Google’s Wave

Took a peek at Google’s video presentation launching wave at I/O last week.

The engineering is hugely impressive – they demonstrated so many advanced features, all delivered through an HTML 5.0 compliant browser (Chrome, Firefox, Safari) (not IE),  that it reminded me of my visit to the Louvre or Musee d’Orsay last week when one has a room full of so many Van Gogh’s or Gaugin’s that one becomes ambivalent.

Available soon as open-source I think it certain that a rich ecosystem of extensions, wave servers and wave apps will appear and build on some of the radical ideas already built into the product.  Apparently the work of about 50 engineers over the past 2-years ‘down under’ just the name ‘wave’ deserves to make this a big success.

I spend some of my time building workflows with BPM.  Lots of forms, lots of email services etc.  These services, as well as polls, are already designed into the wave product.  There is roll-back/history, collaborative preparation of docs, amazing context specific spell check, real time translation, hooks for version control, in fact wave looks like a darn good entry point for ECM.  And this is in addition to the way email / IM has been recast with loads of great features.

For myself I’m interested in how I could leverage wave services within a workflow.  There is a platform here from which to build apps specific to particular functional need (the situational apps) since lots of the drudge communication glue is available out of the box.  Functional ‘waves’ available on separate wave servers dealing with specific needs interacting with individual / personal waves etc.  A wave field in other words.

However, in the UK, will Wave be enough to ween UK-plc off its addiction to Sharepoint/Outlook?  I’m not so sure.  Neither is there an appetite for open-source nor is there an effective counterpoint to the argument that MS Office users cannot learn to use much else.  Having said that, I hope the sheer quality of the creative engineering of Wave will begin to cause MS users to reflect the next time they are asked to cough up for that years fees.

BPM Training

Roberto Pasti has reminded me of forthcoming Intalio training in London in late April.  I’ve previously attended a couple of Intalio’s sessions and the intro 2-day session is recommended for those new to BPM – it’s not too vendor specific too quickly.

Here’s the link.

Blueprint

Lombardi have been publicising a couple of recent reviews of Blueprint, their SAAS play, at BPMInstitute and Forrester.

What is not to like?

Ismael has provided some more meat on the Intalio Developer Edition bones.  Developer is the baby of Assaf Arkin.  What is not to like?  Hopefully I will get the time to ’skill-up’ on this and I think I have a real world project to try it on (if only this was out in 2006 … I had >$100K to play a tune with this).

Intalio Developer Edition

ELS ?

ELS?  Yeah, that’s what I said when I was with a US manufacturer earlier this week.  I’d not come across this particular TLA and needed clarification – Enterprise (of course!) Lean Sigma.

This reminded me of a forthcoming ebizQ webinar being conducted by IBM next week.  This is taking a look at SOA + Lean Sigma + BPM.  Now that seems like quite a big mouthful to digest all at once, but I’m registered and keen to hear what they have to say.

What does surprise me is the lack of awareness of BPM in this type of company.  I guess it’ll be people like me having thousands of these conversations that will gradually raise BPM’s profile, but I still sense that there is a long way to go.

Gartner Magic Quadrant for BI

Gartner published it’s most recent BI quadrant last month.  The thing is, there isn’t a BI product/vendor on the list that I or anyone I know is using.  Ha, ha.

My suggestion to Gartner is to publish another quadrant featuring these products:

Pentaho

Jaspersoft

Spago

Vanilla

Talend

The analysts continue to completely miss the boat.  I’ve read recently that in the new economic reality companies are now mandating OSS.

UK government still to get ‘IT’

The Conservative Party has again criticised UK public-sector for poor uptake of open-source, notes ZDNet and Register.  Larry Augustin (some weeks ago) posted a thoughful piece comparing US and Euro approaches to OSS.  UK state may eventually get it.

Gartner BPM Summit

Gartner BPM “love-in” in London next month.  Bit too pricey for my budget (€2695 + 15% VAT) – that’s £2695 in old money, now that sterling is so weak!  However, I met Elise Olding and Janelle Hill at IntalioCon last year, so I don’t think too much will have changed since then.

What I would really like to attend is an open-source version, with attendance from the main participants in that niche (users and vendors); but such an event is unlikely to happen in the UK.  For now we have the open source BPM group on Linked-In (membership a heady 54

Audit fatigue

McAfee are undertaking ongoing research into compliance audits and their impact on IT functions.  Writing on the OCEG website Evelyn de Souza of McAfee states:

“The most notable finding was the lack of automation tools in organizations with more than 5,000 employees. More than half of the respondents used either unspecified tools or spreadsheets. Timely and accurate data collection is a protracted, manual endeavor for many organizations. Proprietary interfaces for point products prevent data integration, even if the reporting capabilities of the products are automated, resulting in the need for spreadsheets. This lack of operational efficiency puts a huge strain on IT departments. It robs them of time to invest in other initiatives.”

Penetration of BPM into compliance-based functions has clearly still got some way to go.  Where I disagree with Evelyn is in the need for a vendor-specific compliance reporting infrastructure.  Instead, I’d like organisations to recognise that they can ‘roll-their-own’ as part of their SOA using open-source tools.

Run My Process updates

RMP have just released an update of their SaaS BPMS.  Top of the list of improvements is the integrated design / use of web forms, which is welcome and timely.