Archive for the 'commentary' Category

Teaching Business Process Management with RunMyProcess

Published on July 14, 2011 in Business Process Management, commentary, disruptive innovation, education and software. 1 Comment Tags: , , , , , , .
During my studies at Georgia State, I have had the privilege of developing and teaching courses on Business Process Management. When this comes up in conversation followed by blank stares. I typically explain it as model driven execution:
  1. Model your business process.  (like the one to right, created by one of “my” students)
  2. Press a button — code is generated –you have just created an application (and automated a process).

Sounds too good to be true right? Well, you do also have to create forms and route the data around. But, this is all fairly straight forward. It is important to note what is doing all the heavy lifting — what makes this all possible: the Business Process Management System (BPMS).

There are many BPMS systems available see: Gartner’s magic quadrant. We started using TIBCO, which is a fantastic product, but proved too taxing on student (budget) laptops. Then we used a lightweight product called BizAgi, which has a fantastic modeler and a great backend BPMS system which we deployed on AWS. Recently, I have been fascinated by RunMyProcess a BPMS which runs entirely in the cloud. Here are some of its advantages from my perspective:

  • No install necessary (a huge plus for students)
  • Integrates with any webservice. Want to send text messages, send invoices, read or store information into a database of google spreadsheet, call someone with a pre-recorded statement, check exchange rates, the weather, or micro-outsource some work to mechanical turk as part of your process? No problem, there are thousands of connectors to fabulous RESTful webservices waiting for you(e.g. Twilio, Zoho, Google Spreadsheets, Freshbooks, mTurk).
  • Email just works. Setting up email notifications can be a hassle on other BPMS systems when you have them hosted yourself. RMP also has email receptors (i.e. start a process by sending an email to a specific email address… nifty).
  • No hosting required.

I was showing this system at a recent conference and a chief scientist at Google described it as Mash-ups (or MashApps) for the enterprise. Like other BPMS systems you also get the Business Intelligence insight through process monitoring and measuring tools. There are similar platforms-as-a-service out there, but it has been very rewarding to see many light bulbs turn on as students catch the vision that BPM purports. This usually starts to happen when they design a process which sends themselves a text (SMS) message with stock exchange rates, or a customized haiku poem written by turkers.

Focus of Academia: a set of problems

Published on September 30, 2010 in Business Process Management, commentary, conferences and discoveries. 2 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

Recently I was in New York for the BPM 2010, and Human Potential conferences and I took the opportunity to visit from friends at Columbia University.

While there, in Hamilton Hall, I saw a well written paragraph on the importance of problems and question in academia. Click the thumbnail to see a larger image.

It reads:

The focus of Academia can be defined as not so much a set of topics but as a set of problems. Physicists, economists, historians, and so on have problems that are specific to their fields, and are collectively working on points of intersection in order to solve these problems. Consequently, in every peice of academic writing ther is some problem, some issue, some motivating question that is being explored.. at the heart of every piece of academic writing is academic inquiry.

I was surprised to find this randomly, in the only room at Columbia which I visited. I like it, and though it worth sharing.  I think it highlights the importance of publication as a conversation as Anne Huff’s book points out. Also, the importance of asking great and exciting questions. While at BPM 2010, I met Vasant Dhar from NYU who talked about what issues or questions are at the heart of education and research in the information systems field. They serve as a useful guide for those wondering what IS is, and a starting point for further questions. From Vasant’s paper:

Business Centric Questions

  • How does IT transform industries and change the boundaries between them?
  • How do platforms alter existing business models and create new ones?
  • What determines success with a firm’s IT investments?
  • How do firms effectively get value from and govern data?
  • Why do incumbent companies frequently miss large, new IT-based opportunities?

Technology-Centric Questions

  • How do unique characteristics of digital goods impact business models?
  • Why do network effects pervade IT-based businesses and how do they alter strategy?
  • How does human behavior/interaction differ in spaces mediated by Information Technology?

Dhar, V., & Sundararajan, A. (2007). Issues and Opinions–Information Technologies in Business: A Blueprint for Education and Research. Information Systems Research, 18(2), 125.

Shared Services in the news

Published on August 31, 2010 in commentary and research. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

My research involves IT Shared Services. Shared Services is a management concept which has been around since the late 80′s. Often when new articles and press releases come out they pop up on my radar.

I thought I’d share a few good ones that I have seen in the past few months:

In the general Shared Services area (not IT-specific):

The Process is the Punishment

Published on May 26, 2010 in Business Process Management, Uncategorized, commentary and research. 1 Comment Tags: , .

How true that statement is, well sometimes. In a recent meeting, I sat by Wendy Gaustaferro from the Criminal Justice department. The Process is the PunishmentShe was preparing to teach a class ideas presented in Feeley’s 1979 “The process is the punishment“, which describes the lower criminal courts of new haven Connecticut. After months of observing the Court of Common Pleas, Feeley writes:

“Jammed every morning with a new mass of arrestees who have been picked up the night before, lower courts rapidly process what the police consider to be ‘routine’ problems – barroom brawls, neighborhood squabbles, domestic disputes, welfare cheating, shoplifting, drug possession, and prostitution – not ‘real’ crimes. These courts are chaotic and confusing; officials communicate in a verbal shorthand wholly unintelligble to accused and accuser alike, and they seem to make arbitrary decision, sending one person to jail and freeing the next.”

As I understand it, the basic idea of the book  is that having to go through the court process is punishment in itself. Apart from the courts there are plenty of punishing processes. DMVs, Departments of Watershed Management Offices, all conjure an image of punishing lines and archaic forms.   Within the enterprise, it is often these punishing processes which lead many to take the easiest but less efficient route. All the more reason for Business Process Management and Improvement.

Virtual Computing Labs for students through Amazon Web Services

Published on March 24, 2010 in commentary, discoveries and education. 1 Comment Tags: , , , .

I have seen some excitement about Virtual Computing Labs for students. This allows students to access software and resources from their home that normally would only be available to them from an on campus computer lab. A need for mobile educational resources, and dropping technology costs are driving the introduction of virtual computing lab environments.

Virtual Computing Labs also solve an age-old problem for students and professors alike. Student’s laptops have various flavors of (often unkempt) operating systems on them, they often encounter snags when installing larger pieces of software (e.g. ones that need SQLServer or IIS to run). By having access to a virtual computer these problems can be avoided.

Traditionally VCL environments are made possible by server arrays in data centers in a university data center. Today such technology is only available to a few faculty within a very small percentage of universities. Amazon Web Services allow students to remotely connect to machines (Windows 2008 in my case), regardless of their host OS, where they can install any software they wish. Best of all, they are only charged for how long they use the machine.

In December 2009 Amazon announced it is possible to stop and start servers, thereby not loosing any of your data that prior to that would have been lost on terminating the server. In February 2010 Amazon announced consolidated billing, which it would make it easy for a professor to foot the bill for the students. Just hope that the student’s do not forget to “stop” their instances. In April 2009 Amazon announced AWS in Education grants — which give instructors $100 in AWS credits (to give to each student).

How much does this cost?

Well if you get the $100 Education Grant from Amazon… nothing.

If the students use the instance of the machine for an average of 5 hours each week over the course of a 16 week semester the cost would be: 5 hours X 16 weeks = 80 hours @ 12.5 cents an hour = 10$. In addition, the students would need to pay for the persistent storage of their data. This would be 10 cents per gigabyte per month: 30 gigabytes x 10 cents per month = $3 per month or $12 for the semester. This is easily within the $100 education credit from Amazon. And this also assumes that the students “stop” their instance when they are done using it.

I don’t work for Amazon, but I think this service can solve many potential headaches for professors and students alike at almost no cost. It’s also fun… Students get to setup their own servers in the cloud, and who wouldn’t be excited to do that?

If you want to try it out, follow all the directions at EC2 for Poets! And if you have any problems, leave a comment here…

Open innovation in education, OLEDs, and Nature

Published on March 25, 2009 in commentary and open-innovation. Closed Tags: , , , , , , .

Mozilla, Creative Commons, and P2P University announced a new open innovation initiative to partner with educators in extending Mozilla’s role in the education space. This post has more about Mozilla’s strategic position to engage in the open innovation process build educational materials.

Innocentive and Nature just announced a partnership of somekind to engage scientists in solving global scientific challenges. It is refreshing to see this large publisher getting involved in such a worthwhile endevor. Perhaps this is in response to MIT’s announcement to make all it’s faculties scientific papers available for free on the internet.

Lastly, Novaled, an OLED maker, and Holst Centre, an open innovation R&D company announced a partnership.

Read Pascal Finette’s blog about the interesting name change for the LinkedIn Open Innovation group.

The best, free online GMAT study resource

Published on March 25, 2009 in commentary. Closed Tags: , , .

When the subject of GMAT comes up in conversation, I always want to share the best online resource that I found when studying for it. It currently can be found in word document form here. It helped me learn the tricks of the GMAT. Hope it helps you.

Tips for Grad School

Published on March 25, 2009 in commentary, discoveries and research. 1 Comment Tags: , , , , , , , .

A colleague forwarded me a nice blog post by an MIT PhD student on grad school advice.

It is a great list… except exercise is missing from it, as well as timeboxing.

Chad Anderson: Materiality and Affordances

Published on March 20, 2009 in commentary, conferences and research. Closed Tags: , , , , , , .

Today Chad Anderson reported on the ground work for his dissertation. He cited several Organizational scholars who have called for more theorizing in how materiality relates to the IT artifact.

He then related the theory of affordances which originated from Gibson’s 1979 work in Ecological Psychology. Gibson died shortly after proposing the theory, and many others have gone on to explicate it. Chad relates affordances to IT research as the relationship between “features of an information system and the abilities of an individual within the context of an environment.” It will be interesting to see where this goes… and I am sure Chad can correct me if I mis-discribing something!

This colloquium session was a bit more theoretical than most, but very interesting.

Ordinal Logistic HLM

Published on February 25, 2009 in commentary and methods. Closed Tags: , , , , , , .

I recently wrote a paper on “Ordinal Logistic HLM” for my methods class. There are only 3 google results if you search for that.

I thought I would post my assignment, for good or for bad, to help bump up that statistic.

Ordinal Logistic HLM Description – DOC

Ordinal Logistic HLM Description – PDF

If you find mistakes or errors in the paper, leave a comment.