February 26, 2006
Looks Like I Missed Some Good RSS Dirt While I Was Away...
Dave’s Wordpress Blog » Why the backchannel is bad for RSS
February 16, 2006
http://www.flickr.com/photos/vo/sets/72057594065549072/
ProcessWorld 2006 Attendees Kick It In South Beach Florida - a photoset on Flickr
Mac Daddy Dale Roberts, fresh from pimpin' ProcessWorld 2006, hits South Beach Miami Florida with Dann and Vince and makes new friends with Todd, Melissa and Brina. Cigars, Mojitos, and a great hang where it happens non-stop on the shore!
Yep...What Fun. What a Process!
February 15, 2006
February 14, 2006
3Bubbles Integrating Real-Time Chat and Blogs (or Other Websites I Imagine)
http://3Bubbles.com is testing out an easy tool for joining in-progress conversations that can be embedded into any website template...here's a test of copying some text from a conversation I got into where I asked some questions about the tool...
VinceOutlawHello chatters...just followed the link from scripting news... RobertDHello Vince j.where the focus is consumers talking to themselves VinceOutlawHi Robert...any links for more information on this...Dave didn't leave much info... Drewj: we're open to all possibilities Drewvince: www.3bubbles.com RobertDDrew... how many people have registered to receive more information via e-mail? Any statistics yet? VinceOutlawThanks Drew...there now in another tab...checking the home page...wish I could just post from there... j.best of luck guys Drewrobert we had 1500 as of yesterday evening j.I will keep an eye on it. RobertDNice :) Drewprobably a lot more now Drewhaven't checked j.What is the over/under on getting acquired by Blogger or TypePad? j.3 months? RobertDYeah, I put my e-mail addy in about an hour ago... So at least 1501 now j.:) VinceOutlawIs there some sort of widget I can embed on a blog page to have the conversation scrolling...like this one is on the 3bubbles home page? Drewyup Drewit's an iframe RobertDOh nice, I didn't even notice it's up on the 3Bubbles site Drewhttp://dittes.info/blog/ example of one way to implement Drewyeah we have the site up now VinceOutlawIs there a page that gives myself, a copy/paste king, some easy instructions to do that? RobertDNice, where do I send my check as an investment? LOL Drewdittes got into our registration system before he was supposed to Drewvince yes Drewbut it's not public yet Drewwould love to have it Drew:D VinceOutlawIt's a pretty excellent tool so far...how did Scripting get the URL to a particular conversation? sriIs it possible to make the links clickable? Drewhe took it off of techcrunch's site Drewsri: which links are you talking about? VinceOutlawah...can I put links in...like http://AboutEA.com...testing my own question... VinceOutlawhttp://AboutEA.com Drewnot supported yet VinceOutlawtwo strikes for VO... RobertDHas this been /.ed yet? Drewnot to my knowledge RobertDOr Farked? Drewwe had a little digg presence Drewlike 7 diggs RobertDNice :) Drewthat was this past weekend before we were live though
I just copied that in and stuck it in a 'pre' tag for easy-ness. It would be cool to be able more easily post parts of the conversation into a blog to sort of archive it...save the knowledge (or whimsy) generated from the conversation...maybe the cool dudes who did this are already onto that...I'm sure there are a lot more interesting requests that this knowledge worker's. Thanks for letting me try it out...I want one for my blog!
OK...I had to try it...I just borrowed the code from http://dittes.info/blog/ to embed a conversation in a webpage...here's the one I was just in...
August-Wilhelm Scheer Blows Sax in the ProcessWorld 2006 Jazz Lounge
August-Wilhelm Scheer Blows Sax in the ProcessWorld 2006 Jazz Lounge
Originally uploaded by Vince Outlaw.
February 13, 2006
ProcessWorld 2006 Day 1 - Toward the Flashing Lights on Business Process Management
Day 1 of IDS-Scheer's ProcessWorld 2006 is just about done, from the Process of Jazz in the morning to the Process of Party in the evening, it was a fantastic day of keynotes, roundtables, case studies and vendors focusing on the next wave of business process management implementation and innovation. I have to admit I continued my disappointment with lack of Internet connectivity in the conference area and strange stares at the http://AboutEA.com blog URL self-scrawled on my badge, but the great content backing up my convictions of the benefits of an enterprise process orientation for companies of any size and the role of modeling in that way makes up for it.
The founder of IDS-Scheer, Professor August-Wilhelm Scheer opened the conference with a theme I've been pushing in my enterprise, Agility Through Standardization. He and his quartet bandmates swung through 3 parts of his keynote with 3 jazz tunes which illustrated the ability of a team to improvise smartly, effectively, and creatively upon the foundation of a standard rhythm and musical components, or licks, that can be assembled as needed to complete a new melody. A great analogy. He also provided a high-level roadmap or at least assurance to his 3rd party vendor partners that ARIS will not be evolving into a process execution product, but will stick to enabling most of the other aspects of business process management, including modeling, simulation, performance management, and integration with a host of vendor solutions.
Professor Tom Gulledge of George Mason University kicked off the Public Sector
track of the conference with a session on how the Department of Defense is working toward Enterprise Integration. He made an interesting point of how the DoD's move toward Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) was kind of predetermined because the application software vendor's they had already chosen long ago to support them were moving in this direction...they really have no choice...good thing. A key take-away for me in this was the challenge that a federated architecture model like the DoD (each DoD agency having their own architecture that was 'contracted' to work in concert with the DoD's overall enterprise architecture) has in standardizing on service definition. If they don't watch out and implement strong governance, then the benefits of an SOA get lost because each entity can define a similar service (like GetEmployee) in many different ways. He also recommended a Burton Group article on SOA and Data In The Enterprise (or something like that) that I will need to check out to understand some of the other concepts that came up.
Prof Tom also moderated a roundtable discussing some of the same issues with folks from US and NATO agencies and their experiences in this area.
After lunch and some great interactions with some of the ARIS product partners (and some cool free-bies), IDS CEO Mathias Kirchmer gave a much anticipated keynote on the Reference Models: Knowledge Assets for Agility. This reinforced my thoughts on the benefits of enterprises to adopt existing models, the more adopted and created by industry the better, and then modify and adapt them to match language of their company and to highlight or raise those areas where the enterprise needs to focus...keeping the models alive as the enterprise evolves and adapts. VCOR and Project Management reference models (the latter based on the PMBOK and built by a company called PMOLink) are definitely ones that I will want to look at further for adoption by our business people. He also introduced me to the concept of Emergent Business Process...processes that change on the fly and utilize variable process steps based on the knowledge attained during process execution, something that could be utilized for knowledge intensive processes like Research and Development processes...something our enterprise could really benefit from. He mentioned work he has done with the Sloan Business School at USC in this area and I will definitely be getting more information on this. Other concept I was introduced to a little more than in the past was the Process Factory, where many reference models are used to come up with a company-specific set of models...or something like that...I need to dive into this topic much more.
Merrill Lynch's Andrew Brown game another great keynote on their work implementing Business Process Management and SOA in the Financial Services area. It was an IT-heavy keynote, but with lots of questions at the end, so you could tell at least part of the audience was very engaged. Folks at this concept really want to take business process modeling to another level and build and implement their processes. Lot of lessons from this session, so I'll have to cover it later when I'm not so tired.
One of the best and most applicable session of the day was a case study of how BPM has been implemented and is continuing to evolve at Bank of America. They have used the ARIS product in many of the same ways we would like to, including adoption of standard classification frameworks (they used almost all of the APQC's PCF!), adapting it to both their organization and to their business process improvement methodology (Six Sigma, yea!), moving responsibility for business models to the business people (what a job), a release cycle for process models in ARIS (design, review, implement, etc.), just to name a few of the key things I got. I need that presentation. (Can you tell I'm getting tired and ready to stop this post?)
Jim Sinur from Gartner linked in the use of Business Rules into the process modeling talk.
And the evening ended with a great dinner, live music, awards, and flashing lights (even on the cups) in the Gen X Retro Lounge.
I'm totally looking forward to a few winks and back at it in the morning. Hopefully it will be a bit more Miami-like in the weather department...I want to wear my shorts one of these days!
Party Lights in the Gen X Retro Lounge Close ProcessWorld Day 1
Party Lights in the Gen X Retro Lounge Close ProcessWorld Day 1
Originally uploaded by Vince Outlaw.
ProcessWorld Needs To Get Hip To Electrical Devices...
...like Wi-Fi and Powerstrips.
Blogging (or not) ProcessWorld 2006 from Doral Resort in Miami, Florida
It looks like blogging at ProcessWorld 2006 is going to be a challenge. As my earlier audioblog eluded to, I headed to Doral Resort for pre-registration last night to get that bit of business done and to check out the facilities for connectivity. I immediately had a bad feeling when a sign outside on of the still-being-configured conference rooms said "Turn off all electrical devices in the conference room" or something to that affect. I booted up the laptop and found some stray wireless signal (from guest rooms I believe), but had no luck connecting (problem on my part, I believe), so there may be some hope. I also checked out the empty and upstairs away-from-the-action press room and found no hardwires or even faint wi-fi signal, so I wonder what the other press folks are doing...they've probably got their fancy mobile broadband cards and such.
It's still amazing that conferences don't foster the kind of spontaneous reporting and word-of-blog buzz that weblogs in all forms and formats can add to an event like this. To not have wi-fi available to the conference attendees is a big blow-it in my mind. I'll see if I can find out what the "electronic device" restriction and no connectivity is all about and will report back.
Nevertheless, we will make the best of what we can do and post when we can, so come back and check out what's new in business process and enterprise architecture modeling with IDS-Scheer's ARIS product from ProcessWorld 2006.
February 12, 2006
ProcessWorld 2006 Pre-Registration - Listen To The Audioblog
On the road in Miami, Florida, heading to pre-registration for ProcessWorld 2006 and to scope out the meeting facilities for connectivity and such. Listen in to the phone-blogged audio...