even in blogging tools which now have been around for a while. I am really trying to move to some online productivity tools. I really did not find any online word processor yet that gives me what I want. Like most of them are still similar to MS Word 97.

For me one of the functionalities that I really like is to good support for right-to-left languages which I did not see any of them support. Working with tables and images is still challenging and reminds you of office 2000. I am not sure when we are going to reach to the same level of maturity that we have in desktop application on web based applications but for some time still using desktop applications that gives you the same level of collaboration as online applications would make sense. I like to have all my "productivity" tools online and portable one day but right now some of them still make me slow as opposed to "productive".

Under the Radar: "Why Office 2.0 Matters"

In this conference around 32 emerging technologies related to Web 2.0 and office 2.0 landscape has been introduced. Here is the list of participants which I have categorized them just by a quick look on their website. If you thing any of them should be placed in other categories please drop me a comment.

Organizer and social networking had been one of the most populated categories.
In general as we all know it's all about collaboration and social networking around
different subjects. With the quick look that I had on each of them. I liked
http://www.protosw.com/ which looks very good for building desktop mashups using online services. In Organizers category http://iscrybe.com looks promising, it has offline mode, note gathering, and other futures that base on the demo on the website they seem well integrated.
some of the features like thought gathering seemed useful I have to see weather I can integrated it with my blog or not.

Lesson learned from two mentioned website: multimedia presentation and demo in our busy life is getting more and more important! If you build your next application create a complete and yet very short multimedia demo on that. Maybe these two only had better demo but that worked for me!

Organizer (Task manager, contact manager, scheduling) - personal

http://www.bigcontacts.com/
http://iscrybe.com
http://www.smartsheet.com
http://www.stikkit.com/
http://www.timesearchinc.com
http://www.tungle.com


Social networking on online content (link tagging, recommending)

http://www.cogenz.com/
http://www.connectbeam.com/
http://www.firestoker.com/
http://www.diigo.com

Mash up

http://mashery.com
http://www.protosw.com/
http://www.teqlo.com/

Collaborating content authoring for enterprises and small businesses
(Wiki, Blogging, social networking around content)

http://www.blogtronix.com/
http://www.brainkeeper.com/
http://www.systemone.at
http://www.myworklight.com/

Presentation creation and presenting tools

http://www.slideaware.com/
http://www.spresent.com
http://vyew.com

Content management and document sharing and collaboration

http://www.approver.com/
http://www.koral.com/

Website builder and blogging tool

http://www.terapad.com/

Organizer - Team and project scheduling

http://www.longjump.com/
http://www.smartsheet.com
http://www.wrike.com

Design Collaboration

http://www.approver.com/

Spreadsheets (collaboration, sharing, ..)

www.editgrid.com
http://www.xcellery.com/

Payment System

http://www.mypaymentnetwork.com/

Form and survey

http://wufoo.com/

AjaxWorld Conference and Expo

Ajax is one of the components of 2.0 world. Although there are other ways to build RIA (Rich Internet Applications) applications the main open standard that many open standard contributes work on it is Ajax.

The two other competitors for building RIA are Adobe and Microsoft with their Flex and WPF/E. Although these two competitors being proprietary have some draw backs in nature, they are better than Ajax from couple of other aspects which is always the case in open environment. Ajax being open and getting contribution from all over the word still does not have a specified framework to be followed by developer. To be honest, Ajax is still not mature enough and need lots of improvements both for building standards and frameworks and to make it more efficient and productive for development. Currently, deadline with browser's incompatibilities, different third party libraries, trial and error debugging and makes Ajax developers life hard.

Today, by chance I was listening to Jouk Pleiter presentation at AjaxWorld Conference he was referring to mentioned problems and as the solution he was explaining a framework to reduce these complexities, make the Ajax code more structured and reusable, increase the performance and productivity. In his suggested framework the browser compatibility issues are taken care of by the framework, the eclipse based IDE increases the reusability of the developed code and productivity of the developers and some capabilities are provided for developers so the can do better debugging tasks.

BPEL 2.0

BPEL 2.0 is going to be approved by OASIS at the end of this month. This is a good white paper by Oracle that I suggest you to read. I good open source suite that supports BPEL 2.0 from early draft is Intalio I have already downloaded the previous versions and given it a try. Now I am downloading the last version (Designer 5.0) to play around with it. I'll send couple of post later related to this product.

The main thing that we should look when we are evaluating BPEL 2.0 is to see if it supports workflows as well or it just another good tool for integration between services. However BPEL has proven itself as the future of integration between services and software but there are still some doubts about using it as a workflow engine. Ismael discuss this issue in more detail in his post.

Ismael also believes the other advantage of going after BPEL standard is to reduce the number of conversions from different languages that support business process modeling and execution.

First Mobile BPMS!

Cardiff, just announced LiquideOffice for smartphones (BlackBerry®). According to press release this is the first and only BPM solution for mobile users which enables them to deal with process steps from anywhere and at anytime. In addition to that, the solution provide real-time access to process related information as well. This new tool leverages the capability of LiquidOffice and LiquidBPM. LiquidOffice is a Business Process Management suite and LiquidBPM is a SDK which can be used by ISV to add process capabilities to their existing software.

Does Parakey do as good as Firefox

Who thought that 96% market share of IE could go below 80%. Due to its usability features and compliance with standards FireFox is now very well known and a real competitor for IE.

Ross, an intern who started the project at Netscape, had a real impact on the browser market.
Now he is involved in a company called Parakey to develop a web-based Operating System.

Maybe he can could enforce Microsoft's leaders to change their OS strategy like the way they changed their Browser strategy and started to improve IE.

What obvious is the power of Web 2.0 now enabled people to talke about projects like this and yet there are many news left to hear about.

New BAM

ViryaNet just (13March2007) announce release of their BAM tool. It is called ViraNet Operation Dashboard. This business Activity Monitoring Software as announced in the press helps to monitor real-time business events. In addition to that it provides the means for intelligent decision making for managers as required.

Web 2.0 enforces New Business models to big boys

eWeek (March 5, 2007) has a report of an interview with Microsoft's Ozzie.
The reports compare the situation of IBM in 25 years ago when IBM had to shift from Mainframe and hardware only company to a service and consulting company to current situation of the Microsoft. IBM did a good job during this transformation, Would Microsoft be able to do the same thing?

The point is 10 years down the road everything is going to be web based. As the result if Microsoft does not move to thin client architecture it can not survive.
It seems Microsoft by introducing office live and live.com wants to stay in business. However this time the game won't be easy!

Three Trends to consider for Enterprise 2.0

Andrew McAfee, discusses three main trends that we should take serious about Enterprise 2.0
this is very good post that I suggest you to read.

These trends necessary to to move toward a successful application of Web 2.0 in enterprises and in next generation of the Internet Applications.

People don't pay for stuff these days so you should Offer free services.
In addition we are busy enough so we like to use simple tools with good functionalists. one of the practices in this regard is shopify which is a simple way for people to open up their own online store. This is one of the new generation web applications that has been discussed in one of e-Business cluster sessions in Ottawa.

In addition, providing freedom for users to express what they want in the way they want is really important. User's like to have power not to be imposed by the system.

Finally, I'd like to add the networking and collaboration factor of the 2.0 online world.
As we have all seen all next big things now are consider communities and networks of people as one of their most their most important bases.

We should not forget that the syndication of information is what we all need in this new version 2.0 of the world which it is not really hard to get flooded with information in it. Web 2.0 environment not only helps us to increase the information (Wikis, Blogs, etc) but also helps to find what we want in the way that we want (RSS, Atom, tags, etc.)