elemental links

brenda michelson's technology advisory practice

Archives for February 2010

Event Processing Symposium 2010: Profiting from Continuous Intelligence

By

Save the date!  On May 24-25, 2010 in Washington DC, the OMG is hosting Event Processing Symposium 2010: Profiting from Continuous Intelligence:

Learn how Event Processing enables agencies and corporations to profit from continuous intelligence at the Event Processing Symposium 2010, hosted by the new Event Processing Consortium.

Hear from industry pioneers, leading vendors, and early adopters on Event Processing technologies and techniques that increase mission and business visibility and responsiveness.

Interact with industry experts, leading adopters, and peers in roundtable discussions on business analysis, information analysis, management techniques, and technologies to create an environment for continuous intelligence.

Influence, participate in, and benefit from the rise of event processing as we launch the Event Processing Consortium.

I’m working with the OMG on both the Symposium and establishing the new Event Processing Consortium.  Over the next few weeks, we’ll be announcing more on each, including our superstar conference headliner.  [Hint: I’ve written about him in the last few months.]

If you are interested in participating in the Symposium, let me know.  We’ll be issuing a formal call for speakers soon.  Practitioner stories encouraged! 

 

[Disclosure: The OMG is a client of my firm, Elemental Links.]

Counterintuitive: Creative Agency + ISO 9000 = Creativity Increase

By

The Van Halen brown M&M anecdote wasn’t the only interesting piece in the March issue of Fast Company.  I also found a good example of "optimization for innovation”, which I first wrote about on the Business Ecology Initiative blog.  The article, entitled Partners in Time, describes how Partners & Napier, a Rochester, NY based creative agency, streamlined its processes at the request of Kodak, resulting in increased productivity, billings and creative time for the agency, as well as cost savings for its clients. 

How did they do this?  By mapping out processes, to identify and remove wasteful steps and interactions.  According to the article, Partners went “all in, applying for and earning certification in ISO 9000, a quality-management system akin to Six Sigma that’s normally used by manufacturing companies.”

Initially, the idea of applying process rigor to a creative business was met with skepticism:

"A creative embracing quality management may be unusual, but it also may be the model for how to handle clients’ increasingly stringent ROI demands.  When Kodak first asked us to do this, people worried that no one understood how long it takes to get to a great idea," concedes Partners’ CEO Sharon Napier. Chief creative officer Jeff Gabel says the opposite has happened. More often than not, Gabel says, creative work resembles a "giant hair ball." And that’s fine with him. "You don’t want to straighten it out," he says. "It’s nonlinear, illogical, and often occurs at unpredictable hours." But, he says, if the time allotted to a project could be rejiggered so more time went to creating great ideas — and less against the job’s ancillary grunt work — then he was game to try.”

The certification process and initial results:

“The certification process took six months and required each step of an assignment, from developing a brief to reviewing final work with the client, to be documented. It cost roughly $20,000 out of Partners’ pocket, but it revealed some surprising inefficiencies, including a lot of time wasted in back-and-forths for approvals of briefs, concepts, ideas, and directors. Partners was able to trim the time on a job from eight weeks to three, save the client approximately 40%, and boost productivity by 3.5%.”

The on-going impact:

“…its creative output seems to have blossomed as a result, as the agency is increasingly turning out higher-quality work, it says, in significantly less time.”

“Partners has been so happy with the results that it now uses the same approach with other clients. It’s winning more business because it can jump on opportunities once dismissed due to time constraints. Its billings have grown 300% in the past five years.

Still, the process is not without its flaws. All that hyper-efficiency can be exhausting, Gabel admits: "You’ve removed your slop factor."”

As you consider optimization opportunities in your organization, don’t limit yourself to traditional operational areas and boundaries.  Nor, fall victim to the “optimization = automation trap”.  Think about your creative types, strategists, and knowledge workers.  How can their work time be “rejiggered” to focus on value creation activities?

 

[Disclosure: Cross-posted from the Business Ecology Initiative (BEI) blog.  The BEI is a client of my firm, Elemental Links.]

Lessons from Van Halen: What’s your brown M&M?

By

In the March issue of Fast Company, Dan and Chip Heath’s column focuses on early warning indicators.  In one example, they explain why David Lee Roth banned brown M&Ms from backstage.  It wasn’t a diva thing, but rather, an operations performance metric.  The excerpt:

“Your source of data doesn’t need to be high tech. In fact, it doesn’t even need to be numerical. Consider Van Halen. (We have been waiting years for a chance to write that sentence.) In its 1980s heyday, the band became notorious for a clause in its touring contract that demanded a bowl of M&Ms backstage, but with all the brown ones removed. The story is true — confirmed by former lead singer David Lee Roth himself — and it became the perfect, appalling symbol of rock-star-diva behavior.

Get ready to reverse your perception. Van Halen did dozens of shows every year, and at each venue, the band would show up with nine 18-wheelers full of gear. Because of the technical complexity, the band’s standard contract with venues was thick and convoluted — Roth, in his inimitable way, said in his autobiography that it read "like a version of the Chinese Yellow Pages." A typical "article" in the contract might say, "There will be 15 amperage voltage sockets at 20-foot spaces, evenly, providing 19 amperes."

Van Halen buried a special clause in the middle of the contract. It was called Article 126. It read, "There will be no brown M&Ms in the backstage area, upon pain of forfeiture of the show, with full compensation." So when Roth would arrive at a new venue, he’d walk backstage and glance at the M&M bowl. If he saw a brown M&M, he’d demand a line check of the entire production. "Guaranteed you’re going to arrive at a technical error," he wrote. "They didn’t read the contract…. Sometimes it would threaten to just destroy the whole show."

In other words, Roth was no diva. He was an operations expert. He couldn’t spend hours every night checking the amperage of each socket. He needed a way to assess quickly whether the stagehands at each venue were paying attention — whether they had read every word of the contract and taken it seriously. In Roth’s world, a brown M&M was the canary in the coal mine.

Like Roth, none of us has the time and energy to dig into every aspect of our businesses. But, if we’re smart, we won’t need to. What if we could rig up a system where problems would announce themselves before they arrived? That may sound like wishful thinking, but notice that it’s exactly what Roth achieved. Surely, you won’t be outwitted by the guy who sang "Hot for Teacher."”

As you explore active information strategies and event processing, make sure you do the business and information analysis to answer the Heath brothers’ closing question: “Where’s the brown M&M in your business?”

Enterprise Architecture in 140 characters

By

Last Thursday, I barged into a Twitter conversation on the “ultimate outcome of Enterprise Architecture”.  The conversation was related to Forrester’s Enterprise Architecture Forum in San Diego, which I missed due to the blizzard at JFK.  @Dcoon posed the question: “Is consolidation and centralization the ultimate outcome of EA?”

While consolidation and selective centralization are milestones on an Enterprise Architecture journey, I don’t believe they represent the “ultimate outcome”.  Enterprise Architecture needs to play a linchpin role in advancing the business. 

As such, I offered my 140-character perspective, edited for readability, as follows: “The ultimate outcome of Enterprise Architecture is change-friendly capability delivery.”

But, that’s my perspective.  What do you think?  Do you agree?  If not, what is the ultimate outcome of Enterprise Architecture?

Force.com + Visual Process Manager = Vanilla Layer Cake Theory

By

Salesforce.com just added a powerful new tool to its Force.com development platform, a Visual Process Manager:

“The Visual Process Manager brings the power of Cloud Computing to Business Process Apps. Now you can visually draw any business process and instantly deploy it in the cloud with no code, no software and no infrastructure.  The Visual Process Manager helps companies easily automate specific business process like call center scripting, sales quotes, and new employee on boarding.” 

According to a post on TechCrunch:

“The technology powering the Visual Process Manager is based on technology acquired from Informavores, call scripting startup Salesforce bought last year.

The Manager has several different components. The Process Designer essentially helps businesses sketch out applications with established set forms, questions, and choices, and logic components, like task assignments, decision trees, and approval processes. These components can be dragged and dropped into a visual process design diagram/ The Process Wizard Builder enables companies to design a “wizard” to help walk end-users, step-by-step, through their business process. The Process Simulator lets customers test out and review processes before they are deployed. And lastly, the real-time process engine will run all of a company’s sophisticated processes and provides realtime scalability.”

The Visual Process Manager introduction gets a bit deeper on functionality.  [emphasis is mine]:

“Using our cloud-based workflow software solution, you can specify the retrieval, creation, update, or deletion of any object in a salesforce.com application or any Force.com object (including custom objects). You can also call any Force.com API. In practice, this functionality means that sales and service agents can work with simple, easy-to-follow scripts—while underneath, embedded business rules and salesforce.com data drive what the agent sees and automatically update CRM records. These are textbook examples of successful workflow software applications.

After you’ve optimized a specific process using the Visual Process Manager workflow software tool and the process is running inside your salesforce.com application, operations become much more efficient. The newly automated workflow carries out all the administration work behind the scenes. It may control the interaction of an agent in a call center or a customer on a Web site, as it silently interacts with other systems, processes, and Web services to deliver the required actions.

Because our workflow software tool is designed with integration in mind, you can link to databases, dialers, and IVRs; initiate workflows; control exceptional events or surge conditions; and handle the “stop and save” process required to manage escalations and call transfers. All in all, our workflow software frees sales reps and support agents from administrative grunt work, quickly giving them the situation-specific information they need for effective selling and top-notch customer service.”

As I read about Visual Process Manager, I was reminded of my Vanilla Layer Cake Theory paper from 2005. 

“There are classic rules of thumb used in buy/build decisions. Buy in situations of parity. Build for competitive advantage/differentiation. In a buy scenario, you willingly cede control of the end product (functionality, architecture, technology) for the promise of a lower price tag, ease of implementation, and quicker time to market. For success, you must actually cede that control—in other words, no modifications. But, that’s not always realistic. So, how can you reap the advantages of a buy, while providing a solution that actually fits your business (modifications and extensions), without getting trapped? Think Vanilla Layer Cake.”

An excerpt published on elemental links, November 2005:

“The vanilla layer cake theory is simple. Do vanilla (out-of-the-box) installations of all new application packages. Then, customize and extend the application functionality using abstraction layers, rather than in the application package itself.

[Click on picture to enlarge]

 

In essence, the application package installation performs the role of a provider in a service-oriented architecture. In some ways, the application package is more valuable for its building blocks, than how the vendor assembled it.

The abstraction layers implement your business architecture, in the form of an enterprise information model, business services, business scenario composition (process, events, service orchestration), and user interaction (portal, user interface, unified in-box).”

Of course in the SaaS world of Salesforce and Force.com, you can skip the “Do vanilla (out-of-the-box) installations of all new application packages” step, and proceed right to “customize and extend the application functionality using abstraction layers”.  Now, that’s intriguing… 

For those with a sense of nostalgia, you can read the entire Vanilla Layer Cake Theory on ebizQ.  Otherwise, dig in at Salesforce.com.

 

[Cross-posted from Elemental Cloud Computing].

Brenda M. Michelson

Brenda Michelson

Technology Architect.

Trusted Advisor.

(BIO)

Recent Posts

Recent Tweets