My blogging has been a bit anemic lately. We had our big Blueprint launch in the middle of last month accompanied by the post launch clean up of all the stuff I had designated as “get to it after the launch.” And then there was strep throat and visiting relatives…blah…blah..blah.
So here I am back in the saddle and finally getting around to posting my slides from Cloud Camp Austin where Lombardi Blueprint was a gold sponsor. You’ll notice in the transfer to slideshare, some of the formatting is off and in slide 6 you don’t get to see the great build where the poor person collecting the process data gets buried under a mound of random documents – but you’ll get the idea.
To get some of the narrative behind this and more, check out the interview Redmonk’s Michale Cote did with me at the event.
But wait, there’s more…
For those brave enough to go beyond the last slide you’ll get a special bonus slide of all the cheesy 80’s bands used as code names for Blueprint’s releases right up to the the most recent, “Survivor.”
A little over two weeks ago the latest Blueprint update, the Spring ’09 release, was loosed upon the world. We took the opportunity of the launch, which included launches for our other products and services, to overhaul our web pages. In the specific case of Blueprint we created new pages for Overview, Features, Resources and Success Stories.
You gotta see it to believe it
For the top of the Overview and Features pages we created the following video that presents a 3 minute and 18 second overview of Blueprint. (I recommend you click the full screen button so you can see the details). Check it out and let me know what you think 🙂
Dave Angelow, adjunct professor at Texas State University just finished teaching a semester long course in Production and Operations Management. The course, which focuses on the supply chain and value chain as well as some production methods, is a core requirement in the school of management.
I talked with Dave to hear how the course went and how BPM fit into the syllabus.
How a fair number of students also have day jobs (the course is taught at night) and how this allows them to directly apply what they’ve learned.
How BPM, both Business Process Management and Modeling, fit under the quality management section
BPM as a means of compressing cycle time and extracting more value for customers.
Using Blueprint for a hands on modeling exercise and value the students saw in the tool.
Blueprint Educational Program
Lombardi provides free Blueprint subscriptions for educational use. If you are teaching or taking a course where you think Blueprint would be appropriate, please contact us at blueprint@lombardi.com to learn more.
PRC, based in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, manages 14 domestic call centers and a handful of centers offshore. In January of last year this 25-year-old company declared bankruptcy. Six months later, after a massive restructuring they emerged from Chapter 11.
One of the efforts that helped in this restructuring and which continues today is an effort to document, standardize and communicate all of the company’s processes.
Rachel Pace-Maron, Director of Operations Support Service was asked to lead this effort with a shoe-string budget. Last week I chatted with Rachel to learn more about her effort.
The goal with mapping PRC’s processes was to find out how they could do things better and faster and why things take so long. They weren’t able to answer why a process took so long because no one person knew every step. This is what lead them to process mapping.
One of the first processes they mapped was “agent time,” how much time do agents spend on break and what is the management process for keeping them on the phone efficiently and within break parameters.
They found each call center had a different process and none were doing it efficiently.
By standardizing on a process for all centers and bringing them into metric, they had a bottom line impact on revenue.
Before adopting Lombardi Blueprint for process mapping, groups had been using, Visio, Exel and Power Point.
PRC has a group of people who are visually oriented and a group who are narrative oriented. As Rachel explains, “Blueprint’s ability to marry picture to narrative has been fantastic and, I’m not going to say life altering, but certainly business altering.”
Her excitement over the latest Blueprint release and how the addition of participants will help PRC break down silos and take their process initiative to the next level.
Michael Cote of Redmonk welcomes us all. (credit Dave Nielsen)
This past Saturday, Cloud Camp Austin was held down on the UT campus. There was a very healthy turnout and a lot of great discussions were generated.
Sequence of Events
After opening salutations, camp got underway with a series of six five-minute lightening talks delivered by the camp’s gold sponsors.
My lightening talk: Mapping Processes in the Cloud (credit: Dave Nielsen)
The Main Event
From there, Dave Nielsen, the man who originally developed the cloud camp format (and who took most of the pictures in this post — see them all), guided us through the process of coming up with topics for session discussions. That process, appropriately enough given that this was an unconference, began with an “unpanel.”
The Unpannel: Michael Wilde of Splunk, (not sure), Dustin from Canonical, Cote, myself (credit Dave Nielsen)
All Together Now
The way it worked was the room first brainstormed a list of topics they were interested in discussing/learning more about. Anyone who thought they were an expert on one or more of these topics got to get up from their seats and form a five person panel at the front of the room. Each member of the panel then answered two questions from the board and as the question was answered the audience was asked if the topic had been covered by the answer or if it warranted further discussion in an afternoon session
(L->R) Dave Nielsen leads us through our unconference set up. Canonical's Dustin Kirkland and hero-for-hire John West lend a hand.
A Schedule is Born
After the panel, as a group we all decided what the final sessions would be and who would lead them. To lead a session you could either be knowledgeable in the area or completely clueless but wanted to learn about it.
The completed schedule: three sessions ran at a time and there were three time slots (credit Dave Nielsen)
Coming Soon
While at camp I did a couple of video interviews, one with Dustin Kirkland of Canonical and one with Todd Morey of Mosso/Rackspace. I should be posting those in the next few days. I also found myself on the other end of the microphone being interviewed by Mr. Cote. That should be appearing in the near distant future on his blog.
Devin Rickard is a Senior Director of Business Process Improvement at Symantec, the company best known for its Norton line of security products. The team that Devin belongs to acts as internal process consultants at the company and they’ve adopted Lombardi Blueprint as the common process modeling tool for the group. What they found however is that Blueprint has a wide appeal beyond their group.
I caught up with Devin to learn about process improvement at Symantec and how his team was using Blueprint.
Devin Rickard of Symantec's Business Process Improvement team
Some of the topics Devin tackles:
Symantec has grown through rapid organic growth as well as acquisition. This has led to processes being executed in islands. Devin’s group works with the islands to try and “pull them together into a single continent.”
The team practices “stealth six sigma.” They have adapted the processes and tools from Six Sigma so that they fit the Symantec corporate culture.
What started as a nice tool for the practitioners has ended up becoming the core catalyst that brings together individuals and helps them to visualize what they are trying to improve upon for Symantec customers and partners.
As business owners or process managers become engaged they are becoming aggressive adopters of Blueprint. They find it gets them a picture of their business that they’ve never had before and they want to find the areas within their own processes that they can make improvements to.
The interest/involvement of the business has noticeably shortened the time to improvements.
Some of the projects Devin and team have used Blueprint for: transforming the quote to cash process and the procure to pay process (Blueprint helped to cut the time to pay employee expense reports from 3-5 weeks to 2-3 days) as well as working on ways to make the process of integrating acquisitions smoother.
Next month I’ll be heading over to Houston to attend APQC’s knowledge management conference. One of the talks I’m interested in checking out will be given by Bryant Clevenger, the global leader for IBM GBS’s knowledge sharing strategy.
On the KMedge blog, Bryant explains what they’ve been up to:
At IBM, leveraging knowledge has always been an important part of our business. Last year, we undertook a massive overhaul of the technology and approach we use for knowledge management, moving from a centrally managed, linear, taxonomy- and repository-based system to one that leverages the best of Web 2.0, including social software, user participation, and key market-driven concepts like sponsored links.
As a promo for his talk, Bryant put together the following video, complete with a rockin’ BTO instrumental soundtrack :).
Some of the topics the video addresses:
How do you harness the expertise and leverage the knowledge that is spread across 387,000 people located in 170 countries?
1 in 4 workers has been with their current employer for less than 12 months.
People are using web 2.0 in their daily lives, they expect the same tools in the workplace.
The IBM employee knowledge portal allows users to
Search across multiple content repositories
Create social tags, peer ratings and tag content
Locate experts and contact them.
The portal surfaces: 1) the highest rated internal content, 2) Leadership priorities and 3 external competitor info.
Bryant’s “modest” vision for the portal: Unprecedented access to content and experts will shorten the sales cycle and will expand the reach of information…removing country and organization barriers and enabling the globally integrated enterprise.
Goodness for any size
Whether this project actually leads to the “enabling of the globally integrated enterprise” or not I think this effort will create considerable value. I also believe that you don’t have to be a huge multinational like IBM to benefit from the availability of Web 2.0-based tools in the workplace. Web 2.0 tools are built around the principles of linking, sharing, participation and collaboration — valuable elements for a company of any size.
Don’t touch that dial
BTW, If you are interested increasing linking, sharing, participation and collaboration in your organization you’ll want to check out our next Blueprint release, coming soon to a browser near you. Stay tuned 🙂
A few weeks ago I blogged about the Forrester review of Blueprint that was published in early February.
We recently purchased licensing rights to the report, “Vendor Snapshot: Lombardi Blueprint Bridges Gap Between Process Discovery And Execution” and it is now available here.
Quotable Quotes
Here are some of my favorite quotes from the report:
Blueprint provides a process modeling and discovery platform that blends collaboration and documentation capabilities into an easy-to-use, low cost, software-as-a-service offering that can be used by beginner to expert process analysts.
Blueprint combines the best of both worlds for analysts: the “ready-to-use” feel of office productivity tools and the comprehensive knowledge repository found in traditional BPA tools.
Lombardi Blueprint represents a new way of developing, delivering, and interacting with software — the combination of SaaS, Web 2.0, and business process.
From the very beginning, BPM suite vendors sold business and process analysts on empty promises of easy-to-use modeling capabilities. Lombardi is one of the first BPM suite vendors to deliver on the promise of ease of use for process analysts. Lombardi Blueprint combines collaboration, ease of use, and a centralized process repository into an inexpensive and elegant SaaS-based offering.
But don’t take Forrester’s word for it…
And if those quotes don’t get you to sign-up for a free 30-day trial of Blueprint, I don’t know what will. 🙂 Check Blueprint out for yourself. Sign-up for a free trial here.
A bunch of cool Lombardi-related news bits came out last week. I’ve been a bit slow on the uptake so I thought I’d put them together into one entry.
Lombardi Announces ’08 Results
A cause for celebration!
Last week we announced results for last year (our fiscal and calendar years are the same). It was our best year yet and particularly cool was that fact that our software sales grew 47% year over year.
My favorite quote from the release was from our president Phil Gilbert, “[customers] need to lose fat while building muscle. Lombardi helps our customers do both.”
SaaS Adoption: Surpassed 4,500 companies using Lombardi Blueprint, an on-demand process-documentation tool that is used to collaboratively map an organization’s business processes, identify problems, and prioritize improvement opportunities, making it the most widely used Software as a Service (SaaS) BPM product.
Cap Gemini goes with Lombardi
Under the heading “with a little help from our friends” (especially the ones who are big Systems Integrators), we announced that Cap Gemini’s Business Process Outsourcing Platform “will deploy Lombardi Teamworks as the standard process framework for all of its BPOpen 2.0™ BPO managed processes and will make it available to both existing and future customers as a way to help drive further efficiencies in their businesses.” (And for those of you prefer your announcements in French, voila). (Or Dutch).
Gartner 2009 BPMS Magic Quadrant released
And under the heading “everyone’s favorite 2×2 matrix,” Gartner released its ’09 Magic Quadrant for Business Process Management Suites. (Man are there a lot of players in the space these days!) Lombardi was very pleased to find itself in the leaders quadrant once again. To see exactly where, click here.
Interestingly enough, the product that Lombardi Blueprint most often replaces for process mapping is not some high-end tool but rather Visio. So to let Visio users know that there was a better way to document their processes we launched a PPC campaign on Friday.
The campaign takes the user to a landing page on our site where we feature a 2:49 video (starring yours truly in his very first role as a video pitchman). After a brief intro, the video takes the viewer through a high-level overview of Blueprint and compares it to Visio. Check it out:
If you like what you see and want to try a 30-day free trial you can sign up here.
Last month we held our company kick off where all 200+ of our employees from all around the world gathered here in Austin for meetings to get set for the upcoming year. One of the highlights of the three days was the 4th annual Lombardi Science Fair.
The official program and ballot.
Each year, people are given a couple of weeks during work time to work on a project that extends the base platform of Blueprint or Teamworks in some cool new way. As the official Science Fair rules state: “Anyone at Lombardi can enter… all you have to do is think up a project, register the project on the wiki page build the project, and show up ready to pitch your project on January 27!”
Two of the four winners, Scott and Allison and MC Phil previewing the grand prize.
This year there were close to 40 projects and awards were given in three different categories as well as one project that was picked as “Best in Show.” The winners received iPod Nanos and the Best in Show was the recipient of $1,000 in cold hard cash. Not only that, but all of the winners will be show cased at Lombardi’s upcoming customer event, Driven.
The Fair commences.
Everyone Wins
The real cool thing for customers, Lombardi and the entrants is that a lot of these out-o’-the-box projects find their way into the products over the coming year.
This was my first time at Science Fair and I was really impressed with, given the size of Lombardi, how elaborate the whole shebang was. Nice way to keep innovation pumping.
The latest Blueprint update debuted this weekend. Being a cloud-based application we are able to push out a new Blueprint release every ~6 weeks and drive continuous improvement in the product. (In case you’re wondering about the picture to the left, each release comes with its own cheesy-band code name. As you can probably guess, the code name for this release was REO Speedwagon).
We’re Listening
In this latest Blueprint release we tackled the top three customer requests we’ve heard over the past few months on the forums and out in the field:
Autocomplete revamp
Swimlane improvements
File attachments and the word export
If you can spare 1 minute and 18 seconds, check out the video that Blueprint Product Manager Dave Marquard put together that takes you through the new features.
For more details on the release, check out Dave’s entry.
Coming Soon to a Browser near you
What’s next? Well alphabetically we are up to “Survivor” and its gonna be a cool one. It’s coming out party will be in April at our Driven 2009 user conference. Until then, you keep up with the latest and greatest in the world of Blueprint by following us on twitter.
At the end of last year, Blueprint Product Manager Dave Marquard and I had a call with Forrester analyst Clay Richardson to brief him on Lombardi Blueprint. The result of that call and a considerable amount of further research was a 6-page report that debuted last Friday — “Vendor Snapshot: Lombardi Blueprint Bridges Gap Between Process Discovery And Execution.”
Austin-based Lombardi Software’s latest offering, Blueprint, positions the vendor to extend its leadership in human-centric business process management (BPM) and takes direct aim at Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, and Visio as the tools of choice for process analysts. Blueprint provides a process modeling and discovery platform that blends collaboration and documentation capabilities into an easy-to-use, low cost, software-as-a-service offering that can be used by beginner to expert process analysts. To stay ahead of the pack, the platform needs to continue extending its collaborative Web 2.0 functionality as other BPM suite vendors play catch-up by introducing similar offerings. Consider Lombardi Blueprint if you need a collaborative and lightweight process discovery tool that is tailored to support geographically dispersed process discovery teams.
We are in the process of licensing this report and as soon as we do, we will be making it available on the lombardi.com site. If you are already a Forrester client, you can log in access the report here.
Yesterday I chatted with Dr. Joyce Statz who has been teaching a course at St. Edwards University in its school of management and business. Her course, “Multiple project and portfolio management” is offered as part of the Masters of Science in Project Management degree, and teaches how to manage multiple portfolios of project work in an organization.
I recently learned that Joyce introduced Lombardi Blueprint as a tool within her class and had a lot of success. I called her up to learn more.
Who are the students that make up her class and what are their backgrounds?
Mixing concepts with hands-on exercises
Replacing Visio/Word/Excel in the classroom
How the strongest Visio advocates at the beginning of the term became the biggest Blueprint champions at the end of the course.
Blueprint Educational Program
Lombardi provides free Blueprint subscriptions for educational use. If you are teaching or taking a course where you think Blueprint would be appropriate, please contact us at blueprint@lombardi.com to learn more.
Over the the holiday break I chatted with Stacie Kenney, a Business Process Analyst with West Bend Mutual Insurance. West Bend is located in Wisconsin and has been around since 1894. They offer property/casualty insurance for businesses, homes, autos, and personal property through independent agencies in six states.
Stacie and I discussed how she worked over the last year to help create a small commercial offering which, before BPM and process mapping, had not been practical to offer.
We also discussed the role that process mapping played in the recent IT department re-org, helping to streamline processes and breakdown silos.
West Bend Business Analyst and Blueprinter, Stacie Kenney
West Bend’s “Smart Business” offering and how it leverages new technologies like services, content generation tool and Teamworks.
Given that the “Smart Business” premiums were small, the goal was to de-complicate the process so that the agencies could set up the policy with very little time up front.
Before Blueprint, the BA’s leveraged Visio for flows along with a “mammoth” spec doc in Word. The biggest issue with this approach was keeping the content in sync.
West Bend was drawn to Blueprint by its collaboration and document generation capabilities.
The “Road To Excellence” and the IT re-org, breaking down silos and centralizing the BA’s.
Using process mapping to document the flow of work coming into the BA group from the business, categorize it and then deliver it back on a monthly basis.
Next week I’m making my way back to the Bay Area to attend the Cloud Connect un-conference that is being held Jan 20-22 at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View.
The conference is being held in the unstructured un-conference style which I prefer. It allows more time for meeting people and talking about what you want to talk about. That being said, the event won’t be total anarchy and in fact I’m looking forward to the talk David Berlind is moderating Tuesday night. There is also a cool panel that Red Monk analyst and fellow Eph, Stephen O’Grady is leading the following day on the Cloud and Lock-in.
I will be attending the conference armed with an audio recorder as well as a brand new Flip Mino to try my hand at Video podcasting. Attendees, you are forewarned 🙂
Checking out Blueprint in Action
While I’m out in the Valley I’m going to visit a couple of big accounts to see first-hand how they are using the Lombardi Blueprint and also get their input on what they’d like to see in the way of new functionality going forward.
The other area that I want to research is the applicability of Blueprint in the supplier chain/operations world. I think it would be a great fit but i want to check with some contacts out there to get their thoughts.
As the year 2008 draws to a close one more Lombardi Blueprint release has just just gone live.
The login-screen has been cleaned up (except for the coffee stains)and “Twitter-fied.”
The release, code-named “Quiet Riot” (in keeping with the official Blueprint code-naming schema) is characterized by a bunch of cool new features (you can read about them in detail or see the short overview video on Dave’s Blog) designed to make this process mapping tool more collaborative, more powerful and even easier to use.
Here is the high-level list:
File Attachments: These are powered behind the scenes by Mosso’s Cloud Files and allow you to attach screenshots, word docs, spreadsheets etc. Additionally, your files are conveniently added to the same place you collect other information regarding a particular process step.
Easy Invites: Looking to give the gift of Blueprint this holiday season? Well it just got easier. We’ve cleaned up the homepage and now to invite someone all you need to do is to type in their email address in the space prominently located at the top of the page.
Password Rules: Password strength can be set at one of three different levels (high, medium or minimum) using a handy slider bar.
Twitter: This Enterprise 2.0 app just got 2.0-ier
Enterprise 2.0 features like collaboration via wiki-like functionality and IM are at the center of Blueprint. Now in this latest release we’ve added a Twitter feed which powers the “What’s New” section on the login page (see the screenshot at the top of the page).
If the thought of Twitter sounds a bit intimidating, don’t worry, the feed on the login page is transparent to you, all you will notice are postings that are updated from time to time.
If you do want to follow the Twitter feed directly along with your other feeds, click on the little Twitter icon (in the bottom right corner of the yellow sticky) and you’ll be taken to the actual Blueprint Update Twitter page where you can see all the posts. Obviously Twitter works both ways so we’re looking forward to collecting feedback from you as well.
Check out the Blueprint Twitter feed directly at: twitter.com/BlueprintUpdate.
Hope you enjoy Quiet Riot. As always the 6-7 week release beat goes on. Who’s up next? R.E.O Speedwagon.
1. that we’ve signed Google’s corporate contributor agreement
2. that we’re adopting GWT (Google Web Toolkit) as a core part of JBoss Middleware
The world doesn’t need another Java framework for developing rich AJAX apps. so we’ve decided to go with what we think is a real leader – Google Web Toolkit. (Read more)
(I hope this doesn’t mean that JBoss will be replacing us as the self-proclaimed GWT poster child 😉 )
GWT draws inspiration from the Brady Bunch (does that make Alex, Cindy?)
And in other News
In other GWT related news today, Google posted a timeframe and details for their next release, 1.6. And as if that wasn’t enough, Google also posted four sets of developer videos where each of the four gentlemen (including Lombardi Blueprint‘s very own Alex Moffat) discuss how GWT has helped them and why they chose it as their weapon of choice.
Update: This just in… (non-geeks need not read on)
A few hours after I originally posted this entry, the Register posted their summary of today’s events and quoted our Mr. Moffat
Alex Moffat, chief engineer at the business process management firm – and GWT user – Lombardi Software told El Reg he’s mostly interested in GWT 1.6’s string performance and compiler improvements.
However, Moffat said he’s disappointed to see GWT’s in-browser hosted mode has been moved to a “post 1.6” feature on Google’s roadmap. The feature, which lets developers debug their apps within a web browser rather than GWT, was originally slated for version 1.5 and then 1.6 until Google’s latest development update.
A couple of weeks ago Alex Moffat, chief engineer for Lombardi Blueprint, jetted out to Mountain View to record a video at Google headquarters.
The video, which is in YouTube’s new 16:9 aspect ratio (the only way you want to watch Lawrence of Arabia or Blueprint demos), is part of a series of developer videos Google is doing to show the cool things that can be built using Google Web Toolkit (GWT).
What you’ll see (and what you’ll get)
In the video, which is only a minute and 16 seconds, Alex shows how business users can enter info in outline form which then generates corresponding boxes in an adjacent map view. These boxes can be easily moved around via drag-and-drop. Additionally, at the push of a button this high-level view is auto-magically converted into a process flow diagram. As Alex points out, thanks to GWT, all of this happens completely within any browser without the user having to download any plug-ins like Flash etc.
Yesterday, Dave Marquard posted a cool video on the Lombardi blog that provides a great introduction to Blueprint. The video, which is less than three minutes long, was created by Nachi Chidambaram, a Lombardi Business Process Management Analyst. Check it out below.
For those who prefer to read — Spoiler Alert!
The video starts out by showing how a process mapping project works using Visio and the tremendous amount of double-work that’s involved: transcribing from sticky notes, managing and incorporating a blizzard of feedback and keeping track of attachments.
With Blueprint on the other hand, as Nachi explains you can capture the original brainstorming session directly in the browser-based product and then, at a push of a button, transform your discovery map into a process flow diagram. Also due to Blueprint’s collaborative and wiki-like nature, keeping track of feedback and input is easy and attachments are all stored in a central repository accessible to all. And given that Blueprint is cloud-based you can get started as fast as you can enter your credit card number 🙂
Posted by Barton George 
Barton's Blog 