Do you remember the first time you rode your bike without gripping the handlebar? “Hey—look—no hands!” you probably exclaimed with excitement. If you’re lucky, you ended the trip on your bike, bearing a bright smile rather than a skinned knee.

Planning for a business process management (BPM) and workflow implementation bears some resemblance to riding hands free, only on a larger scale. Whether or not you stay on course isn’t just a matter of luck. You need to know where your business is headed; understand what you are striving to achieve; streamline your processes to ensure efficient routing; anticipate the unexpected; keep a sharp eye out for change; and make changes on the fly so you remain steady till the end.

Presuming you’ve read the first two articles in this series (Developing an Enterprise Vision for Business Process Automation and Indexing for the Enterprise: Retrieve Your Documents 100% of the Time), you already learned the importance of establishing a clear organizational vision. You also know ECM is data driven, and you learned tips for effective indexing so information can be found when it’s needed and leveraged enterprise-wide. BPM and workflow build on these successes.

Whether your processes revolve around documents, represent a series of events, or both, your data is a launching pad to drive work and decision making efficiently across your organization. If you understand the unseen as well as the obvious benefits of automation, you will visualize more clearly the long-term value across the enterprise. Knowing what questions to answer before you start helps you approach your project confidently.

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One thing that I have been meaning to do is to dive back into the state of Enterprise Content Management (ECM) as a useful term and the challenges facing its use. I’ve also been meaning to draw attention to some of the excellent posts in the new AIIM Communities. I am going to try and [...]

The IT Channel Planet reports
that Gartner has predicted SaaS revenue
within enterprise application software market will jump up 14 percent over
2009, based on convergence with cloud computing models and diminished security
and availability concerns among business customers. I heard about this through
George Dearing on Twitter.

Three of the growth markets are project
and portfolio management (PPM), content, communications and collaboration
(CCC), and customer relationship management (CRM). These are all areas I continue
to cover on this blog and the AppGap as they are key aspects of enterprise 2.0.
It is encouraging to see these numbers,

It is interesting to note that the
collaboration market exhibits the most noticeably disproportionate SaaS
adoption rates range from 4 percent for enterprise content management to 82
percent for web conferencing. However, I have seen that most collaboration platform
vendors are offering a SaaS option. I think this will continue to grow. 

A week ago, I wrote an article for CMS Wire on The Long Hill for Enterprise Collaboration.  Normally I put an announcement at the top of my blog sharing the link, but I wanted to write this post, and I’ve just been a tad busy…

You should read the article before proceeding much further.  In the article, I talk about the challenges facing the adoption of collaboration tools, an important one being the desire to perform one activity in one interface.  Email is a classic example because, for all its faults, you can collaborate with anyone with an email address.  People will tend to stick with one tool and not keep switching unless they are the “stopper” that is always on a mission to convert people to the good of collaboration platforms.

Well, this scenario is something I have seen quite a bit.  There is one example that really drives home the need to get people not just out of email, but to get everyone into something that can transfer collaborative data between systems just like email is transferred using SMTP today.  That example….me.

Pie Said What?

That is correct, I am a violator.  I am not always compliant.  I have been implementing collaboration solutions for a long time.  I almost always play the role of a stopper in any organization or project that I join.  In the last six months, I’ve noticed something….

I’m spending more time collaborating in email than ever before.

I am working more with people outside my organization than I ever have in the past.  Doing a lot of work in the Federal market, my company is frequently teaming with other companies, and not always the same ones.  For each effort, we have to find different ways to share content and track actions.  Rather than supply the collaboration solution for everyone, we tend to use email.  Why? Simple, our partners use it as well.

It doesn’t stop there though.  I have also been working with people at AIIM and vendor companies on CMIS efforts.  More users and more reasons to collaborate, but still no single system.  Once again, we all use email, so that is where we work.

Doing all of this in email, I have found myself collaborating with colleagues on purely internal efforts via email.  I’m just cruising along in my workday, and before I know it, I’ve sent documents via email rather than sending an alert or a link to a document in an email.

I’m regressing!!!!!

What Can Be Done?

Well, like any good American, I’m going to blame someone else for my problem.  There are two solutions which would solve the problem:

• Universal Collaboration: So we need an incredible, kickin’, collaborative platform with no storage or user limits that is online an free to everyone.  Let’s not forget security because I want to collaborate in one place on all my efforts, not just the public ones.
• Universal Communication: Bad name, I know, but the point is simple.  If my collaborative artifacts could be sent to anyone for interaction the way I send email, but they do their work in their collaborative environment and I am staying in mine, that would be great!

I think it is pretty safe to say that the first will not happen in the foreseeable future.  The second sounds like a lot of work.  Well, the efforts we expend to push Collaboration and Enterprise 2.0 adoption is a lot of work as well.

Fun fact, one old, and lovely feature of eRoom is the ability to email content to a room.  That was a first step in the right direction.  If collaborative packages could just be emailed between systems in a standard format, that might solve all the problems.

There is no easy path.  Maybe instead of trying to get over the hurdles by creating new features, selling, and evangelizing, maybe we should make the tools the obvious in-process tools.

But why solve it?  There is a lot of money to be made telling people how great the software is now.

A few months ago I covered
Jackbe’s preview of this release (see JackBe Provides Enterprise Mashup Platform on the Cloud and Previews
Presto 3.0).  Now it has become available
and I spoke with John Crupi, CTO and Chris Warner, VP of Marketing about their
new 3.0 release.  Two of the main additions
are a platform for creating internal Enterprise App Stores, as well as a robust
visual toolset for creating secure Enterprise Apps.

First, we discussed the Enterprise App Store.  This is modeled after the very
successful and well-known iTunes store but it takes the functionality inside
the enterprise as a means of governance more that a commercial distribution
channel. I like the use of the App Store concept, as people are very familiar
with it. The platform allows enterprise consumers of apps a single source that
is well organized and searchable. It also offers the creators of apps a central
place to share their efforts within the enterprise.  Here is a sample App Store screen.

There is an App Store Manager responsible for
ensuring the Apps have function, documentation and work as advertised. . The
review and approval process provides central governance that can be very useful
given the ease in which apps can be powered by mashups.  This is a way to avoid the potential
chaos of too many apps and redundant apps. You can better get the right apps to
the right users with some degree of vetting along the way.  The apps can be out-of-the-box
creations, as well as templates requiring further customization.  Here is a App Store Manager screen.

The App Store has an area called ‘My Apps’ where users
can place and organize the Apps they want and use. They can provide comments;
tag and share the Apps. This information accelerates the ability for other
users to find and use the Apps they want. Here is a sample My Apps screen

JackBe has also upgraded their development tools
with this release. Their new visual tools make it easier for non-developers to
create enterprise apps and deploy them to enterprise destination like portals,
SharePoint, iGoogle, and mobile devices. Presto 3.0 includes enhancement to Wires, their visual
mashup-making tool, Mashboard,
a new App assembly and wiring tool, and Mashup
Sites for SharePoint, an advanced SharePoint add-on that mashes
SharePoint Lists and publishes Apps as SharePoint WebParts.

They showed me some apps created with these new
tools. One set were developed by a non-technical marketing person and covered
the World Cup. There was an amusing comparison of goals per capita and goals vs.
GDP for the competing countries. These applications took minutes to create
without programming using publically available data.

I especially liked the new Mashhboard that allows
users to group or link apps along a workflow. The creations can run on any
browser, on the iPad, or even within Excel. The approach is to make everything
simple: creation, distribution selection, and implementation.  Mashups are one of the key building
blocks of enterprise 2.0 and it is nice to see these new features to streamline
the process. Here is a Mashboard screen.

JackBe will also be making a cloud-based Developer
Edition of Presto 3.0 available to all members of its Mashup Developer
Community. Registration in the Community is free and includes tutorials,
samples, and support forums. 

According to a new Forrester report, The
Next Wave of Office
Productivity
by Sheri McLeish with Matthew Brown and Joseph Dang, Microsoft Office
continues to dominate both in the enterprise and at home to no surprise.
However, changes are affecting enterprise productivity strategies, such as Web
2.0, enterprise 2.0, and the consumerization of IT. Many enterprise workers use
products like the iPhone and YouTube at home and they have expectations at work
for similar functionality either through these tools or enterprise versions. As
a loyal Mac. iTunes, and iPhone user who is still attached to Office, I was
interested in where all these tools are going and appreciated getting a review
copy of the report.

The report indicated that though most
enterprises have long-term plans to continue using Office, alternative
productivity tools will remain in the mix by leveraging the tools employees
access for do-it-yourself technologies, such as those through mobile devices and
the cloud. These evolving productivity tools will help enterprises transform to
a fit-to-purpose approach to productivity, establishing the foundation for the
next wave of productivity that's focused on aligning tools with employee needs.
In the words of the report, “The next wave of productivity will see
today’s innovations dissolve into expected features, creating integrated touch points
for content-related activities tailored to fit a business purpose or workforce
segment.”

They pointed out that the
recent recession has driven interest in free or low-cost alternatives to
Microsoft Office and has slowed upgrade plans. In the past year OpenOffice.org
has seen a modest uptake by enterprises and is now supported by nearly 10% of
the organizations Forrester surveyed. Similarly,
cloud-based email from providers like Google is finding traction as a
lower-cost alternative to Exchange. I covered the email wars
recently (see: Email Wars Heat
Up in the Cloud). Google’e move caused Microsoft to drop its prices.

Another factor is the growing interest
business process integration and automation, another topic I have discussed
here (see for example: Building Enterprise 2.0 into the Product Development Process).
As enterprises increasingly use collaboration platforms like SharePoint and the
best of breed players, they will (or should) increasingly seek to integrate business
content and processes in an effort to move from simple content storage to
content workflows. I see this as what needs to be done to really make use of
the enterprise 2.0 approach and tools. In a similar way, the only successful KM
efforts were aligned to work processes.

There is much more in
the report and I found it very useful. 
For example, the majority of people surveyed as a background for the
report viewed alternatives to Microsoft Office as complementary, rather than
replacements. In this light, many tools, including Microsoft Office 2010, are
adding social computing capabilities. Other tools such as those from Google, IBM,
and Novell are moving in the same direction. 

 Here is an interesting concept that is well articulated in a new book, The Learning Layer by Steven
Flinn.  Recently, I had an opportunity to
speak with Steve about this marriage of aspects of Web 2.0 and artificial
intelligence (aka adaptive systems) that can have useful applications within
the enterprise.

Steve is the CEO of ManyWorlds,
a firm that conducts R&D in the area of next generation systems
and business processes and provides practical applications of this work to
organizations. He was an executive at Royal Dutch Shell where he held  a variety of positions including Chief
Information Officer and Vice President of Strategy and Strategic Alliances.
Steve has a background in economics, mathematics and computer science.

Steve noted that use of personalized responses
based on user behavior has been pervasive on the consumer Web through such
things as Amazon’s recommendations. 
However, this technology has been applied much less within the
enterprise.  He feels that this is
ironic since behavioral information available within the enterprise  can generally be much richer than out on
the Web. You have a more clearly defined set of users and many more
interactions to data mine, along with more related teams who collaborate and
generate more behavioral data.  I
would certainly agree with the difference in the quality of information on user
behavior and also add that many Web 2.0 applications such as wikis work better
within the trusted environment of the enterprise. This seems to be another
case.

The Learning Layer approach takes this
personalization several steps further. Not only are personalized
recommendations provided to individual users based on their behavior and the
behavior of others, but the system feeds these recommendations back to itself
to continuously adapt on an automated basis. Steve said that the technology is
currently available to do this, it just needs to be properly applied.

For example, a system managing content might make
recommendations for related content based on a user’s profile and actions.  Using the Learning Layer approach, it
would also keep track of all user behavior and feed this back into the system
on a regular basis. The relationship between two sets of content may become
stronger or weaker depending how it is currently being used.  The same logic can be applied to the
connections between people to see the ebb and flow of connections.

The approach can be applied to work flow and here
it gets even more interesting in my opinion. Just as old school knowledge
management created more direct business value when aligned to business
processes, I see the same thing happening here.  Let’s take the example of a property casualty insurance
underwriter. After the system takes in enough actions to be able to
differentiate the skill level of users, it is ready to go.

Now if an underwriter with no experience in
underwriting laundry mats, for example, starts to work on one the system
recognizes this. It also knows the steps that an inexperienced underwriter
should take when working with laundry mats and provides these process steps. It
can also recommend a person who is slightly more advanced than the user who can
offer guidance. If the user has middle level experience, then the process steps
can be tailored to that level. In the meanwhile the system is observing the
ongoing user behavior on an aggregated basis and making adjustments in the
proper process steps for everyone at all levels.

The technology is around to create this type of
system. I can see the value and wish I had this capability when I designed
knowledge management systems for underwriters in the early 90s.  Call centers that deal with complex
topics would be another great target area. You need to have enough complexity
to warrant this type of intervention and then enough users to generate useful
data for the system to apply.

We also discussed the concept of learning value
that Steve raises in the book. He took the concept of value of information from
decision analysis and applied it to learning. In decision analysis people
calculate the value of having certain information to help with decisions. The
same concept can be applied to learning. 
When undertaking an activity there is the direct value and the value of
the learning derived from the undertaking. This often translates into the
amount of uncertainty that can be eliminated by the new knowledge and its
effect on actions. Steve noted that learning only has real value if it changes
behavior (i.e., decisions).  If
people will still do the same thing regardless then nothing is gained. That
sounds simple but it is often overlooked.

I like this approach. I think it does extend the
possibilities of enterprise 2.0. If we can create data rich environments
through the transparent interactions within enterprise 2.0 then we have
expanded the learning opportunities. Then if we can use this expanded learning
to better guide individual behavior we have taken it a notch further. Now if we
can turn this learning back on the system to auto-generate changes within the
system itself, we have taken things another step further.  I think the data gained from the
transparency of enterprise 2.0 is a large piece of the value. Here is an
approach to make better use of this transparency.  

I recently received a review copy of a useful new
Forrester report, Four Giants Compete For Your Cloud Email
Business
by Ted Schadler, that has a cost breakdown of cloud-based email services from
the four leading vendors- Google, Microsoft, IBM and Cisco – and indicates that
Google and Microsoft are in the lead for customers. Here is a good overview in
Ted’s words from the executive summary.

“Google jumped into
the enterprise email market in 2007 with a $50 annual subscription to its cloud
email service and turned the market upside down. Microsoft quickly re-evaluated
and repriced its Exchange Online offering to $5 per user per month; IBM
launched LotusLive Notes and iNotes for $5 and $3, respectively; and Cisco
purchased PostPath and opened its WebEx Mail offering with a 5 GB mailbox for
$5 per user per month. Each of these big four collaboration vendors has since
beefed up and clarified its road map for cloud email and collaboration services.
Their email offerings are rapidly approaching feature and price parity — at
least on the checklist items.”

Since I became an enterprise of one in 2004, I
missed these most recent corporate email wars. My last employer moved from
Notes to Outlook but Google had not yet turned the market upside down. Now both
Google and Microsoft have bundled in their Web productivity apps, something
that IBM and Cisco do not. Cisco allows you to use Outlook.

Over
the next five years, Ted writes, enterprises will be re-evaluating their email
strategy and partner. For vendors, it will be a tough five years as companies
pick a messaging and collaboration partner for the next decade. Ted gives a
nice way to estimate your total email costs that appear to be significantly
cheaper in the cloud. However, there are migration costs to get there.

Forrester also expects
that email will improve it gains features that improve usability and
functionality such as: “analytics to perform triage on messages; collaboration
features to make it easier to act on a message; in-message widgets to pull
information relevant to the message; pushbutton publishing to a team wiki;
messages, activities, feeds, tweets, etc., in a single inbox; and so on.”  This is good news and another alignment
with the enterprise concept that suggests it is becoming standard. Many of the
collaboration platforms already allow you to use them within an email client so
this is going in the other direction but likely focused on the tools offered by
the email provider. 

Here is another
in a series of posts that provide access to my favorite tweets that contain
links to useful information.  Some of these I did to link to things I
found useful and others are RTs that I want to save for the same reason. Since
Twitter archiving is an oxymoron, I am now going to post my favorite links for
the month so they can be easily accessed later. I will repeat this once or
twice a month depending on volume.

Our new book, Empowered, will be in book stores on September 14. But for a real-world conversation about what it means to unleash employees to solve customer problems using readily available technology, come to our Content & Collaboration Forum in Maryland just outside of Washington, D.C. on October 7 and 8.

Yes, this is a pitch to come to a Forrester event, but I promise you that it will be worth your time if you're looking for help with such Empowered topics as enterprise social, empowered employees, iPad in the enterprise, innovation, collaboration in the cloud, videoconferencing, and IT consumerization as well as deep dives into critical topics like search and taxonomy, enterprise content management, and what it means to be a content & collaboration leader.

You'll get two days of my Forrester analyst colleagues' presentations and face time as well as keynote presentations from some great and experienced content & collaboration executives. GM's Steve Sacho is way ahead of the curve in understanding how to turn consumerization from IT threat to business opportunity. Richard West of the defense firm, BAE Systems, is bringing his story of how investments in knowledge management and collaboration have empowered employees to work more efficiently together to solve customer problems. Both speakers as well as Zach Brand, head of all things interesting at NPR Digital Media (yes, that NPR), will share their stories, lessons, and experience.

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