What the heck’s Cloud Computing? And why should you care?

There has been a lot of buzz about cloud computing lately but what exactly is it?  Everyone seems to have their own slightly different definition.

My belief is that if you draw on compute resources, be they apps or platforms, from a source you don’t own or manage and that you can scale up or down as needed and you are billed accordingly… that’s cloud computing. The biggest advantages of this as a customer are the ability to get started immediately, no software to load and maintain, expand as needed and even turn the service off if its not useful.  Also because there is not a big Capex outlay to get started, you are not bogged down in approval cycles.

What do some of the experts in the field think?  I went to the Rackspace customer event a couple of weeks ago to find out.  (In case your wondering, Lombardi Blueprint, our cloud-based process modeling tool is hosted by Rackspace and will soon be making use of its cloud files in its next release.)

This is what I learned about the past, present and future of Cloud Computing:

• My podcast with John Engates, Rackspace CTO and John’s presentation
• My podcast with Lanham Napier, Rackspace CEO
• My podcast with Jonathan Bryce, Mosso (Rackspace’s cloud division) founder

BTW, if you don’t recognize the building in the clouds above, its the Alamo located in San Antonio where the event was held.

Podcast: Process Mapping at 99 year old Tillamook Dairy

Founded in 1899, the Tillamook County Creamery Association has had a history of passing down processes from artisan to artisan.  When a new CEO came on board about 18 months ago he realized that he needed to quickly get a handle on the company’s processes in order to move forward and compete in today’s market.

It was Steve Burge who was tapped to put together a Process Management Model to lead the collection and documentation of the company’s processes.

Take a listen to the podcast I did with Steve where he talks about his challenge and how he and a core team mapped all of Tillamook’s processes within six months.

The Blueprint October ‘08 Update

The latest monthly refresh of Blueprint went live this morning, and I’m excited to give you the scoop on the changes. Over the past 6 weeks, we’ve focused on addressing the top pieces of feedback that we’ve heard from customers. With this release, you’ll find it much easier to keep track of who’s currently using Blueprint, to collaborate with new users, and to print out your process diagrams in exactly the right format. We use your feedback to drive our release schedule, so make sure you give us your thoughts!

Let’s take a look at the improvements in detail:

• User Management: In today’s business environment, it’s more important than ever to ensure that you’re getting maximum utilization of your software. One of the great benefits of Blueprint’s SaaS model is that you can add users to your account just in time when they need access to the tool. When they’re done, you can remove or reuse their license so you’re not paying for software that isn’t being used. This can save you a ton of money compared to traditional desktop tools like Visio that require a big upfront investment and then only get used a few times a year by many people.

  In this release, we’ve greatly enhanced our user management capabilities. You can now see at a glance who has access to your account, when they last used Blueprint, and how many seats you have available. If someone doesn’t need access anymore, it’s just one click to archive them and make their license available to someone new.

  

  Read the rest of this entry »

Process Improvement: Reducing the Friction

An ongoing theme in our Blueprint releases has been making the user experience as easy as possible, or “reducing the friction” as we’ve come to call it. Each new release has included changes that make it easier/faster/better to model and document your business processes. Some of these improvements are large and obvious, others are more subtle.  Across my next several posts, I’m going to focus on a few of these design changes and explain how they can have a big impact on your process discovery success.

A few weeks ago, we announced our latest release which included improvements to the process documentation view. Since then, we’ve received several emails and forum posts asking for more information on the new features and questions about things we’ll be adding in the future. All objects in your process diagram (e.g. activities, sub-processes, events, even the process object itself) have their own process documentation section, and details captured in the mapping and diagram views are rolled up into this consolidated view. This process documentation includes structured information such as the participant, business owners, experts, inputs, outputs, and problems associated with that specific object. A commonly overlooked detail is the fact that these items can be easily edited and modified from the larger process documentation view. For example, to add an additional input, just click the green “+” button next to the input row to dynamically add a new item. Most items in this structured section behave this way, making it very easy to quickly capture and compare details across multiple items. This is one of my favorite new features in Blueprint because it really helps you quickly document the details or narrative of your process without having to open separate dialogs.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Latest Blueprint Improvements

Today I’m happy to announce that we’ve gone live with the latest batch of Blueprint improvements. This release is unique–not only will all current Blueprint customers get to use the changes immediately, but anyone who’s signing up for a new account also will enjoy the benefits. Over the last month we’ve focused on two areas: giving you the best experience possible for documenting the details behind your processes and creating a simpler and easier signup process for new users.

Let’s take a look at the improvements in detail:

• Structured Documentation View: The documentation view in Blueprint has always been a place to record the “narrative” behind your process–the procedures, training material, KPIs, and the like. But we’ve also heard from you that it’s important to be able to see all of the inputs and outputs, stakeholders, and opportunities for improvement that you’ve recorded in context on that view as well. As of today, the documentation view is your one stop shop for viewing and editing all of the details behind your process.

  This has been one of my favorite improvements to Blueprint so far. We’ve been using the updated interface internally for the last few weeks and it’s already made us much more productive at capturing and disseminating information about our processes inside Lombardi, and I think it will do the same for you and your team. Let us know what you think on the Blueprint forums!

  

  Read the rest of this entry »

Your Opinion Counts

The Lombardi User Experience Team is looking for customers to help us make our products even better. We have several new features under development for both our Blueprint and Teamworks products, and we’d like to know what you think. The UX team focuses on how people interact with our software, and the information we collect is translated directly in to product design improvements - so your feedback really makes a difference!

Please contact us if you are a current Blueprint or Teamworks customer and are willing to participate in a product usability study. Most sessions last between 30 and 60 minutes and can be done remotely using Web conferencing software. During the sessions, you will be shown aspects of the product and asked to provide feedback. Your comments are valuable ways we ensure we’re building tools that fit your needs.

You Talk… We Listen

As noted in Dave’s Summer release post and recent product reviews, Blueprint has undergone some pretty significant UI changes in the past few months. It’s especially important to mention that the majority of these improvements are the direct result of our customer’s feedback and feature requests found in the Blueprint Community Forums. If you are an existing customer and haven’t had a chance to check out the forums yet, I invite you to do so (just click the Feedback link in the upper right-hand corner of Blueprint). There’s a wealth of information there, from tips and tricks to modeling best practices. It’s also a great way to interact directly with the Blueprint product and support teams.

A perfect example of this direct customer feedback is our new rich text editing environment found on the documentation view in Blueprint. For those of you who have been using the product for a while, you may remember that our first pass at rich text was a bit limiting - allowing users to apply simple formatting such as bold, italic or underline styles. To be honest, we weren’t entirely sure how our customers were going to use the documentation sections of the product or the types of information they’d want to store there. So we put it out there, watched, and listened to the feedback. And boy did we get a lot of feedback - in fact we quickly found that the documentation section was considered one of the most important sections of the product. Over the course of a few releases, the text editing sections evolved to support things like advanced formatting, custom font styles, lists, indenting, hyperlinks, images, and colors. We also heard from customers that they needed better integration with their existing documentation, so we included support for things like copying from Word, direct export and printing.

We’re obviously not done yet. We have big plans for improving the existing doc features and adding a few new ones (check out the forums for a few hints). We’re also looking for more feedback from you. We’re 100% committed to making Blueprint THE BEST process discovery and modeling tool available. Tell us what you need… We’re listening!

BP-3 Reviews Blueprint

Scott Francis from BP-3 recently posted a great, objective review of the Blueprint Summer ‘08 release. He does a thorough and insightful job covering the entire product. For example, here’s his take on the Visio import functionality we recently introduced:

Visio importing has long been the “holy grail” for process modeling tools.  If I had a dollar for every time someone asked me if a particular BPM product could import Visio models directly I would be rich!  However, Visio import into a process execution environment isn’t always all its cracked up to be.  Visio diagrams tend to be quite unstructured, whereas BPMN is very structured, and executable BPMN is even more structured in form.  Moreover, Visio models don’t have enough information attached to them to be immediately executable.  It is possible to run into issues of “who owns this model” once you import the Visio (the business may have the expectation that they can keep making modifications and “reimport” into Teamworks, for example).  At some point, the implementors must take over the model and own it to produce something executable.  I’ve been working on some models for OMG certification and I thought they would be a fun (albeit simple) set of examples to import into Blueprint for a test drive.  Blueprint imports these easily and accurately.  I went back to the archives and tried importing some really awful process diagrams circa 2004.  The results weren’t pretty (the original wasn’t pretty), but Blueprint imported the models nicely (a visio diagram with 10 tabs and one process per tab).  Going to the Diagram View I was able to sort out the diagram into swimlanes and go from there.  Interestingly, when I imported a diagram WITH swimlanes defined, Blueprint created those swimlanes and participants for me.

But my favorite quote had to be:

I actually like the diagramming portion better than Teamworks!  And collaborating on the same process isn’t just possible, its actually cool.  You almost look for an excuse to try to be logged into the same process at the same time so you can try to step on each other.  Blueprint handles all the conflicting edits really well.  I’m impressed!

We’re very proud of Blueprint’s collaboration and diagramming capabilities as well because we believe that there’s no tool that’s easier to use or can make you more productive, online or off.

Take a look at Scott’s full review when you get a chance.

The Blueprint Summer Update

Today I’m proud to announce the availability of the Summer ‘08 Update release of Blueprint! One of the great benefits of delivering Blueprint in SaaS model is that we’re able to stay nimble and quickly add functionality that improves the value of the product for everyone. So following shortly on the heels of our main Summer ‘08 release, we’ve added features to address some of the most common requests we hear from our customers.

Let’s take a look at them in detail:

• Microsoft Word Export: Blueprint now gives you the ability to automatically generate a Microsoft Word document containing all the details of your process. This is a great way to communicate your process to stakeholders that don’t have a Blueprint account. For example, we’ve been using this feature internally to generate “specifications” for our processes when we need to interact with outside vendors.

Read the rest of this entry »

Who’s on the team?

Ross Mayfield noted today that one of the biggest challenges with collaboration among distributed teams is actually agreeing on who is actually part of the team. Larry Irons quotes research from Distributed Work to that effect:

Of the twenty-four teams surveyed, not a single team was in complete agreement on its boundary: who was and who was not a member of the team. In fact, the average level of agreement within the sample was only 75 percent, such that any given team member was likely to disagree with the rest of his or her team on one-quarter of potential team members. 

We see this all the time in real world BPM projects. Agreeing on what the process is is often the easy part. Identifying the who is can seem nearly impossible, especially if a single team is attempting to define a process that is executed in many different locales all over the world.

A distributed, collaborative environment such as Lombardi Blueprint is key to solving this challenge. Having a structured repository to identify and maintain the players and relationships involved in a business process promotes visibility and knowledge sharing among those involved. Discovering the who in a process becomes far easier when all those that are involved can both document their own role and see how where they fit inside the grand scheme of things regardless of what office or time zone they happen to be working in at the particular moment.