Social for consumers is about chatting with mates and generally keeping in touch. But in the business world it is about getting the job done more easily, faster or more effectively, tapping into unrecognized skills, and collaborating with team across time zones and organizational barriers.

So what is interesting is the evolution of social tools in the enterprise.  They are drawing on streams from people but also systems and applications. Subjects, or context, is a key organizing approach. Simply looking at your ‘wall’  rapidly becomes overwhelming.

Whilst not every company is advanced in its thinking or implementation of social software, there are companies now exploiting these capabilities. And seeing tangible results.  This is now fueling the interest from those companies who have yet to take the plunge.

But with every technology those at the forefront of its use are pushing the vendors with new ideas for future functionality. One of these ideas is geolocation.

What if your device (tablet, phone) knew where you are – and then pushed feeds of information that are relevant.  Scary. Big brother. Or really useful.  Here is a video which shows how it can be used in practice. This is real life, not techno-future-ware.

How could your industry use geolocation?

The challenge as I see it is focus / relevance / interest.

I was keynote speaker at an event billed as ‘one of the USA’s most important BPM events’ – 500 attendees.  Gartner gets fewer 1,000 at their US BPM Summit. In contrast Dreamforce (Salesforce’s PAID annual user event) gets 25,000 delegates.

TIBCO‘s annual revenues are nudging $1bn. Add together the revenues of the other BPM vendors and you will not get to $5bn. This is less than SAP’s revenue, and Salesforce’s revenue in the next 3 years if you believe Marc Benioff.

Yet BPM is relevant and critical to the effective operation of every company on the planet.

So why the ambivolence to BPM?  Is it too broad, too nebulous, too undefined. Maybe it is just been around too long and is just too boring?  Or perhaps it is tarnished and there is ‘Process Prejudice’ as the video in the Process Descrimination shows.

Ask a 20 year old if they have a digital camera or mobile phone and they will look at you blankly.  Why say digital camera – what other sort is there?  Mobile phone -  Huh?

A great comment I heard was “it is not considered technology if it was invented before you were born”.  Let that idea sit with you for a while and think about the technology around you.

Here is a short video which brings the point home.

RIP.

• Senior executives will realise that BPM is strategic to their organisation as they look for double whammy of improved effectiveness and reduced cost against a backdrop of greater regulatory compliance.

• BPM will still be a confusing term used by analysts, software vendors and clients (business and IT) to mean different things – and this sadly will not change.

• Business will get more engaged in speficiying and delivering BPM projects alongside IT, or without the support of knowledge of IT due to Cloud BPM offerings. ROI can become RBI (return before investment) as spped to benefits gets quicker.

• All this said there will be no BPM Tornado (a la Geoffrey Moore) much to the anquish of the smaller software vendors who desperately need to be able to drive larger more profitable sales. Consequently we will see an acceleration of the current consolidation, some companies acquired from a position of strength and some fire sales.

• So 2012 could be a good year for software vendors if they have a truly differentiated offering which delivers benefit and fills an urgent need (ie compliance). But truly awful, or terminal if not.

• 2012 should be a good year for clients who have senior management that embrace BPM. Market/economy pressures and regulation will drive up the profile and importance of BPM projects, which is great for careers. Cloud and competition will drive down the cost of BPM technology whic his great for ROI.

• 2012 is not the year for launching a new BPM technology product, nor is 2013 or 2014. There is enough technology already available for clients from large established, and therefore lower risk, vendors.

So what has it really been like? That’s what every one asks me.

Firstly TIBCO acquired a company with a stable product, strong revenues, fiercely loyal customers, and a clear vision for growth. So it was not a distressed technology purchase that could be neatly slotted into a product portfolio. TIBCO recognized that Nimbus’ value proposition could take TIBCO to the business audience in clients. Remember, TIBCO had been insanely successful with the IT audience and had grown revenue to over $800m. But they have ambitions to provide the software that enable businesses to achieve operational excellence. That means addressing both business and IT audiences.

Secondly, the core of the Nimbus executive team have elected to stay and drive Nimbus as a standalone business unit within TIBCO. We are all excited about the potential that TIBCO gives Nimbus, in effect supercharging growth. How? By raising Nimbus’ credibility, by enabling engagement with the IT organization, and by opening up access to TIBCO’s existing client base.

So there has been some integration of back office functions which has resulted in a few, but inevitable, job losses. It has been sad to see colleagues leave who have been with Nimbus for 5-10 years, but TIBCO has been very generous and the people leave with very marketable skills and fond memories.

The most critical business development activity has been the programme of educating TIBCOs existing field force of account managers and professional services teams. Which is where it has got emotional. We had great concerns that few of them would “get it” as they are very good at addressing IT departmental needs, but have been very pleasantly surprised. Not only do they understand the proposition but are happy to work with us to open up new opportunities in their clients. Inevitably there will be squabbling over account control, but a sensible commission plan (i.e. money) sorts that out.

So what has the reaction been? In a word – emotional. Here’s the reaction from one of the TIBCO ‘s top Solution Consultants having watched Nimbus Control in action at a client:

” I fell in love, don’t tell my wife, I have been working with Claes for a week now capturing a business process requirements at a new customer. Everyone in the company, no matter what the solution can capture detailed information on pain points, opportunities, risks and value for every step in a business process, then when done, you get a spreadsheet that you can sort on the captured data like in risk (high, Medium, Low), Opportunity (high, Medium, Low). This can be used to decide what the best opportunity is for a phased implementation. Nimbus is also ideal for providing technical implementation teams requirements.”
Another comment from one of the senior TIBCO team;

“Nimbus approach is exclusively at business level and much more superior. I recommend everyone at TIBCO sales should sit through a Nimbus discovery session at a customer site. I wish I had done a recording of discovery session at Nimbus. It was a beautiful thing to watch.”

Maybe Nimbus is the Apple of process management software, when terms like “fell in love” and “beautiful to watch” are associated with it? Certainly our clients are passionate about what it does for them. And therefore the critical part of TIBCO’s acquisition strategy for Nimbus is giving us the space to continue to do what we do. Which is exactly what they are doing.

That means the investment in R&D will continue, the exemplary support for customer will continue, and the Nimbus brand will continue.

Which is why we are so excited to be part of the TIBCO family.  Now I am getting all emotional.

Here are the beer mats that were given out to all delegates, with case studies on the back.

And here is the summary video of the Inspiring Performance Conference for those who missed it, or if you want to relive the event.

Bottoms up.

Social media for consumers is like a chat “down the pub”. It is a great way of catching up on news, gossip and mates.

Social media for companies MUST BE a better and more efficient way of working. But there are 2 perspectives; tapping social media to listen to what the outside world (customers, analyst, press, competition) are saying about the brand; and internally engaging and empowering employees and partners.

But a question I am often asked is “What is social media?”  So the video below gives a current perspective, with some staggering statistics.

The next question is “What social media applications are there for business?” Currently there are a number which are getting high levels of awareness. But enterprises need to look beyond the hype, the early stage pilots to start to establish what is really required.

The one requirement for social media is it is to enable employees to  get their job done more easily, more quickly and more effectively. Therefore a standalone social media application, ie without business activity/outcome context, is just idle chatter;  an electronic watercooler conversation. Social media promises so much more than that so expect to see the standalone vendors partner with ERP, CRM or BPM applications to get that context.

So the players….

• Chatter is offered by CRM vendor Salesforce.com
• Yammer is a standalone player
• tibbr is now teamed with Nimbus Process Mapping/Management after TIBCO acquired Nimbus
• Jive is another standalone player.

Interesting times lie ahead.

Maya Angelou (American Poet, b 1928)

But I have a less myopic view than those who believe that the ONLY BPM answer is Active Case Management (ACM), BPMN 2.0  or process automation (BPMS) -[you know who I am referring to]. This is the view of BPM that says it is a software market of $400 million.

My view has been that BPM spans the automated and non-automated. It is the aggregation of information in the context of a business process, enabling end users to get the job done more easily, quickly and more valuably.  That means a combination of process-centric content management, social media and process automation – all within a governance framework.  That view of BPM gives a market size in excess of $10 BILLION.

I am no mathematician but  I know which number I like best and which market I would rather be shooting for.

Those peddling their niche process automation offerings obviously have a different view. They are trying to sell their software in a crowded marketplace where differentiation is difficult and clients are becoming more discerning. They are quick to write off Nimbus as little more than flowcharting, and any integration with them would delay their sale whilst clients understand what really should be automated.

Nimbus’ clients understand that we offer far more than boxes and lines on a diagram. The simplicity of the layout and access approach via Storyboards (role-based guided walkthroughs spanning process diagrams) engages end users – 100,000s of them.  The management of complex hierarchies of diagrams, with multiple language variants and the rigorous governance framework is hidden from those who do not need to see it. And finally collaborative process discovery and ongoing improvement has been a foundation of the software since its inception.  Only now is this being recognized as a valuable aspect with SocialBPM being heralded as the next breakthrough.

So I see a strong and increasing demand for BPM, especially if the economy takes a turn for the worst. The leading companies, many of whom we are proud to have as Nimbus’ clients, recognize that an operational strategy underpinned by governed BPM is a competitive advantage. It is a strategic investment and that investment is ramped up in a downturn to put more clear water between themselves and their nearest competitors.

So I am extremely optimistic about the future of BPM as a key part of every company’s operations strategy, and Nimbus’ role in the overall fabric of BPM applications.  Come rain or shine.

I saw a recent  comment on Facebook “I am buying a new bike to get fit”.  One of the responses sums it up- “To get fit you should buy an old bike”

So is the same true in business? Do we layer procedures and workarounds and automated systems on top of broken processes rather than get back to basics and fix the underlying problems. The back to basics approach often requires more effort and feels more painful in the short term, but the benefits are vast; reduced costs, better transparency, less complication which ultimately leads to less staff frustration.

So, to get to the point which started this whole blog. The world of photography is dominated by hugely capable digital cameras and Photoshop making it easy to get caught up in the technology. Which is why a brilliant eBook has come out which emplores people to get back to basics and has some invaluable advice. It is free, will save you money on equipment and will dramatically improve your photography. Following his advice, armed with only with a camera phone you could probably take more stunning pictures than Joe Punter with the latest top end Nikon or Canon.

The eBook is called Going Candid and the free download is here.

What can those who present in business learn from this:

• no such thing as failure, only feedback
• effective use of silence
• you don’t need a script, slides but props and a general direction
• confidence is everything – don’t panic when things go wrong
• the audience want’s you to succeed

But best of all, each year I get to be Producer of the Nimbus’ global user conference, called Inspiring Performance.  In about March we start to get a venue and a date together and start identifying the clients who have asked to speak.

And then I get to ask “How to we move the game on? How do we break the rules? How do we beat last year?”  For those of you who attended Inspiring Performance 2010 you will remember the truly inspirational improv group The May Days for rounded the day off with a brilliant performance. So how do we top that?

This year we are throwing an exclusive back-stage party after the conference. So my obvious question was – “How do we make sure it is a party and not a boring ‘flat beer and curled sandwiches‘ event, and make it truly memorable”.  Ans: “An inspiring band.”

Having watched Naturally7 in concert in London a few years back I made a mental note that someday we would be able to afford to book them. They have performed with Michael Buble, on sell out world tours and the Royal Variety Performance.  Why are they inspirational?  Because they are a rock band with no instruments. Called Vocal Play or Capella, they imitate instruments with just their voices. Quite incredible.

Sadly tickets are going to be limited to delegates of Inspiring Performance, and few close friends.  Now is the time to see who your friends are…..

But Richard Davis, Business Process Manager (BTW a job title which masks his seniority and vast experience) at ThyssenKrupp Steel (TKS) had the audience enthralled at the Nimbus Inspiring Performance conference in Houston. From what was a swamp in Mobile, Alabama TKS has invested $6bn to build one of the world’s most efficient steel mills - it opened officially in December. At TKS,  ‘the foundation is always process’.

The Business Management System at TKS Alabama – built on Nimbus Control –  incorporates the QMS, the Lean Six Sigma program, links to SAP Solution Manager, and will support compliance to 9001, 14001, 27001 and much else.

Note it is called the Business Management System – no hint of the process word.  His recommendation when  talking to senior business people and end users is to drop the word process from our vocabulary.  A point echoed by the Process Discrimination pt1 and pt 2 blogs

The full story was recently published by BPTrends.com  Click to download the 8 page story in detail.

Register for Inspiring Performance 2011 in London 27-28 September to hear lots more memorable presentations, make some great connections… and leave inspired.

Maybe you’re thinking about conferences the wrong way.  And organisers need to take note.

It costs a ton of time and money to go to a conference. So, other than the parties and freebies, why go? If you cast your mind back to last year’s – or last month’s – conference, what do you remember?

Now, social media is starting to change the nature of conferences.

• Presentations: Before it was about listening to sessions. Now they are available streamed in perfect quality on YouTube or the conference website. Or at least the slide decks are available for download.

• Coverage:  Analysts, bloggers and delegates will all be tweeting and blogging during the sessions for the benefit of delegates and those stay-at-homes. Which means the organizer needs to provide wifi and a room which is not pitch black.

• Networking: Before you might make a few valuable contacts. Now with Twitter and Facebook you form offline relationships before the event. And at the event you meet the people face to face. Putting a face to the gravatar and finding out if they match up to their online profile….

• Organization: The set up of the conference needs to reflect these changes. The agenda needs to allow for more networking,  the venue needs wifi to enable people to connect, and there should be space for informal meetings.  Finally, the organizers should not be overly concerned if people are not attending sessions, but instead are engaged in conversations with other delegates.

This means that the conference starts well before the actual day (making contacts, arranging to meet) and lasts beyond the event (listening to sessions, reading blogs).

So next conference, focus on engaged conversations. The one on one discussions of what someone is working on. Helping a friend think about a a project approach or solve a thorny  problem. Sneaking out to go to a coffee shop with a very cool COO…

So what is your next conference.  If you are a process professional, Nimbus Inspiring Performance conference in London on 27-28 September is the place where over 500 of the leading thinkers in process improvement and business transformation are going to be meeting.

Yes, there will be client presentations, there will be laughter, but more importantly there will be connections which will last long after the final music has faded.

Social software in the enterprise and particularly when related to BPM, coined SocialBPM is in this camp.

Nimbus does not sell a social software platform, but has implemented a 3rd party application internally and is actively looking at the market requirements for SocialBPM. So this is  my  perspective rather than a thinly veiled sales pitch. So, please read on.

SocialBPM was explained by Elise Olding in a recent research paper, which sadly is only available to Gartner clients, called “Social BPM: Design by Doing”. She did a great job of starting to explain what SocialBPM by highlighting 2 very different perspectives, to which I have added a 3rd, which I have described below with some of the issues I see.

1. Social by Design: Collaboration around process improvement

Example: The process for getting a client case study developed and signed off.

This is the discussion between people about how to improve a particular step or related content in a process flow. The initial discovery of processes is often in workshops, but once deployed and executed, then it is critical that there is a feedback mechanism so those actually using the processes can identify issues or suggest improvements. Typically this is ‘send the process owner an email’.

With SocialBPM the discussion is all linked to the automated or manual process step, related document, form, system, metric or compliance statement. Feedback could be simply a rating, or it could be suggesting improvements. To make it work, the collaboration needs this structure, and the recent Harvard Business Review article Want Value From Social? Add Structure echoes the point. The structure is the connection to a process or process related content. Also, this should be as simple and intuitive as using Facebook. After all 750 millions users can’t be wrong.

Simply starting a discussion topic called “How do I get a case study written’ and hoping that people will pitch in or ‘swarm’ may help to get the case study written, but is not the best use of valuable resources. Someone may suggest the correct way of doing it, or perhaps sidestep some critical governance steps. But it certainly won’t improve the overall collective intelligence of the organization or help others who have the same problem in the future.

This was at the heart of my article Social technology is lipstick on a pig. So until the “Yammer crowd*” (Yammer, Jive Software, SocialText, CubeTree, …. ) genre of social software, which is ‘standalone social technology’, is tightly integrated into BPM modeling and execution software it is making life worse not better in the long term. Although for some end users it feels like short term pain relief. But for others it is yet another place to check for messages.

*I have used Yammer as an example as they have managed to raise their profile very effectively as “Twitter for the enterprise”, but there a large number of software vendors with social functionality with Jive Software leading the pack in terms of revenue according to Gartner’s research paper “Magic Quadrant for Social Software in the Workplace” which lists the top 40 vendors.

2. Design by Doing; Collaboration around ‘getting a job done’

For example: The team working to get the case study for a client, Novartis, created and signed off.

This is not about improvement, but getting a number of people together to get a particular problem solved – ie a specific instance of a process. It may be the desperate, ad-hoc fire fighting to get a problem fixed or it may be the normal step in an orderly process which requires a collaborative effort. In both cases social technology can reduce the friction, but also include what might be described as the “unexpected experts”. The person whose role, job spec, position in the organisation and biography does not suggest their expertise and the value that they can give. This is the hidden value that social networking software can uncover, provided it is instrumented correctly i.e. the right metrics are being collected for later analysis. But there is another important aspect to this form of collaboration.

These discussions are more than just discussions or chatter  – they are on-line meetings – with decisions and actions. So any social networking software needs the capability to create, assign or track actions. Otherwise these critical discussions are no better than the quick coffee machine or corridor conversations. Interesting, but they don’t move the game on. Again the current software offerings are still evolving and many still don’t have the full range of capabilities to really be effective.

This is the area where I am seeing most implementations and the business case for “social is the new way of working – forget processes”. Which sounds so refreshing unless you are in a regulated industry or have compliance requirements. So that excludes food, pharma, oil & gas, financial services and any US quoted company with Sarbanes Oxley demands. Ouch!!

3. Social Network: Social networking within the organization

For example: The Wednesday evening mountain biking club in the UK office

This is using social software to enable better social connections within the organization, but it also has a business benefit. We are all now subjected to internal email spam. Distribution lists and inconsiderate use of CC means that we are included on emails that have no relevance.

In the example, I may be a member of the UK office, but actually work from home most days and have no interest in mountain biking, but still get the email each Wednesday afternoon telling me where they are going and when they are meeting. I don’t care. It is not relevant. But I don’t want to be taken off the “All-UK-employees” distribution list. Our own internal implementation of social media eliminated 7% of email in the first month.

I have heard suggestions of “no email Fridays” to get people into the habit of posting to the social media app rather then turning to email. Now this is one area where the “Yammer crowd” do have the functionality, but it is hard to make a business case for a global rollout on the basis of better social interaction at work.

Unformed and uninformed

The challenge is that this market is unformed and uninformed. There are case studies and business cases which show how the benefits of social software in the enterprise. But few of these cover the SocialBPM angles described above, or if they do they are short term fixes masking longer term problems. What is clear is that cloud based social software is being “brought into” (ie being setup and used) organisations by stealth by business users, with the CIO unaware until a problem occurs or a license fee is required to get control of the data.

So, organisations need to start defining what they are trying to achieve and therefore what they need from a social software solution before they pile in with a ‘limited trial’ that suddenly becomes the defacto standard, running roughshod over formal process and procedure. Now I am not a process bigot. I welcome innovation, but also understand that governed process has a vital part to play in driving up the effectiveness and performance of companies.

Social technology has a vital part to play, but needs to be dovetailed into the fabric of the organization and ‘implemented’ correctly. Not another bolt-on fad.

So governance is seen as an unavoidable cost to be kept as low as possible. Lowest cost compliance.  For any company spending $millions on governance, shouldn’t they be asking “Can I get more value out of the money we are spending on governance”?

For everyone governance is a good discipline. No, it is more than that. It is Competitive Advantage when implemented elegantly and in a way that doesn’t inhibit process improvement and agility. And it is underlined by a comment from a VP at Nestle – a highly regulated, complex organisation which takes governance seriously:

“Nimbus is a game changer for Nestle Sales Division, no other manufacturer is using this tool”

What are the implications for implementing process-driven governance?

• Governance covers the entire change cycle (suggested change, review, sign-off, implementation, audit trail, acknowledgement)
• It covers ALL process assets; end to end flows, training materials, policies documents, SOP, video, forms, automated applications, not just the automated process flows
• MSOffice (Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Visio) do not have rich enough governance and when teamed with Sharepoint become an expensive time-suck to administer, so are not fit for purpose
• SocialBPM needs to be integrated into the governance cycle not be seen as a shortcut around process

An extreme example is UTi Pharma, a medical distribution company. UTi Pharma doesn’t make medicine but its systems, technology, a global and local web of pharma grade warehouse facilities, fleet of vehicles make sure that patients always get the original quality medicine they need, when and where they need it.  They work with all the major pharma giants and have over 150 audits per year. Yet with a process-driven approach they can still be innovative and drive process improvement. Last year they logged 495 change requests.

So it is possible to square the circle? Yes. You can combine collaborative change with effective governance, if process is at its heart.

Larry Ellison is a passionate sailor and a formidable businessman.  I am sure that you can draw parallels with succeeding in business and winning in sport. Some of the recent quotes from the video below bring that out

“There is a huge reward for sailing them well”, “To get the best out of them, you have to push”, and “If you make a mistake you pay the price”

Watch the video, and tell me that this is not a brilliant advert for Oracle and also the 34th America’s Cup which hits in San Francisco Bay in 2013.

Any clues as to why I’ve relocated to SF to the Nimbus US HQ apart from driving 30%+ growth and supporting our growing list of US clients.

But it is clear that you need people to follow processes, particularly in highly regulated industries. In pharmaceutical companies people need to followed detailed processes and procedures in certain areas, such as clinical trials.

But in every industry, there is a need when staff are new to the company, new to the role or performing a task which they haven’t done for a while they need guidance. But if that guidance is buried in textual document hidden in a document management database, then Adam’s point is a far one. No-one will read it. And mistakes will be made, some with dire consequences. Just look at the oil and gas industry and Deepwater Horizon where clearly process failures played a part in the the disaster.

So a couple of things need to change:

1. call it something emotive; brand it: How2, PACE, MyToyota, HitchHikersGuide)
2. make it intuitive, easy, relevant and useful; i.e. not process diagrams or flowcharts but guidance that is built on / re-purposes process documentation
3. make it easy to find, first time; personalised and delivered onto the device the user wants; web, iPad, iPhone
4. make sure it is up to date; process ownership delegated down the organisation and friction-free governance

Can that change behaviour?  Absolutely.  One client we have gets 6.2m hits per year on the ‘process documentation’.  That is 4 hits per day PER PERSON in the entire organisation. Many of our clients are rolling out their process content, using our software, to every employee, which is a significant cost. How do they justify that? Because the departmental or division-wide projects have proven that there is a positive ROI.

So Adam’s conclusion is “Process documentation needs a revamp. Surely it can be done better than it is done today…” is correct.

It is and it has been, but don’t look at the Business Analysis tools for inspiration. They are targeting different audience – process analysts and professionals. Forget Visio, brown paper and stickies. Yes, these are still be used!!!

There is a new breed of process vendors who care about end user engagement. The future is already here, and it is called Nimbus Control.  You call it what works for you.

The concern is that there is a blurring between our work lives and social lives.  I thought Facebook was my personal life, but that is changing with work associates requesting to be friends.  Twitter was for work, but people on there I now count as friends.  Confused and confusing?  So let me give you a perspective which might help.

For many of the 750 million users Facebook is a way of connecting with friends and family. Increasingly it is a way that companies are projecting their brand thought fan pages and advertising. And enterprising software companies are devising ways of driving new revenue streams through Facebook apps. But for most it is a way of continuing the face to face conversation online – with people they already know.  It is driven by a form of ‘voyerism’. Connecting with someone you have never met seems strange, and is probably best explained by Some Grey Bloke

Twitter is a chance to hear what other people are thinking and reading. People you have never met before. Rather like wandering around a restaurant and earwigging the conversations at tables. Some are mundane and boring, but others are fascinating. The boring conversations about what time they got up or which flight they boarded you ignore and move on. Others are fascinating and you hang around to hear more (“follow”)” Over time you may get to know the diners and be invited to the table (they “follow you” and “retweet” your tweets).  So it is driven by curiosity and the desire for knowledge or insight.  And it is a way of starting to meet people online you have never met before. Following someone you don’t know seems normal, but actually meeting them face to face is a far bigger step – but fascinating. Does their online persona match up with them in real life? Better or worse?

Social networking for enterprises

There are a number of software vendors fighting over this space. As a long term Salesforce customer we have had tremendous success using Chatter. This is what might have been called collaboration before or the natural discussions required to ‘get the job done’. Now those conversations are being taken online and leaping geographical and time zone boundaries. Interestingly these conversations are between people who already know each other, or who are brought together by a common problem, aim or organisational grouping.  It is quite natural to follow or connect with someone you don’t know. What is interesting is that it can start to breakdown organizational silos and make the goal of virtual multi-disciplinary teams possible.

But let us not get too carried away with the hype. Social Networking software will not replace all enterprise systems. But it will reduce the friction of collaboration in the workplace.  But like any application it needs to be integrated. A recent article on Harvard Business Review “Want Value From Social? Add Structure” http://bit.ly/cBUXAC echoes the point.

Social media, when combined with the proliferation of mobile devices and cloud computing is changing our work and personal lives. For the better? Who knows. It is still a confused and confusing market. And the confused mind typically says “No”.  That is the wrong answer. Social Networking is not a spectator sport. It is best examined and experienced from the inside. Only then can you see how you should respond as an individual, an employee, a manager and a leader.

“Post-it notes, brown paper and a digital camera together with Visio work well for my work. Post it notes and brown paper for the process workshops, digital camera to capture the maps and allow them to be quickly circulated (especially when interested parties may be in another country) followed up by Visio to produce the finalised maps.”

Can anyone see the problem with this?  Rather than post a reply on the LinkedIn group, or email him, I thought I’d write a reply on a small piece of paper and attach it to the leg of a homing pigeon. Should do the trick?

Probably appropriate as the person works for the Civil Aviation Authority.

Why are people fighting with one arm tied behind their back where there are so many capable solutions out there?

The other replies in the group were all suggestions for their favorite product (or employer).  But no-one took a step back and asked the fundamental question; “Why are you mapping your processes?”

If it is
- to capture processes for an individual to analyze  – then Visio probably works
- to define the requirements for a BPMS (automation) or application, then use something which supports BPMN or the modelling tool associated with the BPMS
- if you want to deploy it so 10,000s users can access it and understand it, then you have fewer options
- if you also need governance (ie keep the auditors happy) then the list gets even smaller.

But don’t just go for ‘cheap tool’ because it will cost you in effort long term. Or worse, planes could fall out of the sky.

Sure, you can run through your slide deck and say your lines. That is what most presenters do. And that is why most conferences suck. It is a fire hose of information. The audience could have stayed at home and read the slides or the white paper or the book – and most wished they had.  There is no connection. No emotional response in the audience.  And without that it is empty. A monologue, not a conversation. Information transfer, not insights.

When I talk to a conference organiser about my brief, I ask a simple question:

“At the end of my presentation, what do you want the audience to think, feel, do?”

Three simple words, but loaded with emotion. And loaded with risk for me. Far safer to hide behind the lectern and the slides. But that is not acceptable. With risk comes the reward of an audience that lights up and the energy that buzzes around the room and that’s why I “take to the stage”.

So I am always on the look out of examples of great presenters who really connect. TED is a perfect source. The improv or stand up comedy world is another great place to find role models (plus an excuse to watch comedy videos at work!!). But sometimes they come from unexpected places. Here is a beautiful example. Feel free to sing along at home.

So here is 4 hours of time lapse photography which shows the majesty of the city in just a few minutes.

Steaming City from Simon Christen on Vimeo.

Calvin Coolidge (American 30th President of the United States, b.1872-d.1933)

As I am English so at Nimbus we have changed this to Polite Persistence.

The BPM market, or at least our approach to it, has taken a while to mature as I wrote in a recent blog Our flavour of BPM has become mission critical.  I was talking to a major US client whose comment knocked me back “When Nimbus Control stops working, our staff stop working”.  We have come a long way from simply being used to create a quailty manual that no-one ever looks at.  One of our retail client gets 6.2m hits per year on their Nimbus Control site.  That is 4 views per person per day.

So we have had 14 years of polite persistence and now we are seeing a huge take up in the market. We have moved from being tactical, to departmental to divisional to strategic. The discussions with clients are about global roll-out.

Another client quote from last week “I can now see why we are rolling this out to 287,000 staff”. And this is not an isolated case. Making the business case for Nimbus Control on every desktop is becoming easier, and after a product announcement at Inspiring Performance it will be even easier.

There are many times that we have questioned what we are doing. We’ve watched other companies have far greater growth than us., but hten fade or lose their way. But then we meet another client and realise that what Nimbus Control is delivering is really making a difference. Succss is not (just)  measured in revenue growth, profit or ‘eyeballs’ but in terms of what is really making a difference.  And that drives very healthy, sustainable growth; Nimbus as seen revenue growth every year for the last 14 years.

To finish, I was at the Gartner BPM Conference manning our exhibition stand and a lady came up and we started chatting. She said she was from a client and I thanked her for her support and said I was the CEO and one of the Founders.  She grasped my hands, looked up at me and said “Thank you so much for creating Nimbus Control, it has made my life at work so much easier”.

Enough said.  That will fuel my polite persistence for another 14 years.

As a customer, I’ve never been clear about why companies choose to provide self-service.  And based on my user experiences I am not sure that they are clear.

Most companies are schizophrenic, oscillating between the two options:
•    Reducing costs by eliminating customer facing staff
•    Improving customer satisfaction by allowing access when and where a customer wants it.

What have I been today?

Clearly self service is on the increase. Just, this week I have been a supermarket checkout operator, an airline check-in assistant and baggage handler, and bank teller.  And this is just the physical self service. There is an even longer list of online self service actions this week; buying books, ordering tickets, trying to book a US driving test.

So is it cost saving or improved customer satisfaction? The critical question is: “Can it be both, and if so what is required?”

Firstly, self service has some unique characteristics, whether it is B2B or B2C:
•    The user of the self service is an untrained and infrequent user
•    There is limited opportunity to get feedback on the experience from the user
•    In most situations, if it is too difficult or confusing a user simply walks away, into the arms of a competitor
•    It can make or destroy a customer relationship
•    Done well it can be a huge competitive advantage, reduce costs and improve customer satisfaction
•    It is rarely done well.

Self-service is rarely done well.

Strategy

At the heart of the problem is the strategy.  Self service should be seen as a way of providing far better customer service and a competitive differentiation. It should NOT been seen as a cost cutting.  Done well it will result in reduced costs.

Once the strategy is clear, then the things fall into place.  An outside-in, customer-centric view of the end to end process needs to be taken.  Although self-service is customer facing / front office, it will reach deep into the organization and may change back office processes. For most organizations this is a significant task requiring a senior level commitment in terms of time, resources and budget.

This is very different to the cost cutting quick fix where a website or telephone menu system is often slapped onto poor front facing processes and ineffective back office processes. Sadly this is the approach that most of us experience day in, day out.

Poor customer processes means that no matter how good, friendly and attentive your staff are…… they will fail. Because customer processes are like Gortex.

This is explained in more detail in my article “Your customers hate it, your staff hate it but you make them do it anyway”.

Once the processes are clear, then the supporting technology becomes obvious.

So the aim is to design the best customer experience taking into account the different ways that a customer can touch you; email, website, telephone and post. That experience must be easy and painless as possible for an uninitiated, untrained, disinterested first time user.

Great customer experience is often difficult to explain. It is often easier to identify what causes a poor customer experience, so let’s explore these:

Telephone call routing

Most organizations now seem to have some form of automated routing telephone systems. They were cool and cutting edge in the 1980’s. Now they are a bane of our lives with some appalling implementations.

Here are some examples of how to get it wrong:
•    Menu list from hell – long lists of menu and sub-menu options in no logical order or numerical sequence
•    Cul de sacs and dead-ends – if you cannot provide the information required to get to the next step eg a customer number you cannot get back to the previous option
•    DIY or DIY  – no option to talk to a human being so stuck in endless loop
•    Don’t you know who I am?  – You are asked enter a stack of customer information to “route you to the best operator” and when put through they ask you for it all over again
•    Your call is important to us – Yet you are still kept on hold for 10 mins being told that all lines are busy, but you are very important.

Every one of these issues could have been eliminated if a process led approach was taken, thinking about why the customer was calling and the possible outcomes; customer journeys.

Self service websites

Self service websites can really make a company shine or shoot itself in the foot. There was a brilliant blog called “How to make your shopping cart suck less” which was rather irreverently imploring people to improve their ecommerce websites by adopting some common sense.

The blog cites several examples including:
•    Hunt the icon – The Login/Register and Cart buttons are now typically top right. Why try and be clever and put them somewhere else?
•    First things first – Why make me register and enter payment details just to find out the cost of shipping and tax?

However, self service now goes beyond e-commerce and is now tapping into the same data that customer support staff use, either to maintain customer details or to get support.  Examples of this are online banking and product support. These involve more complex customer processes and places even more emphasis on clear process design combined with a great user interface.

With more variability, (and therefore the possibility for confusion) this is the one area where true competitive differentiation is possible.

Self service “kiosks“ are now appearing in airports, supermarkets and banks. Normally there are staff hovering close by to support new users as they struggle to understand what they need to do based on the onscreen instructions.

Again, a little process thinking prior to implementation would smooth out the user experience or identify where additional support is required. As standard approaches emerge, then these need to be adopted for those who have a different approach.

Opportunity

If you do not offer self service, you are perfectly positioned to leapfrog the competition. Provided you take it seriously enough.

If you already have self service options when was the last time your Head of Customer Service tried navigating through it like a first time customer? That should be the catalyst to kick off a serious redesign.

And once you have fixed your customer self-service, you can focus on employee self-service which is probably just as convoluted.

Getting it wrong

Sometimes you will get it wrong, but not as wrong as this: (company name withheld)

I was struggling to use the self service website, so opted to phone the customer service number. Having navigated through the maze of options and sub-options I finally spoke to a real person. She patiently explained that she could not help me because the service was only available online, and when I said I wanted to formally register a complaint she gave me this response: ”complaints can only be handled by email.”

A recent blog highlighted how many marketing companies engage in marketing techno-babble. Incomprehensible jargon that is presumably intended to make them feel intellectually superior, but leaves potential customers mystified.

This time last year we were lucky enough to be introduced to a TED video by Simon Sinek about how great brands market, based on his book, Start with Why. It transformed the message about what Nimbus does from some list of adjectives describing what we have, to a simple sentence of why we are excited to come to work Nimbus. We are all about:

Making work simpler, faster and more valuable for millions of people.

Here is another beautifully simple video showing the power of words when they really connect with people emotionally. Inspired.

-          Process mapping application supports live workshops rather than detracts from workshop.

-          Process content displayed via end user web application that has collaborative capabilities (social) when allow discussion linked to a process, document, metric.

-          There is a streamlined approach to driving any change through the change cycle so governance is not a barrier to innovation.

So SocialBPM is not new… it is collaboration.  The way it now looks (a la Facebook, Twitter) is new.   Mirroring that interface will engage thousands more individuals in organizations who would normally run at the mention of the word process. My blog Are you the victim of process discrimination described the problem with process.

Some customer stories to bring this to life and make it real ( BTW Head over to Chris Taylor’s BPM for Real blog for some great customer insights)

Avaya: process discovery workshops using webex for remote SME (subject matter experts) around the world and local teams together in workshops. The business case for the collaborative software was based on saving cost of airfares/hotel/travel

UTi Pharma – heavily regulated but wanted to innovate to improve. SocialBPM capabilities within a governance framework allowed innovative suggested for improvement to be implemented which still maintaining regulatory compliance

Carphone Warehouse: 1,800 processes deployed in 6 months using store managers as SMEs, then they established a Center of Excellence to focus the collaborative efforts from both front and back office staff, as you can hear in the video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wnvgbc3uGfU

New Balance:  Ran live workshops but didn’t deliver the results initially as they had no way of capturing and locking down the improvements , described in first 40secs of this video  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SodU0wIfuZU

So in summary:  Collaboration is made easier (crossing geographical / time boundaries) with the right technology.  But simply implementing a social tool in the enterprise (facebook, twitter, yammer) won’t help improve business processes sustainably across the business.  It will simply allow subsets of people to “chat” about how they get around the lack of clearly documented processes.

This is like putting band-aid on a major wound.  Or lipstick on  pig.

Barcodes have been around for years, but something has changed. No longer are they lots of stripes but they are square and dotty and are called 2 Dimensional. There are multiple formats and the winning format is far from clear.However there are large companies trying to make their format the standard, with the inevitable lock-in.

But there is a lot of support for independent QR (Quick Response) code made popular with the rapid growth of the Android phone which supports it natively.

Simply changing shape and format of the barcode is not significant. Sure it allows more information to be stored, but the critical issue that more and more people have smartphones with cameras.  With freely downloadable QR Code reader software any person can take picture of the barcode and it is translated into a URL, phone number SMS or email that is automatically opened on the smartphone.

Creating a QR code couldn’t be easier with a range of websites and software applications  available, so a QR code can be printed or put onto a website.

This has opened up a wealth of possibilities for marketers, sales and also, bizarrely, for process professionals.   Here are 50 examples  from Flyteblog.com.  These are very creative and fun, but after the list is a fascinating example from Carphone Warehouse / Best Buy Europe

1. QR Codes on bus stops, train stations and subway stations: A quick scan would give you realtime information on when the next bus, train or subway would arrive.
2. Posted next to paintings and sculptures at museums. Great for visitors who want to learn more about the artist, the time period, and the reaction to the photo.
3. As part of a personalized direct mail piece. Each QR code can go to a PURL (personalized URL (Uniform Resource Locator)).
4. On historical sites and on walking trails. Sure, a plaque is fine for grandma, but I’d like to delve deeper, whether with a wikipedia entry, or an video of a local historian explaining the significance of the site.
5. At video kiosks. QR codes can appear as people interact with your kiosk, whether it’s at the mall or your place of business.
6. On For Sale signs. Whether residential or commercial, for sale signs could include codes that had all the information a sell sheet includes, plus video walkthroughs.
7. Email newsletter signups. Build your subscriber base by having quick links to an email signup box.
8. E-learning. Have your QR code generate an email that starts an autoresponder, sending daily emails filled with lessons and related information.
9. Next to packaged food in groceries. Give shoppers quick access to recipes that include the ingredients they see on the shelf.
10. In a jigsaw puzzle. This would create some real engagement as the user would have to put together the puzzlebefore scanning the image.
11. On produce. You could include information about the farm, organic vs. conventional growing, best by dates, etc.
12. Buying coffee (or anything else.)
13. On bottles of wine. It would be nice to be able to get info about the vineyard, and maybe buy a case of that bottle I enjoyed at the restaurant.
14. On tags for sustainable clothes. Is that piece of clothing really sustainable? Let’s quickly scan and see it’s story.
15. For conference signage. Next to the name of the upcoming sessions in each room would be the QR code so you could get the full description, speaker bios, and see if there’s any room left.  And to leave feedback.
16. On conference name tags. SXSW has been doing this for at least a year or two. Why trade business cards when you can just scan them. Now, don’t you feel all TSA?
17. Written in calamari ink on diners’ plates. You can’t make this stuff up.
18. On jewelry. Examples abound.
19. As part of interactive maps. Check out this example from Town Graphics.
20. At the bottom of all newspaper and magazine articles. Then you could quickly get to the online version and see the comments that other readers had left.
21. On liquor bottles. Linked to drink recipes; this would be especially good for new drinks you’re bringing to market.
22. On building permits. New York City is already doing this.
23. On the fliers that you find under your windshield wipers at the mall. One example might be an offer for a car wash; the URL would give you the discount code and directions to the car wash offering the deal.
24. On the safety bar ads on ski mountain chair lifts. These days, everyone on the mountain seems to have a smart phone, and they’re going to be a captive audience for 5 – 10 minutes, sitting on that chair going up the mountain.
25. Inside elevators. If I ran a dry cleaning service or something else that helped busy executives out I’d advertise inside elevators in tall buildings.
26. In bar bathrooms. I often see Home Runners and cab companies advertising above the urinals in bars. Why not make it easier for patrons to get a safe ride home, rather than drunk dial a wrong number?
27. Within a video game console to share avatars. Nintendo is already doing just that.
28. To get more people to sign a petition. Like the one for cleaning up the BP mess.
29. At bars, clubs and anywhere else music is playing. Sure, Shazam is a great tool for finding music, and often you can even buy the track you discovered at iTunes or Amazon. But in a loud club you may not be able to suss out the song. If a QR code appeared above the DJ’s head, you could quickly scan the code and purchase that new song.
30. On the backs of tractor trailers. Because “How’s My Driving?” with an 800 number is so last decade.
31. On wedding invitations instead of RSVP cards. Scan a QR, save a tree. And a stamp.
32. As a temporary tattoo. Link it to your Facebook profile or Twitter account.
33. On a laminated card for trade shows. Instead of dropping a business card in a fish bowl. Booths win because they’ll get all the pertinent info, and the event could give away prizes to the people who get scanned the most.
34. To encourage community feedback. The library in Groton, CT, does just that.
35. As wallpaper. Well it’s better than the wallpaper in our bathroom when we moved in to our house.
36. On the bottom of flip flops. The imprint they make on the beach…until the tide comes in.
37. On coffee cups from your local coffee shop. Plenty of advertising opportunities here.
38. On posters linking to free books. 1st Bank is giving away free copies…of these out-of-copyrighted classics.They also have other boards that link to free sudoku.
39. On a ball field. Have you seen what the groundskeepers can mow into the outfield these days? They’re artists!
40. On a human billboard. Think “Eat at Joes.”
41. As wrapping paper. One company is already customizing this with unique videos attached to QR codes.
42. On trade show booths. Scan a picture, (be entered to) win a free iPod.
43. On recipes in magazines. Quick link to videos, reviews and feedback at the website.
44. For self-guided tours at factories. Scan a code, learn what that dohickey does.
45. Posted on car windows in dealerships. Perfect for after-hour shoppers.
46. Scratch and Win cards. It’s not enough to have them scratch off the card, make them scan that card to see if they’ve won.
47. On movie posters. QR code takes them to a preview of the movie.
48. On cocktail napkins. The code could take networkers to the sponsor’s site, the beverage’s site, or some networking site with photos, so you can connect with people after the event.
49. In TV ads to make them interactive. Here’s an exampe from AXA.
50. Business cards. ‘Nuff said.

You can even get t-shirts printed with QR Codes, presumably linking to the wearer’s Facebook site so you can check them out rather than walking up and talking to them.

All very exciting. But we’ve seen a far more valuable use of QR codes.  For making peoples lives easier and less frustrating at work. The client is Carphone Warehouse Best Buy Europe. The have documented all their business processes and links to systems, forms and documents using Nimbus Control. This allows them to make them available to every member of staff.  Every process diagram, or storyboard (which is a step by step guide through the diagrams) has a unique URL. They have branded all this process content How2.

So now the team are looking at all the problems and frustrations in the workplace and seeing if they can solve them by giving staff access to the answer, which is invariably a process, document or system in How2.  The access is via a QR code stuck to item.

For example. You are having a bad day and it only gets worse when you need to photocopy the ID of a new customer and the photocopier is out of paper or toner.  Where do you find the spare toner cartridge, how do you load it, which form do you use to order a new one, and what do you do to recycle the old one.  Simple. There is a QR code on the photocopier. The person can take a photo of the QR code using the free app on their smartphone that takes you via a URL to the correct page in How2.

But this idea could be extended.  What do staff need to do when evacuated for an earthquake or fire?  Where should they assemble? When can they go back into the office? What do they have to do before starting work again?  Most people when they leave the building will have their phone and company ID.  Why not print the QR codes linking to the procedures on the back of the ID card?

Why don’t my United, Virgin and BA Card frequent flyer cards have QR codes on the back that take me to the correct page on their website for bookings and for check in, or a QR code on the side of a self-service check-in terminal to call for assistance?

All you needs is a little ingenuity, a printer, and information management system which enables you to capture information where the URL does not change when versions of the content changes….  and some information that is valuable to your end users.

Now that has got you thinking?  Let me here your ideas – scan the QR code to send me an email…

But now you are getting older, and so is he. He is no longer so cool. He is no longer so quick and sharp. His perspective on what is cool and what isn’t is stuck in a time warp set 5-10 years ago. And any attempt to ‘buy his way’ into cool look make him appear helplessly out of place. Perhaps, he should be learning to grow old gracefully?

I am sure you can all think of someone like this you looked up to, and now you are concerned that they have lost direction and hope.

I have got to really know Microsoft through my years on the World Partner Advisory Council and presentations at World Partner Conference. But over the last 15 years working alongside them as a key technology partner I have marveled at their ability to produce incredible technology and awesome returns. But I now have grave concerns.

Long ago they watched the internet boom and seemed to have misjudged the impact and the attack from Netscape, but they responded strongly and decisively. Roll the clock forward and now every areas of their business seems to be under attack from far more credible and powerful combatants than Netscape. The Cloud Office business from Google; the business apps from a host of suppliers led by salesforce.com; the phone from the 2 upstarts iPhone and Android, and now Google is challenging the operating system and the Apple Mac is gaining momentum in corporate accounts. Only in the gaming market can Microsoft hold its head up with the truly spectacular XBox360 Kinetic.

Just like my Uncle there is no shortcut back to cool. Simply hanging out with cool guys (buying a stake in Facebook), going drinking with other ex-cool guys (partnership with Nokia), or buying the latest cool overpriced ‘threads’ (buying Skype) won’t do it. Perhaps is now the time to take a long hard look in the mirror and work out what are the strengths today, forgetting what worked in the past.

I desperately hope Microsoft gets its mojo back, because it is never nice seeing one of your childhood heroes on its stumbling.

He wanted to tak to Nimbus because we are having great success with very tangible project ROIs  e.g. Carphone Warehouse Best Buy ROI was 1100%. He was interested if this was valuable data in his “CIO driven by value” research. Sadly he left the discussion empty handed interms of CIO data, but we both discovered an interesting insight.

The challenge with BPM when seen through the eyes of the CIO is that it is an automation technology to be installed. If you look through the eyes of the senior business transformation sponsor (COO, VP Business Operations, Hd of Business Excellence, VP Business Transformation…) then they look at BPM as a major transformation approach, where IT plays a supporting role. These individuals ARE motivated by how BPM can drive up revenues as well as improve efficiency.

What came out of the conversation is that the future CIO will not have a career path that comes up through IT, but will have a financial, product or operational background. The leading search and recruitment firms are seeing that when they are being asked to recruit CIOs, having a technical or computing background is not mandatory. What their clients is asking for is a strong business knowledge and how IT can help the business.

So the BPM sponsors or champions, our clients, are the potential CIOs of the future.

When the CIO has a change of focus (career direction, measurement, remuneration) from IT to business then BPM will gather greater momentum and remove many of the barriers to successful transformation.

Maybe when I say “We don’t sell to the CIO”, I should be saying “We don’t sell to the current CIO”.

This great HBR article showns how innovation is more than evolution – sometimes it is paradigm-shifting, curve-jumping, market-making, bloddy-hard-work. But rewarding.  Which pretty much describes the last 14 years at Nimbus. But the market is now recognising what we do, and last week Gartner awarded Carphone Warehouse / Best Buy Europe the BPM Excellence Award for Leveraging BPM Technology. This short video shows what they have achieved.

But to bring it to life watch this excellent TED video on perception management

Then came the film, with the first public screening of a film in 1895. The early films were no more than capturing onto celluloid a stage play originally with sub-titles. Roll the clock forward to 1927 and film The Jazz Singer. Suddenly films became very different from a stage play. They were set in real locations, with multiple cameras taking different perspectives. They cleverness of the words, the emotion of the storyline and the imagery were replaced with so-so dialogue and fantastic sets.Jump forward to today and a film is interactive. Don’t like the ending? Choose another. Take a look behind the scenes. See how it was made and what the Director decided was suitable only for the cutting room floor.

Wikipedia: History of Film

Books (and magazines) are going through their own evolution. The first major breakthrough was the printing press coupled with and increasing literacy. Books are now making their way into the 21^st century. Currently most eBooks are simple electronic copies of paper books with a little reformatting to make them readable on the wide range of ebook readers. The ePub standard has potential, but limited take up, to allow books to be interactive but there is still the DRM (Digital Rights Management) hurdle to get over. The publishing industry hasn’t learnt from the music industry that DRM ultimately fails because it becomes too unwieldy and discourages wide spread take up.  But I digress. eBooks have still some way to go, and possibly they should look at the magazine industry.

Magazines in many ways are more advanced. Perhaps because many quickly went online to save costs, increase distribution and get wider advertising coverage. Computer Weekly which started in 1966 this week stopped its print edition. Advertising in the print copy had dwindled and this of course is why magazines exist. Surprisingly, subscriptions of some print glossy magazines is on the increase in parallel with the take up of the online access.

There are some great examples of some really interactive magazines and these have been spawned by the iPad.  Magazines designed to run as iPad applications. Examples are Evo , the fantastic car magazine (yes I am a petrolhead) and companies like Zinio are offering a platform to help magazine publishers up their game. This means combining different media – text, video, audio – with popups and rollovers to give further information. Making reading exploration nd fun rather than linear.

If we take a look inside a corporate and the way employees consume information, particularly how they do their job (processes) we are virtually back to the world of playwrights and storytelling. And the script is pretty sketchy with continuity issues in “film industry speak”; continuity is the consistency of the characteristics of persons, plot, objects, places and events seen by the reader or viewer over some period of time.

In some companies we have seen processes and the supporting information (documents, applications, metrics) move to the early days of film. Process, Quality or compliance documentation is simply an electronic representation of the paper based equivalent. Now it gathers dust on a hard disk somewhere rather than on the shelves.

However in the most process mature companies, such as Carphone Warehouse / Best Buy Europe, they have caught up with the best that film and magazines can offer. An interactive view of a process, tailored for the individual, with links to other media. The ability to collaborate or interact. And they can view it when or where they want to – on-line or off-line on a variety of devices.

This has not gone un-noticed. Gartner has just awarded Carphone Warehouse / Best Buy Europe their coveted “Best use of BPM Technology” award which will be presented at the end of April at their BPM Summit  – the Oscars of BPM.

Everything is in place to make BPM a blockbuster.

• Technology platform – web, tablets and smartphones.
• Demand – cutting costs, improving staff effectivenss, supporting compliance
• Audience – over 240 million employees in companies with greater than 500 staff around the world

We even have a storyline that has twists and turns, plenty of politics, moments of exhilaration and complete dispair, and can appeal to the young and old no matter what level of seniority:

Making work easier faster and more valuable for millions of people.

Will it be a happy ending? For many the story is still unfolding.

Part of the problem is back to the definition of BPM (process discovery vs process automation vs operations platform). Some of it is possibly a theoretical perspective on  the cloud – the “It is just technology” view.

But at Nimbus we have had a cloud offering for 5 years, so my comments are based on real world experience for over enterprise 100 clients in every industry including Nestlé, SAP, Novartis, BP, BestBuy Europe and Toyota.

And what is surprising is that the behaviour is not as expected.  Yes, 90% of new clients use the Nimbus Cloud for reduced speed, risk and cost reasons. But they do not necessarily see the cloud platform (currently) as a long term answer.  This is not a reflection on the robustness or quality of the Nimbus Cloud service.

Let me explain:

The Cloud for business users speeds up implementation, reduces cost and risk.

Business users have a transformation project and they want to start mapping to understand/optimise their processes and want to then provide the mapped content as the operations guide / manual / platform to all business users, to the auditors and also to IT to reconfigure the back end applications (SAP, Oracle, Salesforce.com) or build a new workflow application (BPMS).

Previously the options for the business users were

- get IT to find a server and install Nimbus Control (ie wait 3-6 months)

- be forced to use an “inappropriate” IT modelling tool (System Architect, ARIS, CaseWise, Provision)

- just start using MSOffice (Visio, Powerpoint) with the obvious limitations of lack of central management, collaboration and governance.

With the Nimbus Cloud users can get going immediately using the right tool for the job, purchase from OpEx rather than CapEx, and also prove the business case for wider rollout with reduced risk. Then after 6-18 months we are seeing many (but not all) clients decide to install the Nimbus Control application on premise.  As we offer both options clients have choice.

We are hearing the migration on-premise is for several reasons

- the tight integration with the core systems (Active Directory, email, document management, business intelligence, enterprise applications). This is possible with a cloud app (as Salesforce.com has proven), but it is easier on-premise

- the security of critical IP – the DNA of the business – processes, metrics, documents, policies, collaboration

- the scale of the roll-outs – 10,000-300,000 users – means it is a core centrally managed application

- and IT Departments exist to install and run applications, so the cloud is stealth outsourcing which takes jobs away.

A couple of quotes that bring it to life:

“Using the Nimbus hosted services helped us quickly get a pilot project underway and prove that our lean operations initiative was working”  Toyota

“We met the CFBA’s compliance requirements on time thanks to the rapid implementation made possible with Nimbus hosting capability”   ING Bank

“The project has been aided in a huge way because it was hosted by Nimbus”  Carphone Warehouse

Enough said.  Or maybe not.  Let the debate continue.

The Gartner BPM conference had the highest level of attendance ever, but what was also palpable was the enthusiasm. With a growing backdrop of regulatory compliance in clients, BPM is becoming far more important and is now a Board level agenda item. This is being reflected the scale and scope of projects being presented by clients and the resulting ROI stories.  For example, Carphone Warehouse won a BPM Excellence Award for Leveraging BPM Technology and their ROI for the first year was 1100%.

But many projects are unable to show the true ROI as they don’t have the raw data, because they haven’t implemented BI effectively. So for some companies that BPM initiaitive is a leap of faith as I talked about in my blog  Harry Potter and the Leap of Faith Not that it should stop companies looking to implement BPM.

So how does BPM and BI fit together?

Firstly BPM is giving a context for BI. Mapping of a business process will drive out the correct metrics to be collected, rather than those most easily collected. This was discussed in my article published by BP Trends called Leading vs Lagging indicators.

Secondly, BPMS systems are providing a valuable data feed into BI systems as it is realtime data enabling for faster and more accurate decisions to be made.

The challenge for organisations is to make the groups implementing BI and BPM talk to each other and recognise the value each can bring to the other.

In terms of sequence; Is it BI or BPM first?

We are seeing those organisations who have implemented BI having a better view of performance shortcomings, and using BPM to improve them. This often identifies a need to change the BI system to collect different metrics, which means reimplementing BI.

Those that start with BPM can, in parallel, identify the business activities and the supporting metrics which are required from the BI system. So do it only once.

What is interesting is that BPM is rapidly gathering momentum and is a valuable partner to BI.

For some industries governance is not important, it is critical. Pharma and the food companies are governed by the FDA. The banking industry is regulated by the FSA. Both the FDA and FSA  recognise that process content in MSOffice or some other ungoverned mapping tool is unacceptable, hence the increase in usage of process repositories. But some estimates suggest 80%+ of companies rely on MS Office (Visio, Powerpoint, Word) for process documentation. Scary.

So if you have ungoverned process documentation, how can you be confident that you are automating the correct proceses. All BPM activities need to start with a solid foundation.

At Nimbus we have been mirroring the software development approach when looking at governing process documentation.  You have different versions of the process model; production, pre-production/test, development. There is a formal sign-off to move between these different states. The BPM application should make the move easy. But remember that the

Here the business can learn from IT. Process documentation in MSVisio or Powerpoint and then stored in Sharepoint is not necessarily governance. It is more subtle that that. There is version control, audit, sign-off, review, notifications that all required to make the governance cycle manageable and not a nightmare email or paperchase. The interrelationships between the different diagrams and attached files in the model need to be controlled.  And what about multiple language variants of each process diagram. Make it too difficult and it won’t be managed.

Some of you are say that it is unrealistic to control to this level of granularity, but Fortune 1000 companies ARE this complex, and they are driving the requirements.

So either do governance properly or not at all. You are either in control or not.

But it also was a disaster in terms of outsourcing and process management.

Firstly, I need to be clear that BP and Transocean are not clients of Nimbus. So my comments are as an external observer rather than someone who is intimately involved. Therefore, this is blog not intended to make specific comments or recommendations on this particular incident. There is no shortage of people lining up to do that.  The Economist this week listed the books in an article Writings from the Black Hole that have been published,

Fortune Magazine in January ran an in depth expose, called BP: An accident waiting to happen.

Firstly BP outsourced the operation of the rig to Transocean, and I am sure that Transocean outsourced or subcontracted part of their work to 3^rd parties.  When everything is going fine, there is enough money (and oil) sloshing around to make it profitable for everyone. But when it all gets nasty then, not matter what the contracts say, rapidly the spotlight shines on BP and it is clear that the public still holds BP responsible.

But, in talking to some very experienced oilmen, there were several clear failures in operational processes over time which led up to the ultimate disaster. Now whether these were cross organisation process issues, which often occur with outsourcing arrangements, or just within Transocean I am not clear. But what is very common is that outsourcing or subcontracting gives a very clear boundary. Often end to end processes, which should normally run seamlessly across any boundaries, are truncated with disastrous results. The interface between the companies is captured in a legal document which focuses on metrics and risk, not in any process related documentation.

The Fortune article makes fasscinating, if somewhat morbid reading. But small section got my highly-tuned “BPM” senses buzzing:

BP has taken a huge financial hit in terms of payouts and potential lawsuits.  But just this week, they have announced that they have filed lawsuits against the maker of the failed blowout preventer on the Macondo well, the operator of the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig, and the well’s cement contractor, saying they were largely to blame for the accident one year ago that killed 11 and spilled 4.9 million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. Time to get the contracts out and go to court. Sadly this is how many, many outsourcing arrangements end. Normally they are not so visible to the general public.

The current issues of Transocean are compounded by the (callous / greedy / insensitive  – you choose your adjective) actions of the executive to award record bonuses to themselves.  They could and probably will claim that the bonuses are justified and are contracted performance bonuses.

They may be, but it is worth digging a little deeper to understand the basis of the reporting and therefore calculation of those bonuses. It appears that the metric was based on the rate of incidents per 200,000 hours worked.  On that basis the Deepwater Horizon disaster would not have had a significant impact on the statistic.  The problem is that it was an inadequate metric to determine management bonuses based on safety.  It doesn’t pass the smell test.

In a filing on executive pay, Transocean said, “Notwithstanding the tragic loss of life in the Gulf of Mexico, we achieved an exemplary statistical safety record.” Based on the total rate of incidents and their severity, “we recorded the best year in safety performance in our company’s history.”

So, what we potentially have here is an outsourced contract with multiple parties involved and no clearly documented end to end processes with metrics which do not reflect the fuller picture or encourage the correct behaviour.

No wonder outsourcing needs BPM –and quickly.

That is a sad way to spend such a large proportion of a person’s time on the planet.  Life is not a dress rehearsal. Some people leading quiet lives of desperation, but increasingly their outpourings on Facebook  or Twitter have made it public. And some have lost their jobs as a result – but it wasn’t something that they wanted anyway!! Often it takes redundancy to give people the shove they need to fulfil a dream with a financial cushion that allows them to do it.

There is no shortage of research that are more productive and companies full of happy people perform better. But what does ‘happy’ mean? A recent blog called “Happy Staff, I don’t run a bloody holiday camp” pointed out that every job has its highs and lows. The lows help you appreciate the highs. But on balance you need more highs than lows.

So what are highs? Surprisingly it is not money. Money helps.  It is not recognition. But everyone needs to feel they are doing something important. The answer, surprisingly, is feeling that you are making progress toward some goal, either self imposed or set for you.

So what is the worst job in the world?

There are quite a few that would seem to be up there.

• Coal miner – dangerous job, low pay, awful working conditions in a dying industry
• McJob – a minimum wage job in a service industry with no future
• Dentist – hurts people who don’t want to be there so no surprise dentists have highest suicide rate
• US Football player – who trains hard for a career that lasts no more than 5 years, 30% of which is spent on the bench or injured
• Popstar / celebrity – lots of attention and no privacy but in some cases a great deal of money
• Politician – lots of power and no privacy but a fairly low salary (augmented by fictitious expense claims in the UK)

But I think know the worst job. The person who designs the turn indicators on cars for the US market. It is the worst job in the world because he (or she) works hard making sure that the indicator design fits with the style of the car and the rest of the lights, it is operated by the stalk on the steering wheel column, it makes the right sort of clicking noise, and it switches off after a turn.

And then they have to walk the streets, cycle and drive around the roads of America seeing that the turn indicator they poured their energy is NEVER USED. 

How soul destroying.

So it was interesting today to read that Amazon’s EC2 cloud crashed overnight.  Twitter this morning was a blaze with “disruption to FourSquare “ For me it was a welcome relief not to have postings to tell me “Peter James has just gone into Victoria’s Secret in Las Vegas” or “Robert has checked into Marriott, London”.

But there are number of applications that run on the Amazon Cloud, probably snuck in without the knowledge, support or blessing of the CIO or IT Department, and have become core applications inside corporations. These I have been calling The Stealth Cloud.

If the CIO has no knowledge of these apps, there is no backup or contingency plan. No work around. So how do corporations assess the risk or impact of an outage? Will it simply mean that an internal department is less productive, or will it hit your customers? Does that cloud app have customer data, support cases, order data or financial information? When it comes back on line what are the processes for re-entering the backlog of data you’ve amassed manually whilst it wasn’t available.

Suddenly (possibly) the business can now understand the value of all those boring, laborious activities which IT does behind the scenes. The vendor assessments. The contingency planning. The backup, DR and restore processes. The things you don’t miss until they’re gone.

Like electricity.

To see a list of some of the apps that suffered read the blog Amazon’s Cloud Crashed Overnight, And Brought Several Companies That Rely On It Down Too

So what of the 3 P’s?      Polite, patient, persistence.

Polite: you need to be good to people on the way up as you will meet them on the way down

Patient: the time you want to sell is not necessarily the time they want to buy, but you need to be there when they do

Persistence: too many people give up too soon, and the best things sometimes take longer (ask at any winery).

Here is sneak peak behind the scenes – his preparation and some great advice on presenting

Sir Ken Robinson’s TED presentations

Sadly only available in the UK and timed to coincide with National Cleavage Day, Apple announced today that it has developed a breast implant that can store and play music. The iTit will cost from £499 to £699, depending on cup and speaker size.

This is considered a major social breakthrough because women are always complaining about men staring at their breasts and not listening to them.

Sure, they both need to make sure that they don’t poison anyone, but they can get away with a lot in their industry without appearing frivolous. But other industries are different. Or are they?

Somehow you wouldn’t want a nucleur power company, oil company, airline or passenger transport company to be wacky. You need them to be solid, dependable and safe.  Or do you?

Let’s take a look at some airlines for a moment.  British Airways is a very serious airline. Solid, steady and dependable. Leaving a huge opportunity for Branson to inject some personality with Virgin Atlantic.  South West Airlines have taken it even further and are highly popular and profitable.

But have these 2 airlines taken it too far?   First New Zeland Airlines in flight safety video which started with a Naked Stewardess safety video

but then produced this shocker

And for a completely different perspective here is Kalhuah, a low cost South African Airline, Kulula with head office situated in Johannesburg . Kulula airline attendants make an effort to make the in-flight “safetylecture” and announcements a bit more entertaining.

Here are some real examples that have been heard or reported. But first a couple of pics of their planes:

On a Kulula flight, (there is no assigned seating, you just sit where you want) passengers were apparently having a hard time choosing, when a flight attendant announced, “People, people we’re not picking out furniture here, find a seat and get in it!”

On another flight with a very “senior” flight attendant crew, the pilotsaid, “Ladies and gentlemen, we’ve reached cruising altitude and will beturning down the cabin lights. This is for your comfort and to enhancethe appearance of your flight attendants.”

On landing, the stewardess said, “Please be sure to take all of your belongings.. If you’re going to leave anything, please make sure it’s something we’d like to have.”

“There may be 50 ways to leave your lover, but there are only 4 ways out of this airplane.”

“Thank you for flying Kulula. We hope you enjoyed giving us the business as much as we enjoyed taking you for a ride.”

As the plane landed and was coming to a stop at Durban Airport , a lone voice came over the loudspeaker: “Whoa, big fella. WHOA!”

After a particularly rough landing during thunderstorms in the Karoo , a flight attendant on a flight announced, “Please take care when opening the overhead compartments because, after a landing like that, sure as hell everything has shifted.”

From a Kulula employee: ” Welcome aboard Kulula 271 to Port Elizabeth . To operate your seat belt, insert the metal tab into the buckle, and pull tight. It works just like every other seat belt; and, if you don’t know how to operate one, you probably shouldn’t be out in public unsupervised.”

“In the event of a sudden loss of cabin pressure, masks will descend from the ceiling. Stop screaming, grab the mask, and pull it over your face. If you have a small child travelling with you, secure your mask before assisting with theirs. If you are travelling with more than one small child, pick your favourite.”

Weather at our destination is 50 degrees with some broken clouds, but we’ll try to have them fixed before we arrive. Thank you, and remember, nobody loves you, or your money, more than Kulula Airlines.”

“Your seats cushions can be used for flotation; and in the event of anemergency water landing, please paddle to shore and take them with our compliments.”

“As you exit the plane, make sure to gather all of your belongings. Anything left behind will be distributed evenly among the flight attendants. Please do not leave children or spouses..”

And from the pilot during his welcome message: “Kulula Airlines is pleased to announce that we have some of the best flight attendants in the industry. Unfortunately, none of them are on this flight!”

Heard on Kulula 255 just after a very hard landing in Cape Town : The flight attendant came on the intercom and said, “That was quite a bump and I know what y’all are thinking. I’m here to tell you it wasn’t the airline’s fault, it wasn’t the pilot’s fault, it wasn’t the flight attendant’s fault, it was the asphalt.”

Overheard on a Kulula flight into Cape Town , on a particularly windy and bumpy day: During the final approach, the Captain really had to fight it. After an extremely hard landing, the Flight Attendant said, “Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome to The Mother City. Please remain in your seats with your seat belts fastened while the Captain taxis what’s left of our airplane to the gate!”

Another flight attendant’s comment on a less than perfect landing: “We ask you to please remain seated as Captain Kangaroo bounces us to the terminal.”

An airline pilot wrote that on this particular flight he had hammered his ship into the runway really hard. The airline had a policy which required the first officer to stand at the door while the passengersexited, smile, and give them a “Thanks for flying our airline. He said that, in light of his bad landing, he had a hard time looking the passengers in the eye, thinking that someone would have a smart comment. Finally everyone had gotten off except for a little old lady walking with a cane. She said, “Sir, do you mind if I ask you a question?” “Why, no Ma’am,” said the pilot. “What is it?” The little old lady said,”Did we land, or were we shot down?”

After a real crusher of a landing in Johannesburg , the attendant came on with, “Ladies and Gentlemen, please remain in your seats until Captain Crash and the Crew have brought the aircraft to a screeching halt against the gate. And, once the tire smoke has cleared and the warning bells are silenced, we will open the door and you can pick your way through the wreckage to the terminal..”

Part of a flight attendant’s arrival announcement: “We’d like to thankyou folks for flying with us today.. And, the next time you get the insane urge to go blasting through the skies in a pressurized metal tube, we hope you’ll think of Kulula Airways.”

Heard on a Kulula flight. “Ladies and gentlemen, if you wish to smoke, the smoking section on this airplane is on the wing.. If you can light’em, you can smoke ‘em.”

A plane was taking off from Durban Airport . After it reached acomfortable cruising altitude, the captain made an announcement over the intercom, “Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. Welcome to Flight Number 293, non-stop from Durban to Cape Town , The weather ahead is good and, therefore, we should have a smooth and uneventful flight.. Now sit back and relax… OH, MY GOODNESS!” Silence followed, and after a few minutes, the captain came back on the intercom and said, “Ladies and Gentlemen, I am so sorry if I scared you earlier. While I was talking to you, the flight attendant accidentally spilled a cup of hot coffee in my lap. You should see the front of my pants!” A passenger then yelled, “That’s nothing. You should see the back of mine!”

So if you want to make this quirky approach work, you’d better make sure that you have a very clear customer proposition supported by some really effective customer and back office processes, a strong and forgiving culture .

Without these “laugh with us” becomes “laugh at us”. And the only place customers will sepnd money to watch clowns is at the circus.

Early childhood memories are faint, but every boy can recall his first major-league baseball game. He can remember the score, who hit the home run, who pitched. But mostly he remembers his father. The smell of his aftershave is wrapped up in the smells of baseball – the freshly cut grass, the summer air, the hot dogs, the stale popcorn, the spilled beer, the over-oiled glove complete with the baseball breaking in the pocket. He remembers the visiting team, the way the team tossed grounders to warm up the guy at short, the way the hecklers made gentle fun of the TV commercials, the way the game’s greats rounded second and slid headfirst into third. You remember your sibling keeping stats, studying the lineups the way rabbinical scholars study the Talmud, baseball cards gripped in your hand, the ease and pace of a slow summer afternoon, Mom spending more time sunning herself than watching the action. You remember Dad buying you a pennant of the visiting team and later hanging it on your wall in a ceremony equal to the Celtics raising a banner in the old Boston Garden. You remember the way the players in the bullpen looked so relaxed, big wads of chew distorting their cheeks. You remember your healthy, respectful hate for the visting team’s superstars, the pure joy of going on Bat Day and treasuring that piece of wood as tough it;s come straight from Honus Wagner’s locker.

Show me a boy who didn’t dream of being a big leaguer before age 7, before Training League or whatever slowly began to thin the herd in one of life’s earliest lessons that the world can and will disappoint you. Show me a boy who doesn’t remember wearing his Little League cap to school when the teachers would allow it, keeping it pitched high with a favourite base ball card tucked inside, wearing it to the dining table, sleeping with it on the night table next to the bed,. Show me a boy who doesn’t remember playing catch with his Dad on the weekends, or better, on those precious summer nights when Dad would rush home from his job, shake off his work clothes, put on a T-shirt that was always a little too small, grab a mitt, and head into the backyard before the final rays faded away. Show me a boy who didn’t stare in awe at how far his Dad could hit or throw a baseball – no matter bad an athlete his Dad was, and for that shining moment Dad was transformed into a man of unimaginable ability and strength.

Only baseball has that magic.

From The Final Detail, a book by Harlan Coben

Nirvana (innovation and empowerment) or a potential train wreck (chaos, compliance failure)?

I have been encouraging business users to take control of the definition of their own processes, rather than abdicating it to Business Analysts or IT Analysts as they have for years. 14 to be precise, which is how long ago I founded Nimbus. Nimbus Control is easy enough to be used by end users, not business analysts or process professionals. There is clear evidence in client after client that we have achieved that.

But, Phil Gilbert from IBM has gone so far as to claim that IBM Blueworks is so easy that everyone should just “start mapping”. To me that sounds like a recipe for disaster. Everyone creating islands of process. Disconnected. Uncoordinated.

But a Business Process Competency Center (BPCC), as Gartner advocates or Centre of Excellence (CoE) is a way of putting some structure around the mapping work. Again Phil Gilbert has something to say here. “Kill the Center of Excellence“.

The new level of interest in BPM offers an opportunity to harness the passion and energy of the entire organisation. True crowdsourcing. But crowds need leadership, guidance and direction. Hence the critical importance of a BPCC or CoE.

We should look to other successful crowd sourcing activities for guidance. Probably the best known is Wikipedia.  Wikipedia is not a free for all.  The founders of Wikipedia set some structure, guidelines and rules. After that they let people fill out the structure. They delegated ownership, yet kept overall control.

Both these principles Nimbus Control supports.   But remember with Wikipedia there is no requirement for different Wikipedia entries to gel or fit together. No need to satisfy regulators or auditors. For processes to really improve business performance as a whole, they work they need to work end to end, spanning departments or even companies seamlessly.

So, whilst I applaud Phil Gilbert for raising the profile and discussion around end user driven process management I cannot agree with him on his approach.

If I did that, we’d both be wrong.

As a regular speaker on the circuit, Las Vegas has a lot of conferences, so I’ve walked down the strip and taken the roller-coaster in New York, New York. Therefore I was not looking forward to a weekend in Vegas. But with the family it would be different right?

Firstly having a 9 and 11 year old bodyguards was great. Walking the strip holding on to them meant we were not hounded by touts with offers of hot girls, free nightclub entry or cheap drinks. The Belagio fountains were spectacular, as always. But far better with excited squealing from the family – my wife the loudest. So good we stayed for a second song. The volcano at Mirage was impressively lifelike. The size and majesty of The Forum in Caesars Palace was incredible. The Venetian had some many famous landmarks of Venice you might even think you were there – except The Venetian is too well maintained. No crumbling plaster or worn steps. No walkways across St Marks Square to keep tourists out of the flooding.

But the highlight of the weekend was Cirque du Soleil. The tickets cost more than our suite at the Luxor but they were worth it. The mix of comedy, elegant dance, weird costumes and amazing athletic prowess was perfectly balanced over the course of 90 minutes of breathtaking action. So what were the audience of several thousand people thinking when they watched the two guys perform a spell binding strong man act? These guys were not in the 20’s, but closer to 40. There were visible gasps at some of their moves. If you need a lesson on the anatomy of muscle groups you had it right there. Or alternatively you could watch The Chippendales or Thunder from Down Under.

For some, probably most of the audience, based on their waistlines, their reaction to the show was, “Wow! Very impressive. I could never do that. Those guys are so lucky to have such natural talents”. They left the show and went out for a large burger, fries and chocolate milkshake. And a discussion about their next big win in the casino.

For another, far smaller group they watched the show and resolved to get even fitter. Enrol at the gym or take a course like P90X. It was a call to action. If not now then when?

For the kids in the audience, how many resolved to run away and join the circus? Or at least they learnt some new tricks to try on the trampoline?

Which group would you fall into?

If you need some clues watch the Cirque du Soleil video highlights

Imagine that a 1,000 year old man has walked into the room.  You are then told which thing (eg fridge, camera, TV, microwave, car….) which you need explain to him. Tricky. Trickier than you think.

Try it now.  What did you discover? You need get back to first principles. You need to assume nothing. You need to keep it simple.

Perhaps every technology marketing company should play this game before they vomit up a load of marketing-techno-babble onto their website.  Here is one good and 2 awful examples.

We said a 1,000 year old man.  But what about a 100 year man?  Just 100 years ago was 1911 and below are examples of the latest car and plane.

Makes you think, doesn’t it?  It has spurred us to create a family project: a timeline. A LONG piece of paper graduated in years starting at the Year 0000 AD running through to 2011 AD, and when a topic comes up we will put it on the timeline.  So we talk about Elizabethan times, we put it on. Discussion about the invention of the internet, or the first commercial flight, it gets added. You get the idea.

Shouldn’t all marketing teams take this approach. How about two these howlers from my industry, BPM?

Assembles a comprehensive and consistent view of data by providing cross-referencing and translation rules to harmonize semantically different data sets across multiple applications.

XXX’s self-adaptive software products autonomously and pro-actively strive to optimize their behavior in order to fulfill configurable business objectives, such as cost and productivity goals, or guaranteed service levels.

See what I mean?  And I am sure you have plenty of examples far, far worse than this. Which is why we are rather proud of our vision which is  admirably simple:

Make work easier, faster and more valuable for millions of people

Sit back and enjoy this video from Rethink

Dog’s new shoes

Penguin indecision

Kitten and his phone

BBC Walk on Wild Side: preview

BBC Walk on Wild Side: Episode 1

BBC Walk on Wild Side: Episode 2

BBC Walk on Wild Side: Episode 3

BBC Walk on Wild Side: Episode 4

BBC Walk on Wild Side: Episode 5

BBC Walk on Wild Side: Episode 6

So firstly their definition of Social BPM:

In short: 2 distinct perspectives: Collaboration to improve a business process or to get a job done

Elise’s recent research note Social BPM: Getting to Doing is the first paper I have read for a while which starts to cut through the hype and suggests practical actions. Sadly this research is only available to those us who are Gartner clients.  But the key findings and recommendations are:

• Social BPM enhances the tenets of BPM — visibility, accountability and adaptability.
• Organizational change is a necessary focus for implementing social BPM.
• The amount of social data can be overwhelming. It should be distilled into insights that can drive business performance.

• Don’t limit social BPM application to only customer-facing processes — many processes can benefit from a broader, more interactive participation.
• Strive to redesign processes, rather than “bolting on” social capabilities. It will result in a better process design that enables seamless usage by the participants.
• Learn about social software by hands-on usage of available tools in order to understand the various capabilities.

So what does this all mean? Firstly is it not about technology, but it is technology enabled. People had friends and had conversations before Facebook. Now those friendships and conversations can be synchronous or aysnchronous, hence span timezones and geography. The same is true for BPM.  Collaboration to improve a business process or to get a job done -  the 2 perspectives of Social BPM – has always happened.  Now there can be less friction, more people can be involved, and better decisions can be made. But there’s the rub.  Unless you have a solid process context or backdrop to have those conversations you will not exploit Social BPM.  So for many companies, getting the basics in place – consistent, shared, understood end to end processes – is the starting point. Social BPM is not a short cut.

As Elise says: “SocialBPM supercharges BPM”.  There is a reason why Driving Schools have small engined cars, not supercharged Dodge Vipers.  People can get hurt.

Perhaps this picture from Successories that sits on my desk will give a perspective.

A hundred years from now it will not matter what my bank account was, the sort of house I lived in, or the kind of car I drove….but the world may be different because I was important in the life of a child

Or maybe you prefer not to have the message sugar-coated by Successories and therefore you will appreciate the company perspective from Despair Inc.

Because you've given so much of yourself to the company that you don't have anything left we can use

You decide…..

“Any time, any place, any where – it’s a wonderful drink you can share, Martini”

“Social media is redefining everything, including how we; work, play, learn, share, discover, create, complain, celebrate, mourn, applaud, influence, collaborate, investigate and evaluate.”

So looking at that list, which items are not relevant to work and improving the way you work?  Some may single out “play, celebrate, mourn and applaud”. But in really great companies these emotions are allowed. Laughter has no meaning if you don’t feel sadness. Happier staff are more productive.

So social media is changing the way the world works inside and outside corporations. It doesn’t change the need for people to talk, disagree, agree, improve and change.  That happens all the time between colleagues, customers and partners.  Social media changes how those interactions look and also breaks down physical and geographical boundaries. It is also f**king liberating, as the presentation will show. In a great presentation, the Head of Operations from Carphone Warehouse Best Buy Europe said “standards liberate”. And when you step back and think, they do. They liberate you from spending time working out how to do things (standards) to focus on the real innovation and customer service and how to do things better  (libration).

So, at yesterday’s discussion looking at the evolution of Nimbus Control, social media was on the agenda.  Nimbus Control has been enabling auditable business improvement since R1.0, 14 years ago. But the really social collaborative element we called it Memos & Subscriptions. Not a very sexy title and  definitely not a very sexy look. It probably hasn’t changed in terms of look and feel since it was first designed, apart from a quick makeover when we created the interation with MS Sharepoint.

Social media has been a wake up call for Nimbus.  One faction is saying “But we do social media – we have done for years“.   But we realise that memos, discussions need to be replaced by a more social media style interaction. Same content, different presentation plus some great ideas on how to really make process related content more relevant – by user feedback.  Let’s see the more valuabe content drift to the top of any search or discussion. Let’s let the authors of content which is irrelevant or not useful know so that they can change what they are doing.  Which is completely aligned with our mission“Making work easer, faster and more valuable for millions of people”.

Exactly what that will look like you will have to wait and see – but not long.  The next release is not far away.  So in the meantime, take a look at how Social Media is changing our world. That is, if you give a f**k. And you should.

If you had been marooned on a desert island for the last 3-4 years and returned to civilization today you would be staggered by what has happened to the world you once knew.

Suddenly the information at people’s fingertips has exploded and with it changes to the way the world thinks, lives and works.

These changes are permanent and are so significant that they are profoundly affecting the way that individuals and businesses interact. The actions of our political and business leaders can be scrutinized as never before.

Welcome to a new world of transparency

The most striking example of how this new world works is Wikileaks. The high profile release late last year of hundreds of confidential diplomatic cables from US embassies worldwide, hit at the pillars of US foreign policy and diplomacy.

In the wake of the release, several American politicians labelled Wikileaks founder Julian Assange a “terrorist”, and the former governor of Alaska Sarah Palin called for Assange to be “hunted down” like al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders.  Several companies, including Amazon (upon whose servers the site was hosted) and Mastercard cut ties with the site and found themselves under attack.

There are clearly many questions and profound implications – many of which are still to emerge – from the Wikileaks affairs.  The overriding lesson for me is that the distinction between public and private information, already being eroded by the rise of social networks, effectively no longer exists. Even the private – and confidential – musings of individual employees can be published in full for all the world to read from the comfort of their living rooms.

As individuals and businesses we better get used to this idea. Actions and comments that we share in what we consider to be a private context may now be shared against our wishes with the entire world.

Even censorship by hacking (as the high profile cyber wars in the wake of Wikileaks demonstrated) doesn’t work and traditional media laws are struggling to catch up to a media that operates across international boundaries.

What are the implications for businesses?

We’ve always known that information is power. But, maybe those who are in power or positions of influence never realised exactly how much until now.

A recent ebay mobile advertisements sums it up. The advertisement shows how you can find out the best price for a product anywhere in the world in an instant. Gone are days where retailers could set prices in their own bubble. Suddenly they are pricing based on a global market.

It’s also exposed businesses and well-known personalities, including business leaders, politicians and celebrities to the views of the man in the street. And in many ways it has shown them to be far more naive and vain than the man in the street who at least has the common sense not to tweet what should clearly should stay un-said.

Ill-advised tweets have landed celebs and politicians in court or have lost them their jobs.

Whether businesses like it or not, the culture of transparency is reshaping the way that we’re interacting with our personal networks.

It’s also creating a new obstacle course for personal reputations. If you wouldn’t tell your best friend, work colleague or your Mum, why would you plaster it all over the internet?

Millions, no make that 100’s of millions of people are doing that on Facebook every day. And if you’re not posting things yourself, you can rest assured that somebody, somewhere is about to tag you in a photograph doing something embarrassing and post it for everyone you’ve ever befriended to peruse at their leisure.

All those thoughts, videos and photographs WILL come back to haunt you when you want to get a job or next time you run for President.  I explored this in more detail in a blog called With the internet our past is now written in pen not pencil.

Generation Y has already started evolving rules and etiquette about what is acceptable.  There are parties, for instance, where there are explicit “No posting photos to FB” rules.

But for us Boomers there is a disturbing trend. I see more and more of my friends ‘getting Facebook’ and piling in. An inevitable slew of Friend Requests follows as they discover long lost mates or current contacts on Facebook.

The problem is that all these boomers have not grown up with Facebook.

When I was young, wild and reckless (yes – even more than now) PCs, smartphones, the internet, Facebook and social networking didn’t exist.  We had to make do with beer and conversations – which seemed to be enough!!. As a result, we haven’t grown up around the latest social networking, chatting, tweeting, and “broadcast my location” technologies and understand implicitly how they “work” and how to behave on them.

Aside from the just technical nous needed for control over things like privacy settings, there’s a huge minefield to navigate around acceptable behaviour. What’s the best way of handling Friend Request? Who is a ‘friend’? Is it a business colleague, a mate from school or friend of a friend? Is unfriending or ignoring a request rude?

For a great explanation of perils of FB friends here is a very funny video from Some Grey Bloke. How much do you read into a posting – a drunken post, sarcasm, or genuine love?  My 42 year old divorced sister-in-law recently announced she was proposed to by her new boyfriend on FB. She announced it and we all laughed assuming it was a joke. We laughed; she didn’t. And back to posting photos. We never had “No FB photo parties” and it is easy to scan paper photos and post them in FB.

So now we have got to the nub of the problem.  My ‘Friends’ have started to post photos from my past and they are now committed to the internet for ever.

Is this progress?

In some ways.

The technological developments are amazing. I can take my smartphone, open a calendar entry and click on the address of my appointment. Google Maps opens which because of location services knows where I am and then calculates the best route and time to get to the address. And when I get close it pops up a picture of the building so I can confirm exactly where I am going.

But, as the old saying goes, information is not knowledge and we may have more data, information and transparency than ever before…but do we know what do to with it?

My favourite book is In praise of Slow by Carl Honore. It encourages us to take time over the important things. There is so much beauty around us. So much to reflect on and question. So many conversations to be had.

So I am off to a secluded island to with a pile of unread books and maybe the energy to write another of my own.  Don’t expect to be able to contact me. There is no phone signal. It has stunning beaches and the most spectacular sunsets.  How did I find it? www.exclusiveislands.com

So Marc B was wrong by about 5 years.  But let’s not let fact get in the way of a great and entertaining presentation style.

Here is a brilliant parody of the iPad2 created by LA-based production agency JLE

Some of you may have missed their earlier white iPhone4 parody, so here it is.

Or their original drunken iPad discussions

BTW for those of you who say Apple improves productivity – you have just wasted 10 mins!!  Good wasn’t it?

The advertisers have latched onto social marketing. Some of the more switched on are realising that it is about engaging with the audience rather than just a cheaper form of direct email.  And it is FUN.

3 trends are changing the complexion of marketing; cloud, social and mobile.  Some brands are starting to embrace this and understand what it means.

One thing I am now seeing is reality advertising. Big brands are getting creative and engaging by running ‘competitions’.  Here are 2 examples:

TheFunTheory from VW in Sweden, which is both clever and put sometning back into society.  WELL worth a look at their ideas.  The Infinitely deep dustbin.  The Piano Stairs.  ….. And the winner  : Speed Cameras that pay you

Stella Artois who are looking to get people to send film clips and audition to be in a film, called Casting Call.  So get your phone out and start rehearsing.

Makes me think what clever, fun stuff we can do with Nimbus around the theme  “Making work esier, faster and more valuable for millions of people”.

A large company, ABC,  has an $80m SAP project which is implemented by Systems Integrator, XXX. They created a blueprint that was a MSWord document with questions and answers around business requirements. Somehow they configured SAP, but the business users don’t understand any of it.

We got a call two weeks ago. We presented to the company and started an initial piece of work one week after we were contacted. The scope was mapping using Nimbus Control as the core processes.

A week later, we’re 2 days ahead of the game due to our Accelerator content and they are now looking at our HR Accelerator content which was initially out of scope.

Their CEO and CIO have iPads and are viewing the content as it’s being created. The CEO’s major concern after the SI’s work was that the business won’t understand what was created. He was right. But the work went ahead and the SI was paid.

3 questions.

1.  Why do SIs insist on using MSWord or other modelling products to capture the business processes, when they must know that the end users will not be able to use them?

2.  Why do clients let themselves be treated like this?

3. Is there a better way?   Yes..  Here’s a white paper with some clues

And finally :

Who is innocent and who is guilty, and why are the guilty allowed to reoffend like this?

“If BPM is so necessary, how come so many 100 to 300 people organizations do fine without it?”

There is a process maturity curve which starts at the bottom end with low process (BPM) maturity which is a stage called Heroics.

Many of you work in companies like this. Staff heroics day in day out make up for poorly defined processes.  Inefficient, but it gets the job done.  But at what cost?  Financial: Wasted time and cost  Reputation: Client errors & security Emotional: Staff morale & burnout

The question said these companies are “fine”.  They are, but only by the definition of FINE from the last Italian Job film.

F= f*cked up
I= Insecure
N= Neuroitic
E= Emotional

The challenge is making clearly defined and govenered processes easy enough to achieve and maintain for SMB organisations. That requires Board level commitment, and funding, to first get the processes defined and then funding a FULL TIME Business Excellence / Quality /Compliance role to support the continuous improvement.

This requires a leap of faith by SMBs, but the results are worth it. Whilst you can calculate the costs of documenting your processes, or even in the marketing effort to get  them used and adopted by end users, sometimes it is tremendously hard to calculate the benefits – as my blog Harry Potter and the Leap of Faith suggested. But the results can be measured in efficiency, ability to grow, to punch above your weight, and the human cost of all those heroics.

Let’s put this is real terms.  Nimbus is an SMB and needed to get ISO27001 to give our global clients confidence of our Nimbus BPM Cloud service. Because we have implemented BPM (Nimbus Control + Salesforce.com) we have saved huge amounts just in the ISO27001 audit process.  But Security comes free with a well run business as we have discovered.

But to finish on a quote from the auditors:

“It should be noted that in our extensive experience with a range of client ISO Gap Analysis projects, of those at a similar stage of ISMS development, Nimbus have demonstrated one of the highest levels of compliance we have seen.”

That is why BPM is important to an SMB.  You need it to play on the global stage, and Nimbus does not intend to stay an SMB for much longer.

After examining over 200 cases of social media collaboration success, Gartner have identified a set of collective behaviors that underlie almost all successful efforts. They are collective intelligence, expertise location, emergent structures, interest cultivation, mass coordination, and relationship leverage. See a recent Gartner press release for descriptions of each.

However, it will probably take more that this to stop VC’s pouring money into social  media companies as the blog  Bubblicious shows.  Staggering amounts.

However there is a fascinating graph (oppostite) which shows how fast companies reached $1 bn of revenue. BTW Groupon started as a WordPress blog in 2008!!

On a more positive note, it is raising the importance of the collaborative capabilities of existing products which is something I blogged about in Social BPM – New and Improved and it is making all of us think about how the user interface should change to engage users.

So off to drive Nimbus to $1bn of revenue…..

Bill Gates’ response after Steve Jobs accused Microsoft of borrowing the GUI from Apple for Windows 1.0. Xerox PARC used a GUI before both Apple and Microsoft.

Last week one of the Nimbus consultants had run a 1/2 day facilitated workshop with the team to map out some client process content which were on the Nimbus Cloud.

Back to today’s meeting. The client laptop that had web connectivity to be able to see Nimbus content needed to be restarted, so while everyone fiddled with that, I took my iPad over to the SVP and he and I navigated their hosted content on Safari.  He saw a great-resolution map, actions, drill downs, attachments, compliance links and we opened a linked pdf.  if we hadn’t got connected I could have used the Nimbus Mobile Player for iPad/iPhone. It was a great moment.

Point 1.  An SVP executive is interested enough in BPM to attend the meeting for 2 hours

Point 2. Deployment of governed process content is becoming a critical issue

Point 3. The iPad is a great device for deploying ‘content’ in an engaging format

So we may have sold the client on using Nimbus Control, but definitely on using the iPad.  Shame I didn’t get a chance to demonstrate the Nimbus 5 pencil iPad stand or my free non-tangle headphone gizmo!!

Now in 2011 AC (After Children) I have zero vacation.  Technology did this.

So is this progress? I think so. Sounds mad, but hear me out.

With a global role at Nimbus it means that I need to be everywhere and nowhere.  But Nimbus is growing fast and never sleeps. And as we all know as an executive you never really get to take vacation.  What happens is you have a mad rush to get things done before you go, leaving you stressed as you start your vacation.  When you get back to a mountain of messages and emails and you work like a nutter to catch up.  Or you take calls and answer emails whilst on vacation.

Technology – wifi, cellphone (smartphone), laptop, webcams, skype, webex  means that I can be connected 100% of the time. Yes I need face to face meetings, but many meetings can be achieved more effectively via video conferencing. So selective use of a 747 means I travel less and do more.

I do not feel I can, or want to, step away from the business for 2 weeks and be completely out of contact.  And surrounded by this technology I don’t need to be.  However, I can be out of touch for 2-4 hours in any day. Which means I get far more flexibility about what I do with my time.

I still get calls where people say “Oh I didn’t realise you were in US. Sorry for calling you so early”.   My approach is “if my phone is on, then call me”.  I might be working late, up early due to jet lag,  or stupidly left the phone on whilst asleep.

All this means that I am never out of contact, so the concept of  “x days vacation allocation” is alien in 2011.  I will work to get the work done and work to get my work life balance right.   It is not for everyone. Some need to get away from work completely, or their role does not allow flexible working.

So what is your work life balance?  Does it mean no vacation and work flexibility, or 9-5 and 4 weeks  of vacation?

Watch this 10 min video on work-life balance and decide for yourself.

Step 1. Simply take an old credit card, hotel key card or loyalty card and a pair of scissors.  Step 2. Cut 2 curved slots in the card (circled red).  Put the earphones in the slots and wind the card around the card. Now smile.

Just because the application (ERP, CRM or other line of business app)  is Cloud or SaaS doesn’t mean that it can be implemented in days.  As the report says “Do not believe the hype about the ease of implementing a SaaS ERP” and more importantly “Do not confuse the implementation with installing a system, and recognize that most implementation activities are not eliminated by using a SaaS solution.”

This is welcome research from one of the respected analysts but it is enough to stem the tide of hype coming from the ERP/CRM Cloud vendors? Is it going to require some high profile Cloud implementation failures to make customers wary of the “It only takes  5 days to implement” bullshit.

But if you are a Cloud software vendor you need to sell seats quickly and in volume if you are going to be able to make the business model work, as I discussed in an earlier post Why software vendors should fear the Clouds. And that is going to drive a hard-nosed, pushy “just buy the software” sales technique.

What is most disappointing is that the Cloud ERP / CRM vendors have reinvented how software is delivered and configured, but they could also change the way it is implemented by embracing newer, but proven approaches. But they haven’t and have left the Systems Integrators to replicate the old, broken approaches as this recent example shows.

One of the leading vendors is salesforce.com with their Force.com platform. They have put the power into the hands of the business users. This has changed the nature of the custom development lifecycle as my blog Force.com  – a powerful force in enterprise computing and a new book explains.

Nimbus has been a customer of salesforce.com for the last 7 years and has used Force.com to extend the CRM application into HR, Procurement, Asset Management, Business Excellence and Finance. All this has been achieved by a business-focused team with just a little support from IT. We were runner’s up in the BCS IT Department of the Year for our innovative approach which I described in  How many people in the Nimbus IT department? I have no idea…

But as the Gartner research report points out, customisation is just one part of the implementation process. That part is far quicker as is the software installation/configuration.  But the other activities such as Requirements Capture, Business Design and User Training are still required and still take the same time.

However this is changing too.  The Nimbus Control Business Process Management application is now being used in on-premise and Cloud ERP /CRM implementations to make the capture of the business requirements, the configuration and the end user training quicker. It is a core focus of our software implementation practice. Which is why Nimbus is an SAP, Oracle and Salesforce.com partner with technology integrations and is workig on some of the largest implementations around.

But even we won’t claim you can implement in 5 days.  It is our #NOSS promise.

So what companies waiting for?  Perhaps 01/01/2012 so they can make their corporate New Year’s resolution “I will do BPM more”   Just like changing your work-life balance, as this excellent TED video in a recent blog suggests, there is not perfect time to start, and a small initial step is better than no step at all.

So, just get started. The question I often get asked when speaaking about BPM and Change is which process to start with. Some would say “The one with the biggest problems” but that is too high profile and probably is too big a challenge. You need an early quick successes. So pick something which people care about and will make a difference.

One idea is “On boarding new staff”. Self contained. Normally a basket-case…. How many people get their business card, laptop, phone and induction plan on Day 1 that they join? Day 5, Day 15. Often the issues are miscommunication between HR, facilities, IT and marketing  – all of whom have input into a business card. And those problems can be ironed out without needing to make any changes to underlying systems. So the changes can be implemented immediately. For the next new joiner through the door.

And the benefits are far more greater than just some cost savings.The difference in morale for a new joiner who is inducted properly vs the shambles in most companies is vast. They are more productive more quickly. Less likely to leave. More likely to recommend friends and colleagues apply to join them.

At Nimbus we hire under graduate student on their gap year for some back office roles.  We have interviewed them and offered a job before other companies have even acknowledged their application. So we get the best pick of the under graduates – year after year.

Our experienced hires often come from far larger organisations and they always comment on how effective and professional our recruitment and onboarding process is. It is one of the reasosn we can attract, recruit and retain such high calibre individuals. And that is in turn why our client satisfaction levels are so high. A virtuous  circle.

Final point. The only place process automation is ahead of process mapping is in the dictionary. So map it out first before you let IT try to automate it.

- a dustbin in a park which makes a noise so it sounds like the bin is 100 feet deep

- stairs next to the escalator which are a piano. walk up and play a tune

- a speed camera which was such a good idea that the The Swedish National Society for Road Safety, actually made this innovative idea a reality in Stockholm, Sweden.

Go to the website and watch some of the videos.  And then think……  how could you change the behaviour of people at work by making it fun? This is what Volkwagen does.  And that’s why they launched The Fun Theory competition.

So they had fun, improved their business, improves society and got some great PR.  Awesome.

Shout out to Volkswagen…..

There is a northern California laid back feel to the resort. The lift lines are orderly and relaxed. The lift operators are happy, polite and have a laugh. The restaurant staff on and off the mountain are the same. The guys who throw icecream around like a cocktail bar are a classic case… and oddly enough the kids want to go back again and again.

But behind this fun, ski bum atmosphere there is a serious business. Hevenley is part of a group of resorts. The lift pass for a week is an eye watering $504. It needs to make money.

But more sinister is the reporting.   This morning there has been a huge dump.  We are REALLY excited.  So a quick look at the Heavenly website on lift status. By the look of it we need to get up there.

24/30 lifts open          94/94 runs open                4800/4800 acres available            100% resort open.

Sounds great, but this is where people act as they are measured.  The lifts have 3 statuses  “Open”, “On Hold” or “Closed”.   “On Hold”  which means the lift is not running but it counts as part of the 24/30 lifts open!!!

Look at the detail (the panel below the metrics) and only 11 lifts are running which gives access to the lower part of a 1/3 of the mountain. So, technically 100% of the resort is open. Take the first lift and walk!!!

The question is: Why lie? There will be fantastic skiing in deep powder in the area of the resort that is open.  Especially when the lie is so easily uncovered.

Which is more than can be said of the car which is buried under 2 feet fo snow that fell last night.  Better go and get the shovel to dig it out so we can go out and play.

So first – what is “our flavour of BPM”.  Well. BPM is typically used to talk about software which helps automate processes and build applications. Pegasystems is the leading vendor according to Gartner, who call this BPMS (BPM Suites). But there are many others who are BPMS vendors who are blindsided by their focus on selling in their competitive market and hitting their revenue targets.

Nimbus is all about capturing and documenting the processes from the strategy level down to where the BPMS players can automate or where the enterprise applications like SAP, Oracle and Salesforce.com operate. But what clients document using Nimbus Control is the Intelligent Operations Manual for every employee. It is served up as guided walkthroughs on the web, iPhone and iPad.

A little more than “just documentation”. We think so. Our clients think so.

Just this  week I have had 3 separate instances where clients have said, on their own words  “You are strategically important. If your software stops working, our staff stop working.”

This is very exciting as it means we are starting to get real momentum – our 50% revenue growth this year should also give us confidence. It also carries with it a level of responsibility.  Not that we haven’t been responsible before.  We’ve been running the software on the Nimbus Cloud for Carphone Warehouse / Best Buy Europe, Nestlé and 50+ other clients for the last 5 years. We understand our responsibilities.

But what other evidence is there that BPM is ready for primetime?

• The level of project sponsor is now VP, EVP, GVP. These people are engaged. The understand what Nimbus does, and in some cases they can demonstrate it. This is not a small documentation project run by a quality manager or risk manager in a dusty corridor office.
• The scale of roll-outs delivered and in budgets is now enterprise-wide. These are global roll-outs. Again not project focused.  That means the business case to spend $millons needs to be robust.  And it is.
• The software is being used. It is not shelfware. That is being demonstrated by the very high maintenance renewals rate.

A long running question on eBizQ was “Why has BPM not taken off like ERP of CRM“.  Simple answer “It was not important and not urgent.”

Now it is.

It is good customer service because:

- they answered my email immediately

- it could be argued that FedEx let them down – BUT THEY DIDN’T

- they offered a refund without question

- they realised the cost of return and restocking was LESS THAN THE GOOD WILL associated with letting me keep them.

Email trail below explains:

Sat 19
To: “customerservice@streetsideauto.com
Subject: RE: StreetSideAuto.com Order #179252 Tracking Information.

I ordered a product, tire chains, and your agent told me the shipping was 3-5  days.   Having checked on the FedEx website to check on the order, which should have arrived today (5 days), and it gives the expected delivery date as 23 February.

This is not acceptable.  I ordered the tire chains to use this week to go skiing. They will now arrive after we have come back.

I do not want the tire chains, I would like them returned and a full refund.  Please let me know what I need to do to return the tire chains

Regards
Ian

Mon 21
To: ian@oiangotts.com
Subject: RE: StreetSideAuto.com Order #179252 Tracking Information.

Ian,

We apologize for the delay in receiving your order.  We have issued a full refund for your purchase.  Please keep the chains as a token of our apology.  Maybe you can use them next time.

Regards,

Jamie Schmidt
Customer Service Manager
StreetSideAuto.com

Nimbus answer

Our vision summarises the approach

“Making work easier, faster and more valuable for millions of people”.

That means easily understood content that is governed and available with controlled access to every end user as guided walkthroughs on a range of platforms (web, offline PC, iPhone, iPad), and will scale to a single installation with of over 500,000 users.

Sounds familiar? I have written a number of articles recently talking about the challenges facing CIOs  which are the links below

Firstly the 3Cs;  Compliance, Consumerisation and the Cloud

Secondly the need for the CIO to be more business focused and cut the ties with the IT department.

I see this happening, but not quickly enough and technology, in the hands of business people, is accelerating the problem where now  1 in 3 employees is playing roulette with their company in the Cloud

The quote I started with was from a book The Evolving Role Of The CIO, by the Concours Group written in 2004 and that was before iPads, Cloud apps, and the  mashups that are breaking company security policies

What is the answer – simple.  PASTA.

Check out this blog on PASTA and tell me why it won’t work.  If you can’t, then CIOs need to change their diet, and quickly.

Execution was clearly the issue. The strategy was correct but our implementation was a disaster as new issues kept surprising us. We underestimated how this new offering would confuse customers. We thought they understood cloud computing. But it simply stalled sales. They assumed they needed less consulting support and projects started to fail. The help desk was swamped and customer satisfaction scores went through the floor.

But the worst was the sales cannibalization and changing salesmen’s compensation to be tied into our annuity model. This seemed to be the last straw for our salesmen. If they can’t make money, they will go somewhere where they can.

12 months ago, before we launched our cloud computing strategy we were on the top of our game. Now we are fighting for survival.

There are so many questions, with hindsight, we wish we’d asked.

Could this be you?

As a successful software vendor, are you on the brink of making the same fateful mistakes? Or are you a start up with a great idea? Building on a cloud platform may be a no-brainer but what else do you need to consider to be successful?

Much has been written about cloud computing from a customer’s or technology, and mostly from a security, perspective but little has covered what it is like from the independent software vendors (ISV) viewpoint, particularly those migrating from an on-premise model.

Cloud is here to stay

Cloud computing seems to have struck a chord in a way that ASP, On Demand, SaaS and all the previous incarnations never have. Every analyst is blogging and tweeting about it, there are a slew of conferences and a surprising number of books have already been published. That means it is more than just the technology folks who have heard about it and the benefits. Now that business and consumer worlds are familiar with the concepts and that is driving demand for ISVs with cloud offerings.

The cloud computing evangelists would have us all believe that this is the only future and someday soon all software will be delivered as a service. And looking at the huge investments that some of the largest gorillas in the IT industry are making, maybe they’re right. A 100% cloud world may be true for SMBs but for large enterprises, they will continue to run their core applications such as SAP and Oracle in-house for years to come.

Life for the ISV has just got more complicated not less.

Independent software vendors (ISV) require a hybrid model with some clients 100% cloud, others using it as a platform for pilots/early stage projects and then a migration in-house, and finally straight on-premise purchases.

Benefits and risk – two sides of the same coin

Putting aside the hyperbole that always goes hand-in-hand with new ideas in IT, there are many sound reasons to consider the cloud. Here are a few:

Enterprise capability at commodity costs - By providing the service to multiple customers, utilizing a common centralized infrastructure and a multi-tenant approach, you can achieve economies of scale and therefore provide the service at a reduced cost compared to an on-premise solution. This means that you can then scale down to reach the long-tail. Also, by outsourcing the infrastructure there will be the potential for internal cost savings.

Before, you needed to knock out a software release every six months or so. Now you are responsible for a service that needs to be available 24/7/365. Are you adequately funded, resourced and prepared to do that? Do you have the management and technical skills to handle it?

Speed of availability vs. implementation – With the service already installed and waiting for use, much of the traditional time taken for customers to plan, install, configure and deploy is removed. But don’t confuse availability with their ability to use the service. Simply making the service available, unless it is very simple and of a very narrow scope, will result in chaos. Implementation from a process perspective will be critical for successful projects, which will in turn reduce churn and increase your annuity revenue. Ignore this at your peril.

Anywhere access – Clients can access the service using any device: PC, tablet or smartphone. A hybrid model may answer the question, “What happens when not connected to the internet?” By providing synchronized copies of data. But this has implications on the architectural complexity of the solutions you need to develop.

Always up to date – The centralized management of the services makes it easier for you to deploy updates and once deployed all users will have access to the new capabilities. This also provides the opportunity to have more frequent release cycles, which leads to a more rapid introduction of improvements, bug fixes and enhancement requests. This means that you can move to truly agile development but this may be a very different way of working.

Go to market - Despite all the hype, the dominant delivery model for software is still the on-premise one. This means that there may be resistance from customers to adopt the service. You could be too early. Or you may need to offer both a cloud computing service and an on-premise solution.

For cloud, the presence of industry heavy weights such as Google, Oracle, Microsoft et al, reinforces the validity of the market. Maturity will come, but until it does there are opportunities for new start-ups to steal a march on existing players – namely you.

Commercial arrangements – The traditional on-premise world was simple: customers paid for a perpetual license for the software and some form of optional annual ‘support and maintenance agreement. But the vast majority of the costs were up-front as part of the implementation project.

With cloud computing things are changing fast. There are different charging models varying from free or ad-funded with little or no support through to managed services with on-going annual, quarterly or monthly costs.

You will also find the customer negotiations on SLAs will be far harder. Before they wanted the software to work. Now they want it to work and be available, which is now your responsibility. Your customers will hold you accountable no matter who you have outsourced elements to.

Annuity revenue stream and motivating sales teams – The appeal of long term annuity revenue is compelling as a long term employee or shareholder but they will be far less excited about the P&L, balance sheet and margins all of which are far worse than the traditional on-premise models.

Career-minded sales teams are used to making big ticket sales and seeing equally large quarterly bonuses. They will not be motivated by promise of a far lower annuity commission stream, locking them into the company for years even though they will be better off in the long term.

One product or two? One company or two? – Should you be developing a new cloud application or migrating your existing offering? Do you need separate development, marketing and sales teams who can openly compete? The answers to these questions are strategically important but will be driven by your market and existing customers and the long term opportunity you see.

Not theory – a practical example

Nimbus, where I am founder and CEO, has been offering its process management system as a cloud offering for five years — long before it was called cloud. But we operate a hybrid model. Many clients, including Nestlé, SAP, Accenture, and Best Buy Europe have used the service to get business projects going quickly with a view to migrate in house after 18-24 months. Others are happy with our long term hosting solution.

The ability to offer a hosted service, particularly when selling to business users is critical. It can take as much as six months out of a sales cycle and there are some other, unexpected benefits. Professional services teams can work remotely with clients reducing travel costs but also the stress and fatigue of constant travel. This can super-charge implementations enabling RBI (return before investment) rather than just ROI.

On the flip side, Nimbus has been a cloud customer using Salesforce.com for the last seven years. Now every operational application needed to run Nimbus is on the Salesforce.com platform; Salesforce.com for Sales, Marketing and Support, and Force.com to develop apps for HR, asset management, business excellence, R&D management, PR, and finance using FinancialForce.com.

The benefits are a single integrated system eliminating messy, error prone and expensive integrations between disparate applications. The business continuity and security built into the system is greater than we could reasonably afford to put in place.

But it is not just about cost saving. The opportunity to expand into new markets and territories without infrastructure investment is huge. This strategy made our 40% year-on-year growth possible.

So to cloud or not to cloud?

With all this in mind, should you give cloud computing a wide berth? It depends. Everything we do in business (and life) carries a risk. The key is to understand the risks that we are taking, and the associated rewards so we can make informed decisions and put the appropriate risk management strategies in place. Critically however, there is a fundamental difference between risk management and risk aversion, with the later typically leading to stagnation, decay and failure.

The book Thinking of … Offering a cloud Solution? Ask the Smart Questions articulates the opportunities and the challenges ISVs face in their transition to cloud world.  Start asking the smart questions.

The Head of Oxfam spoke about the trouble with lots of headless chickens running around in Haiti. The relief effort was severely hampered because so many well meaning NGOs descended on the disaster zone. There was a lack of knowledge of how to help.  Local UN office was wiped out by earthquake so a lack of local coordinated expertise. The issue was that much of the aid was wasted.

The Haiti problem of coordination and making the staff on the ground effective could have been solved with the relief workers intelligent operations manual

What are the processes, video, photos, documents (and systems if available) for  …

-          Treating the survivors

-          Supply chain of medicine, food, water

-          Working out who the children belong to when separated from parents or orphaned

-          Building shelters / latrines

-          Supply of clean water … etc…

These could be made available on phones using off-line storyboards  – end to end processes and linked resources (video, photo,  documents) – using Nimbus Control.

This is where the politics kick in.  Who would want to build and promote this content?  UN, UNICEF, Oxfam …?

Nimbus is happy to provide grants to effectively make the software free. It is something we have done before with some awesome results at the RNLI. The RNLI voluteers and staff are amazing and we simply are helping them direct their energies where they can make most difference. Nimbus is helping save lives.

The interview with Oxfam covered the growing pains of what once was a small charity run out of Oxford to a multi-million pound international operation and the challenge of the weight of that organization absorbing lots of money – which should go to relief – into just running the operation.  If ever there was a need for lean, well understood processes – here was the advertisement for them.

Sowhat are we waiting for? The next natural disaster? But then it will be too late to develop the intelligent operations manual and people will be running around like hedless chickens.

If you agree that “happiness is the state of being happy”, then it is the role of PR & advertising to help us understand why we should be happy with their product / service as this excellent TED video explains

From unlikely beginnings as a classics teacher to his current job as Vice Chairman of Ogilvy Group, Rory Sutherland has created his own brand of the Cinderella story. He joined Ogilvy & Mather’s planning department in 1988, and became a junior copywriter, working on Microsoft’s account in its pre-Windows days. An early fan of the Internet, he was among the first in the traditional ad world to see the potential in these relatively unknown technologies.

An immediate understanding of the possibilities of digital technology and the Internet powered Sutherland’s meteoric rise. He continues to provide insight into advertising in the age of the Internet and social media through his blog at Campaign’s Brand Republic site, his column “The Wiki Man” at The Spectator and his busy Twitter account.

“Rory is the original advocate of ’360-degree branding,’ a persuasive and charismatic speaker and has a tremendous knack for making ideas come to life in an easily digestible way. He has been walking the walk longer than anyone.”

Gary Leih, Ogilvy Group Chairman

This is a GREAT video talk . Have 20 inspiring mins in your day..

Dan Gilbert believes that, in our ardent, lifelong pursuit of happiness, most of us have the wrong map. In the same way that optical illusions fool our eyes — and fool everyone’s eyes in the same way — Gilbert argues that our brains systematically misjudge what will make us happy. And these quirks in our cognition make humans very poor predictors of our own bliss.

The premise of his current research — that our assumptions about what will make us happy are often wrong — is supported with clinical research drawn from psychology and neuroscience. But his delivery is what sets him apart. His engaging — and often hilarious — style pokes fun at typical human behavior and invokes pop-culture references everyone can relate to. This winning style translates also to Gilbert’s writing, which is lucid, approachable and laugh-out-loud funny. The immensely readable Stumbling on Happiness, published in 2006, became a New York Times bestseller and has been translated into 20 languages.

In fact, the title of his book could be drawn from his own life. At 19, he was a high school dropout with dreams of writing science fiction. When a creative writing class at his community college was full, he enrolled in the only available course: psychology. He found his passion there, earned a doctorate in social psychology in 1985 at Princeton, and has since won a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Phi Beta Kappa teaching prize for his work at Harvard. He has written essays and articles for The New York Times, Time and even Starbucks, while continuing his research into happiness at his Hedonic Psychology Laboratory.

“Gilbert’s elbow-in-the-ribs social-science humor is actually funny. … But underneath the goofball brilliance, [he] has a serious argument to make about why human beings are forever wrongly predicting what will make them happy.”

New York Times Book Review

This requires a combination of things: Do we understand what we’re doing? Do we have a clear way of defining our strategy and communicating it? Do we have a clear understanding of what our business processes are from the top all the way down to the bottom of the organization?

It’s great being the CEO and saying ‘I want to be more customer focused’.  But for a call center employee, what does that mean? Does it mean I need to smile when I answer the phone? Does it mean that I need to give a discount? Actually maybe more customer focused from a call center perspective  means using a slightly different script, actually having better access to various deals or entering slightly different information into our customer system so that we can get better analytics. These are actually quite detailed things…and if we want people to work in a different way then we need to make sure we give them the tools, the support and direction at that lower level.

So getting strategy implemented accurately down the organisation is tough, but not impossible and the results are more than worth effort. Plus – that is what your job as CEO is all about – plus the business lunches and collecting awards.

Part of the trick is having a vision that is crisp enough that EVERYONE can remember it.  15 years after leaving Accenture I can still remember “Helping clients change to be more successful”.

At Nimbus it is “Making work easier, faster and more valuable for millions of people“.

Most vision statements are meaningless rubbish. So lets leave the last word to Dilbert’s Vision Statement Generator

“We have committed to synergistically fashion high-quality products so that we may collaboratively provide access to inexpensive leadership skills in order to solve business problems”

“It is our job to continually foster world-class infrastructures as well as to quickly create principle-centered sources to meet our customer’s needs”

“Our challenge is to assertively network economically sound methods of empowerment so that we may continually negotiate performance based infrastructures”

Hint:  Implementing Nimbus Control could give you those 52 days

Customer service is at its heart a process supported by an application.

So you should use (BPM: process mapping) to establish what the process should feel like from a customer’s perspective (especially now self-service is prevalent), and then you should use CRM or BPM (automation) to provide the support and you should deliver both the description of the processes and the application to the customer service agents (who may be your staff or your customers).

A recent blog called Your customers hate it, your staff hate it, but you make the do it anyway describes the issue in more detail.

But a picture tells a thousand words from Just a Thought

My mantra is “Retain the culture, rewrite the rules”. I actively look for the quirkiness in situations. If you read this blog you have probably realised it. I am lucky that as Chief Evangelist and part of the Nimbus marketing team it is part of my job.

A GREAT example was the blog Process Discrimination.  Making process fun  – it’s not often you hear those words in a sentence together!!

But this approach gets results….  but has risk.  Clear examples of the results are the way that Nimbus punches above its weight in terms of the Inspiring Performance conference programme, and the number of competitors who openly say that they wish they could emulate our marketing. Perhaps they are locked into their stuffy business-suited thinking, paralysed by the risk of failure?

Time to break out the cassocks and sandles.

So I thought I would start to capture some of the things which go to make up a happy and fulfilling life. Some are personal, but some are about life at work. After all, you spend an enormous amount of time at work, and it shapes your fellings about life. The blog is called La La Happy Land

As the Nimbus vision is “Make work easier, faster and more valuable for millions of people”, clearly a key outcome is happy staff.   But as my earlier blog Happy staff!! I run a business not a bloody holiday camp suggested, work cannot be La La Happyland, but it can still be rewarding.

Yesterday was different. I rounded the corner and thought I was in Miami or Newark. A HUGE line of people. Not a problem as SFO Immigration is very efficient. But after 10 minutes when the line had not moved at all, clearly something else was happening.

The immigration system had gone down. So no ability to check passport information, ESTAs, take fingerprints or photographs; in fact all the border controls. Without the system there were 2 options; ignore the system and let ANYBODY into the country, or close the border. Perhaps the system had been taken down maliciously to try and allow terrorists or illegal aliens into the country?

They chose option 2 whilst they initiated the fail-over plan.

The immigration officials were deeply embarrassed about the delay and couldn’t apologise more; having an E2 visa gains a great deal of respect. The problem was their fail-over plan involved installing a CD and working locally.

However, the CDs wouldn’t work in all but 2 of the desks.  Those that managed to install it didn’t have the encryption code. No one had been trained in the manual processes.

So the border stayed closed.

That, bizzarrely, was probably the best answer for us in the line.  Because if they had managed to initiate the fail-over plan with manual processing, what were the odds of the data being transferred accurately when the main system was back on-line? Most people forget the ‘restore to normal operation’ processes. We would be potentially walking around with I94 forms in our passports which had never been registered and this could look like we had entered the USA illegally and forged an I94. Not a situation I want to find myself in.

So the Homeland Security system, VISIT system was put in at a HUGE cost to the US taxpayer.  To be exact a $10bn contract was awarded to Accenture to provide it. So let me hazard a guess.  None of the $10bn was allocated to documenting and providing the processes for the immigration officials to follow; certainly none of the fail-over and restore processes.

Still the alternative option is far cheaper.  Stop people coming into the country.

But for companies like Nestlé, Chevron and Best Buy Europe simply shutting up shop when systems go down is not an option. Which is why they use Nimbus Control to manage all their business processes.

Others would argue that Apples cash hoard of $60bn, which is not enough to live on but a good start, is totally down to Steve Jobs’ frightening attention to detail and his refusal to let any product launch unless it is perfect by his very exacting standards.  And jewellery should be perfect as I argued in my blog  Apple Makes The Best Jewellery

So there is a time and a place. In the context of a company’s processes I believe it is impossible to define ‘perfect’.  What is the ‘perfect’ HR (Recruit2Retire) process?  It depends on the company, the country, the culture, the economy. So the idea that you can simply implement ‘best practice’ is wrong.  Certainly the AQPC process frameworks which have been converted and are available in Nimbus Control are a great starting point. A strawman. The catalyst.

An AQPC benchmarking study, due out in mid-March sponsored by Accenture and Nimbus looked at top companies’ use of process frameworks.  An eaarly copy will be reviewed and available for download here. The results are fascinating.

One could argue the ‘best’ process is one that everyone follows. So adoption is critical here. Put more energy, passion and creativity to find ways to make the processes relevant and engaging to your audience, rather than getting the ‘perfect process’.  That’s what Best Buy / Carphone Warehouse did and they got staggering results.

And then there is getting things done. Things that you take for granted because you have grown up around them are are a mystery.  Some things you expect to be dificult, like getting a driving license. After the aborted attempt which you can read about in my blog Had a FAB Day I am pleased to say I passed my written test but I have to take a physical test within 2 months – but Adrian was told he had 6 months!  Remember he passed his test without needed a social security number, I wasn’t even allowed to take the test. Am I being discriminated against – or just paranoid?

Whilst I was queuing waiting in line in  DMV to take a number I overheard an American guy ask about his motorcyle. I couldn’t hear his question but I did hear this comment “I have read all the documents you sent but the process is still a mystery. I am your mercy here”. Enough said.

DMV (Department of Motor Vehicles)  I have been told is probably the worst US Goverment Department to have to deal with. My experiences to date would confirm that they are a nightmare. But the staff I dealt with there were helpful and hardworking. But the processes were working against them, which is an example of the principle I spelt out in my blog Poor customer processes are like Goretex.

There are other telltale signs. Got to the loo restroom and this is what you are confronted with.

But the simple things are still a surprise to me  – Can you post me a check? Sounds simple.  Let’s explore that sentence.

Can you post where do you buy envelopes? where do you buy stamps? how much is a stamp? what does a post box look like?  me a check how to you write a check? is it safe to post? what about a cheque guarantee number (remember those?)?  how long does it take to clear?  is there a charge?

So the problems here are

• different terminology
• opaque or broken process
• inconsistent application of process

As a customer it is starkly visible. For those imposing / administering / applying the process they’ve just got used to it.

So what is it like for your new employees or your customers? Employees just have to just suck it up and get on with it. Customers can walk – and they will.  Unless there is nowhere else to go in the case of dealing with Government departments.

So to end on a more positive note, the very helpful staff in Blockbuster Video explained how to write a check, provided an envelope and explained where to get a stamp.

Even here there is  lesson. Who do you customers or staff go to for help?  Why is it not you?

Music is a perfect example.  Particularly jazz which encourages improv, free thinking, risk taking.  But there is still a score – a ‘song’ to be played.   There are strong parallels with business process management.

BestBuy Europe/ Carphone Warehouse says “Standardization Liberates”  Is this an oxymoron, like Microsoft Help or Military Intelligence?   No.  They say that by having a standard approach (processes) it liberates staff to spend their energy on what make a difference for the customer. And that makes work more enjoyable.  To see this in practice watch this video

Enough words for a Friday…. Just listen and watch some awesome jazz

I blame the analysts, They should be out there making sure the acronyms are very clearly being used and everyone understands them. But no.  They spend time arguing amongst themselves about the exact definition and by the time the agree, the acronym is gone. So they have to come up with MCAs (more contrived acronyms) instead. PBS (Pattern Based Strategies) or ECA (Event Correlation Analysis): pulllleeeese!!!

Give me examples I can here you say. Well let’s start with BPM (Business Process Management). For a long time the IT department made it their home. CIOs each year have BPM as one of their top priorities, aided and abetted by workflow/automation vendors. Gartner and others are doing a reasonable job of moving these vendors next door to BPMS.  But they are not going easily. They quite reasonably say – “But no one else was using it”, but it is confusing the hell out of clients / buyers out there.

Mark McGregor and I made an effort to help people understand that there is more to BPM than simply automation by writing a book Thinking of.. People Centric Process Management? Ask the Smart Questions. It has case studies of different aspects of BPM but is  summed up by a lovely quote on the back “The only place you find automation before mapping is in the dictionary”.

Another area is Corporate Performance Management (CPM). Sounds great. Every business leader should have some of that. Sounds a lot more sexy than BPM which feels operational. Think Ferrari, not SUV. Pop around to CPM and you’ll find a different set of squatters. But these guys are lot bigger and more difficult to shift – SAP, IBM, Oracle.  So why are they squatting? Surely they are legitimate tenants.

It is these big companies in their guise as BI (Business Intelligence) software vendors. The solutions they are offering are capturing, manipulating and reporting on business metrics. Slicing and dicing. Displaying as reports and scorecards.  Great information, but not great insight. For the difference between information and insight read Data, information to insights; the CIO evolution.

So really these vendors are producing Corporate Performance Reporting (CPR). The CPR acronym is not really being used in the business space and I’ve checked with the Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation guys and they are happy to co-habitate. But before they move we need to spell out why.

The M in CPM is Management. Exactly the same way the M in BPM is Management. You cannot have process diagrams (Visio, Powerpoint or some software product like ARIS or Metastorm), completely ungoverned with no version control and call it BPM.  The same is true for CPM – (Management). Reports, so matter how pretty, without any way of understanding why a problem is happening and then a way of changing behaviour cannot be considered CPM – (Management). It needs a process context and some form of action management to make it CPM.

So what is the answer. Maybe time will fix it. The markets are aggregating.

The BPA (modelling tools) are being acquired by the BPMS (workflow automation) guys. Eventually the BIG players will snap up the BPMS players and if they get their act together from an integration (rather than just marketing perspective) they could have a very credible offering. Until then buyers should stay out of the neighbourhood when they see squatters.

BPM (BPMS+BPA) * CPR = CPM / OK!

The MOST amusing thing about this is the video is by EDS who are (im)famous for outsourcing other peoples processes – HR, Finance etc.  Their tagline is “solved” but the internal tagline given to them by staff is “Your mess for less”.  Enough said.

A harsh criticism possibly but history has shown that making shared services or an outsourced operation really effective is difficult. Suddenly you have put artificial barriers into the end to end process. Which is why an approach taken by the long list of clients are using Nimbus’ approach to share services/outsourcing.

It is summed up by a quote in the book Common Approach, Uncommon Results in the chapter on outsourcing:

If you don’t know enough to run it, you don’t know enough to outsource it..

So the questions you should ask your potential outsourcing partner are

“How are you going to ensure that everyone who touches the processes is going to understand how they work?”

“How are you going to drive auditable, continuous improvement?”

If they say “Trust me, we’ve done this before. There are great cost savings”,  the walk away.

Do you really want your mess for less?

The evolution is from DATA through INFORMATION to INSIGHTS.

In the beginning the CIO was trying to put in place systems to cature and manage data.  Trying to somehow integrate the islands of data and disparate systems. This was in the Application Era in the 1980s with ERP and CRM solutions. The question the Application Era was answering was “Do you have the data?”.

As the data battle was being won the CIO could leave the application work to technical teams. They could then elevate themselves and start working how the data could help the business. This was the Information Era.  In most organisations they are still in the Information Era developing more and more sophisticated reports and dashboards to slice and dice the data . Clearly a huge and profitable market which is why IBM and others have been buying up all the niche BI vendors. The question the Information  Era was answering was “Can you make sense of  the data?”.

So now the CIO needs to extricate themselves from the BI projects which are becoming overly technical and start to play a strategic role.  We are at last entering the Insights Era.  Once the CIO grasps this then they can be admitted to the top table because the question the Insights Era was answering is “Can you make decisions based on the information?”  And that often requires the right contextual (process) information.

Let me explain with a simple example – the Quote to Order process.

DATA: The data being managed is leads, opportunities, contracts and orders. Having them in one CRM system is the Data Era.

INFORMATION: Being able to report and analyse them gives the sales managers an idea of the potential pipeline and the likely quarterly sales revenue. But it is reactive. The reports shows that sales are likely to be down.  Why? is because leads are not being turned into opportunities because of the quality of the leads, or is it the salesteam approach, or something else?

INSIGHTS: To be able to make decisions you need some context. So what is required is a detailed, intimate knowledge of the quote to order process. with the data and metrics attached to process.

This means that the CIO needs to understand the business operations which, for many, is a big scary step from systems which is where many of them grew up with their IT career path.

We’re seeing early signs that the CIO’s ideal career path is not up through IT but around the business if the CIO is really going to accepted onto the Board and CIO is not a dead end. A recent post What does CIO stand for? looked at the alternative options for CIO. Some more amusing than others. But this is a serious issue if  CIO is not going to stand for Career is Over.

CIOs need to embrace process from a business process.  Many of you CIOs may say “But we are taking a business perspective”.  I hate to stamp on your fireworks / piss on your stawberries, but you are not. You say process but you are thinking of an IT / business analysis / systems process perspective, which is NOT an end user perspective.  If you don’t believe me read the Which hat are you wearing? blog

Why do we know? Nimbus sells to the Fortune 2000 largest companies worldwide. We sell our Business Process Management application, Nimbus Control, which is designed to capture, manage and deploy a process view and context to millions of end users. Our biggest blocker is the CIO/ IT department who insist that the business users use (their) IT-driven business modelling tool.  This is NOT what the business uses want or need. They refuse to use it and more and more are winning the battle. The loser in the battle is the CIO and their reputation as a business executive.

Now is the time for CIOs to take step back and renergise their careers

Just a Thought

Nimbus has a part to play in helping identify and eliminate Bad Work – forever.  If you look at the Nimbus mission statement you will understand that helping staff discover Great Work is at the core of the company. The mission statement is brought to life in the blog Making work easier, faster and more valuable for millions of people

The Alchemy of Great Work

In the world of BPM what are the 11 words we should be thinking about in 2011?

Adoption
Collaborate
Compliance
Easier.for.users
End.to.end
Maturity
Mobile.enabled
Process.driven
Shared.services
SocialBPM
Sustainable.improvement