Sunday, October 11, 2009

Aweekstweets Oct 4-11 2009

Aweekstweets Oct 4-11 2009

  • Social media in customer svc: "witness factor": clients testify to your screwups & successes: performance anxiety keeps you at peak. #btf0931 minutes ago from TweetDeck
    • JK2---To some degree, social media just intensify the hellish online culture of flaming, blaming, and shaming. But, if you have fire-resistant skin and are not agoraphobic in the slightest, social media are the platform and proscenium for your world stage. The audience witnesses everything you do. You may or may not witness them in return. You need validation, or just a place to vent? You up to it?
  • Why doesn't TweetDeck let create column of tweeters I've never accepted, have unfollowed, or just received? A tweet-spam folder, so to speakabout 6 hours ago from TweetDeck
    • JK2---I just want to witness the passing parade I’ve chosen to let pass me by. Or in whose passing parade I’m currently marching.
  • Problem re "crowdsourcing" is that "crowd" often far more noise than signal. Trick is tuning your receiver to hidden harmonies: throngsong.about 7 hours ago from TweetDeck
    • JK2---The harmonies are usually in the overheard overtones: the distant chitter-chatter that plays back in your head when you’re not paying attention.
    • JK2---Let the world witness your internal processes, including your backlogs and bottlenecks, your deficiencies and inefficiencies. Yes, your competitors should be able to peer deeply into your innards too. What do you have to hide?
    • JK2---Real friends stay with us. Faux friends merely witness our outer manifestations, if they’re really paying attention, which they’re probably not.
    • JK2---Lean socializing means a clean, uncluttered experience. A comfy, non-distracting, pressure-free personal experience of community. As comfy as a stroll in the neighborhood, among friendly, non-judgmental people who welcome you into their presence—and you them. And who make your day a little nicer—and you them. Lean means a single “neighborhood.” To the extent that social media means having to hop back and forth among Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, blogs, etc., it’s far from a single neighborhood, and none of them feels completely like home. It feels like a sprawling megalopolis in the making. So, no, it’s not lean. It’s bloating out of control.
  • Clay, #btf09, says audit BPM tech portfolio re specific biz requirements. Get bloat out of your BPM tooling. Reuse tools across BPM projectsabout 8 hours ago from TweetDeck
    • JK2---Lean business process management (BPM) goes against the grain of traditional enterprise adoption of this technology: the tactical, bottom-up, project-specific implementation of app-embedded, process-specific, siloed workflow platforms and tools. You can only implement lean BPM if your companies has a BPM competency center and a senior-level sponsor (e.g., CIO) who empowers it to consolidate existing workflow environments into a corporate standard platform—and to dictate use of that platform for all future projects.
  • Audience Q at #btf09: ROI metrics to justify lean BPM project? Clay's A: Don't hide behind ROI numbers w/o strong narrative re biz impact.about 8 hours ago from TweetDeck
    • JK2---The BPM justification/payback narrative is key. A single powerful ROI anecdote, with or without actual numbers to back it up, can make all the difference.
  • At #BTF09, question re BPM ctr of excellence relevance to lean BPM. Clay says BPM CoE must be aligned w/ biz strategy, connect to biz value.about 8 hours ago from TweetDeck
    • JK2---This is, of course, motherhood and apple pie advice for any technology. Where BPM is concerned, it’s even more critical: the business value of a business process platform must be unimpeachable. The business value of, say, a new data storage investment is also important, but it’s more indirect and bottom line. A business process platform should be a top-line investment from the start: it should have clear payback in helping organizations be more productive and agile in responding to challenges.
  • Clay, at #btf09, says business analysts must have passion for process, but work closely with tech analysts, to deliver on lean BPM projectsabout 8 hours ago from TweetDeck
    • JK2---Truth be told, passion for results is what counts. Workflow experts become passionate about process at their peril. That’s like being bullish on bureaucracy or rah-rah about red tape. Business analysts must work closely with tech analysts to trim process to its leanest, least obnoxious, most agile essence.
    • JK2---Consolidate your many process monitoring dashboards down to a single correlated view, updated in real time, available to all internal and external stakeholders, triggering automated and manual exception handling actions.
  • Keys to lean processes: Process alignment to strategy. Process governance and skill building. Process waste reduction. C. Richardson. #btf09about 8 hours ago from TweetDeck
    • JK2---This is the essence of every scientific management, business process reengineering, and quality assurance philosophy ever put forth by anybody anywhere.
  • C. Richardson, #btf09, on lean BPM: Watery metaphors: old BPM "waterfall method"; new BPM "cloud." Which processes should I put in cloud?about 8 hours ago from TweetDeck
    • JK2---This is the age-old “what’s my core competency vs. what should I outsource” debate, latest chapter.
  • Listening to Clay Richardson on lean BPM at #btf09. Michael Hammer's BPR was euphemism for firing people. Please Hammer, don't hurt 'em.about 8 hours ago from TweetDeck
    • JK2---This is the age-old “shareholders uber alles vs. employees come first” debate, 80s flavor.
  • Building personal brand as an analyst. It's all about personal integrity, viewpoint, approach, & passion. Being a whole person. A personage.about 18 hours ago from TweetDeck
    • JK2---This is the age-old “demarc between life, career, and job” question, IT analyst rumination variety.
    • JK2---Everyone wants to cash in on being the start and/or end of someone’s online voyage of exploration, or being the map that connects those points.
    • JK2---Everyone wants to have at least one absolutely indispensable product that customers cannot live without—and that is their last best hope for sustaining a business model in the face of erosive competition.
  • "Fit to purpose frameworks" for lean software. An anti-monolithic deploy. In analytics, user-config modular hetero BI/DW solution. #BTF099:23 AM Oct 8th from TweetDeck
    • JK2---I’ll spell that out. A lean analytics deployment is one that users customize from modular platform, application, and tool components—business intelligence (BI), data warehousing (DW), and whatnot—sourced from heterogeneous vendors. It’s “roll-your-own” but entirely standards-based, rather than a monolithic stack from a single vendor who locks you in.
    • JK2---Lean is anti-lock-in. Lean is ability to throw it all out, or repurpose and reassemble any set of components as needs change.
    • JK2---Lean is clean. Consolidate to fewer system-of-record applications, eliminating the need for intermediary solutions that do downstream profiling, matching, merging, cleansing, correction, and governance of data.
  • Lean analytics? Trim cost thru BI/DW consolidation, fit to purpose thru deep domain content, agile to new biz needs thru user empowerment8:58 AM Oct 8th from TweetDeck
    • JK2---In the coming year, I plan to go deeper in my Forrester research in all these areas.
    • JK2---Just my basic working definition of “lean,” extensible to any application, information, or process management topic.
  • My replacement laptop will be here tomorrow in time for #BTF09 #FORR. Tons of new e-mail in my inbox. Kiosking hard on my feet. says4:53 PM Oct 6th from web
    • JK2---New laptop works great so far. I’ve caught up on e-mail. I worked out my legs over the weekend. I’m on my feet now, typing this at the food/coffee bay in the back of a moving airplane. Flight attendants are up front serving people. You work where you can.
    • JK2---Essentially, everybody reusing everybody’s mashed-up analytic apps.
    • JK2---Workload isolation—transactional vs. analytics--makes great sense for so many reasons. If they’re both using the same underlying platform, we’re talking separately deployed servers, clusters, and tiers.
    • JK2---In 10 years time, we won’t be sad. We’ll forget. We’ll be so surrounded, suffused, and saturated by online everything—including the devices to access, view, consume, and interact with it all—that hardcopy will just be another option. We’ll be comfy and habituated to the new world. Much as nobody seems to be mourning the loss of ubiquitous hardcopy family photos anymore.
    • JK2---And I’m sure they’ll have interesting announcements at IOD in 2 weeks.
    • JK2---“Next wk” is here. I’m on way to San Francisco for OOW. Sun acquisition not complete yet, so I suspect there won’t be much discussion by Oracle of Sun futures.
  • RT @bevelson "Pentaho acquires piece of Lucidera for new OLAP UI" JK--BI SaaS pure-play space not yet viable. But great IP breeding ground.9:43 AM Oct 5th from TweetDeck
    • JK2---DW SaaS also underdeveloped, emerging, immature space in late 2009. But will be huge in 2010-11.
    • JK2---Also a 2010+ focus area for my research at Forrester.
  • Few phrases make me chuckle like "think tank." Older term for "research, analysis, and consulting firm." Implies hermetic isolation chamber.9:07 AM Oct 5th from TweetDeck
    • JK2---Forrester is one such “think tank.” No place could be less hermetic. A little isolation now and then would be great—so I can ward off distractions and get work done. I doubt that analysts in other firms have the luxury of shutting themselves off. That would sort of defeat our core function: deep market research into the latest/greatest and future of everything IT.
    • JK2---For analytics, core function of intelligent storage layer is faster queries.
    • JK2---In high tech, the most important phenomena are those entities either above or below the threshold of everyday perception. Above that threshold? Wide-area, wireless, virtual, software-driven clouds. Below that threshold? Invisible processes executing in memory inside boxes, inside molecules, inside atoms, inside quarks, astride the tiniest strings in superstringy base reality. Inside imagination.
  • Endured yet another bee sting today mowing the lawn. Last mowing pre-frost. Last sting pre-extermination.7:18 PM Oct 4th from TweetDeck
    • JK2---I have forgiven the little guys. Besides, I can’t tell which of them is the culprit. They all look alike.