Blog Innowix

A friend asked: What Blogs do you read?

2011-09-27T11:56:00.001-04:00

Here are some of my favorites.

Kurzweil - Accelerating Intelligence - http://www.kurzweilai.net/ - very good insights into the evolving field of AI and Future of technologies

Lifehacker - http://lifehacker.com/ - Generally good and useful content

J.D. Meier's Blog - http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jmeier/ - Very good content around Microsoft’s Patterns and Practices and now he has moved on to Azure area. He maintains a personal blog called “Sources of Insight - Skills for mind, body, emotions, career, financial, relationships, and fun” at http://sourcesofinsight.com/ - worth reading

MSDN Blogs – http://blogs.msdn.com

Nick Malik’s Inside Architecture blog - http://blogs.msdn.com/b/nickmalik/ - Good insights into Enterprise Architecture and general debate on value of EA etc.

Mashable - http://mashable.com/ - good commentary on social happenings

Some personal interest stuff - Engadget, Gizmodo, My Next and other similar blogs on consumer electronics

I do maintain (rather attempt to maintain and update) two blogs:

Blog Innowix - http://bloginnowix.blogspot.com/- Promoting my company

Nitya Nivedan (mostly for kids) - http://nityanivedan.blogspot.com/ - Some of the cool happenings in the world and pop culture items to expand their horizons

Content consumption in Social Web World

My content consumption style has changed significantly. I am more into Twitter feed and checking out the headlines on the blogs mentioned above and many more on my personalized iGoogle page which includes the latest news from multiple sources, finance and stock market pulse, my e-mails, Facebook updates, weather and few other things. If something interests me more then I click on the link and read the details.

Otherwise, 6 to 8 word headlines (less than 100 characters!) is sufficient. ADHD has kicked in and finding that one long article and reading through has become more and more difficult.

That is why books are much better to read - on paper. Much less distractions and impulses to jump around.

Your thoughts?

Puzzle Party 2011 Conclusion

2011-08-14T21:53:00.004-04:00

The Puzzle Party 2011 is over. It was held on Aug 6, 2011 at Kensington Metro Park Shelter C (Spring Hill Shelter). It was a hot and muggy day but it did rain a little during the afternoon. However, shelter was big enough to accommodate all the participants well.

We had approximately 50 participants ranging in age from 2 years all the way to 60+.

Read more at Google Site page: https://sites.google.com/site/puzzleparty2011/conclusion

Innowix Puzzle Party 2011

2011-05-22T22:43:00.000-04:00

Welcome to 6th annual Innowix Puzzle Party. For those who haven't participated in past, please check out the arrangements and conclusion from 2008 party at http://sites.google.com/site/puzzleparty2008/Home.

Location: Shelter C - Kensington Metro Park, Milford, MI
Time: 11 AM onwards

We hosted Puzzle Party 2010 at New Jersey with friends who worked on the project with me. It was just held for couple of hours but it was loads of fun as usual (fun for me while they solved the puzzle and then fun for them when we talked about solutions!). That is why we didn’t have here in Detroit Metro area (and also that my partner-in-crime Puzzle Master Pattabi moved to California).

One of the promises we had made during the conclusion of 2009 was that we will entertain puzzles from the participants and Puzzle Masters will become participants for those puzzles. So, please bring your puzzles (be gentle please!). We will entertain at least one puzzle per team (may be more if time permits).

This time around, you will have nothing to bring. You are welcome to bring some games to play in the park.

Here’s the rough program:

11 to 1:30 – Gather, games and lunch (sponsored by Innowix)
2 – 4 – Puzzle solving
5 – Prize distribution
5:15 onwards - Games or go home

Send in your RSVP. Looking forward to seeing you there.

Hiren

IBM Watson leads way to Singularity but will have to learn Roboethics and obey Asimov’s 3 (and some) rules of Robotics to behave

2011-02-17T00:24:00.005-05:00

Update 2: IBM's Watson site http://www-943.ibm.com/innovation/us/watson/

Update 1:
Here's a YouTube video on how they built Watson: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3G2H3DZ8rNc
IBM is already working on applying Watson technologies to Healthcare. From IBM: "... a doctor considering a patient's diagnosis could use Watson's analytics technology, in conjunction with Nuance's voice and clinical language understanding solutions, to rapidly consider all the related texts, reference materials, prior cases, and latest knowledge in journals and medical literature to gain evidence from many more potential sources than previously possible. This could help medical professionals confidently determine the most likely diagnosis and treatment options."

Original post below...

This subject has been beaten to death by now and every geek is smiling with pride that a computer beat two human beings in the Jeopardy! challenge. It is an amazing feet for humans to create such a machine, teach it all the knowledge and teach it how to "listen" to answers and find the best question (yeah – that's how the Jeopardy! is played). Check out Day 2 on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZLdkJpAtt1I. Alex also shows some of the hardware behind Watson.

This was a massive effort on IBM's part where they spent close to $100M for hardware and software. The hardware specs are impressive - (90 IBM Power 750 servers using 15 terabytes of RAM and 2,880 processor cores taking up almost as much space as was taken by Eniac – the first computer built in 1940s (just to keep things in perspective folks – in 70 years since we have machines which almost act like humans so imagine what next 30 years will bring? Read on – Singularity is almost here!).

The software is even more astonishing! Remember, you have to follow all the rules of Jeopardy! This means that you have to know

What are the categories?
What's the value of each question?
Whose turn is it?
How much to wager for the "Double Jeopardy!" question?
Should I answer if the other contestants' answers were not correct?
How much to wager for the "Final Jeopardy! Question"?

For the most part, these are simple algorithms to implement. The biggest issue is to understand Alex Trebek's spoken instructions, answers and any other jokes etc. to filter them out and create a machine understandable question to which it can go find an answer.

Watson did pretty well with factual questions but when the questions had some correlation (I really cannot explain but here's an example: The category was Computer Keys and the answer was "___ is where the heart is!". The question is "What is Home". Watson's potential matches were totally out of context).

Here's where our ability to "program" a computer to learn context and references falls short. How do you teach that? Well – how do you teach kids such things? Is this simile? Will it understand idioms and figure of speech? How about rhetorical expressions?

Well – those types of advanced "emotional" and "lateral thinking" aspects will take time to program into a computer. However, the time is not too far. Hopefully in my lifetime we will have an event known as Technological Singularity.

As per Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity):

"A Technological singularity is a hypothetical event occurring when technological progress becomes so rapid that it makes the future after the singularity qualitatively different and harder to predict. Many of the most recognized writers on the singularity, such as Vernor Vinge and Ray Kurzweil, define the concept in terms of the technological creation of superintelligence, and allege that a post-singularity world would be unpredictable to humans due to an inability of human beings to imagine the intentions or capabilities of superintelligent entities."

Time magazine has covered this subject in their latest issue well.

http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,2048138,00.html

The gist of it is that by 2045, we will have Technological Singularity (TS) and beyond that we cannot imagine (unless you really stretch your brain muscles!) where the new innovations will take us. Very interesting read – I highly recommend it. However, one of the key points which TIME didn't do enough justice is around Ethics and Morals for the time when we achieve TS and machines become self-aware and start building and innovating in unimaginable ways. It is like raising kids – you have to teach them right and wrong, good and bad, good and evil etc. Presumably our yardstick of good/bad or right/wrong are generally accepted and will be so in future too! But the point is that somebody will have to teach these computers these emotional items so that when we get to TE, we are not staring at SkyNet from Terminator which knowingly or unknowingly tries to eliminate humankind.

This brings me to the Isaac Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Laws_of_Robotics).

A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
A robot must obey any orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

These are very simple rules and if you program the Robot's OS (rather put these instructions in the CPU itself!) then we should not have to worry about it too much. Now, there will always be cases where a robot may have to "pick between the lesser of the two evils" – meaning making a choice in a situation where it has to figure out possible courses it can take which may ALL hurt humans and then it has to calculate the path of least damage. That is the most painful part for human beings and I am not sure how to teach that to a machine.

Anyways, the Wikipedia article goes on to introduce additional rules including a zeroth rule:

A robot may not harm humanity, or, by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.

Fourth law:

A robot must establish its identity as a robot in all cases.

And fifth law:

A robot must know it is a robot.

Please read the Wikipedia article for full details on these laws and what types of scenarios various authors came up with which required them to introduce these laws. Very interesting and mind bending reading at times!

So, these laws have evolved into the Roboethics (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roboethics) and eventually to Ethics of Artificial Intelligence (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethics_of_artificial_intelligence).

Bottom line is that these fields will have to merge and a good reference framework for good vs bad, right vs wrong will have to be defined without being prejudiced about attributes of human beings including religion, sex, shape, size, color. May be we should start teaching these things ourselves first before we can effectively teach these to our kids and eventually to the artificial intelligence in the machines.

Another thought that occurred to me about learning was around how do babies and kids learn? The mechanics of learning involves getting exposed to various stimuli including parents, TV, teachers and now Internet, books, movies, radios, environment and many other such factors. Watson had to be fed entire encyclopedias, knowledgebase and other such knowledge works and it created complex data structure which were efficient for searching etc. We human beings also do similar exercise right from the time we are born. It is just that the breadth and depth of the subjects taught to us are not as wide as what Watson was taught! So, theoretically, you could record ALL stimuli a baby is being exposed to and keep teaching machines from that experience. This knowledge augmented with the established knowledge of humankind (like what was fed to Watson) can be an awesome resource for humans. It is like that Matrix movie where she learns to fly a helicopter in matter of seconds by simply downloading the entire manual and flying instructions!

Gordon Bell of Microsoft is already recording everything he is getting exposed to using video camera and a microphone. Check out http://totalrecallbook.com/ - the title says it all – Your Life, Uploaded. The digital way to better memory, health and productivity. So, kids - start early! Record everything on Facebook and Twitter and then we will find a way to tie those learning with what you learn at school and what others learned through the history, geography and other subjects and then you can pass exams easily. Hey – but why do you need an exam then! Well – you will need exams to ensure that you can use this stuff effectively! What's the point if you cannot search the answer to 2x2?

Anyways, in conclusion, I am sure a time will come where we will be able to easily tap into the vast knowledge of humanity using highly contextual searches (natural language search) and that will make our lives better. Just make sure that we teach our kids the right stuff and so that they can program those machines accordingly!

Back to Watson and how it can help us today. They are thinking up many applications where Watson can help. First and foremost is medical field where once fed with all the aspects of human anatomy, symptoms, diseases and medicines etc., you just have to tell that I am having these health issues and it will diagnose the issue accurately and also recommend a course of action. Similar things can be applied for many other fields including insurance, fraud detection and many other fields. I am sure IBM is going to get 10 times the return on the investment they made on Watson!

(Phew! This was a long rambling…).

For more details around how Watson came around and what are some of the implementations behind it, check out following links:

CNN - Behind-the-scenes with IBM's 'Jeopardy!' computer, Watson By John D. Sutter, CNN (February 7, 2011 8:29 a.m. EST) http://www.cnn.com/2011/TECH/innovation/02/07/watson.ibm.jeopardy/index.html

Also, some good details around algorithms and implementation of DeepQA can be found here: http://www.taranfx.com/artificial-intelligence-algorithm-behind-ibm-watson

The actual whitepaper - "Building Watson: An Overview of the DeepQA Project" - is available here: http://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs124/AIMagzine-DeepQA.pdf

Yago is one of the knowledge base which was fed to Watson. YAGO (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YAGO_%28database%29) is a knowledge base developed at the Max-Planck-Institute Saarbrücken. The knowledge base contains information harvested from Wikipedia and linked to Wordnet. It knows more than 2 million entities (like persons, organizations, cities, etc.), and knows 20 million facts about these entities. YAGO has a manually confirmed accuracy of 95%. It can be queried online. The YAGO ontology is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License.

I imagine that they would have fed it Encyclopedia Britanica along with CIA World Factbook (https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/) and Internet Movie Database - IMDB (http://www.imdb.com/). How about the complete catalog of Library of Congress?

Happy Third Birthday to Innowix – Future Plans

2010-10-22T15:31:00.001-04:00

This is the third installment of "Celebrating Innowix's 3^rd Birthday" blog entries. We are making some of our plans public and invite comments, feedback and even expect to collaborate a bit with some of you.

Plans for 2011

Hire at least 2 (two) architects in the company as partners
To be achieved by Q2-2011

Even though I have people working for me, I am looking for those key confidants who can come along and join the adventure. There are always risks in running a company but the rewards and fun outweigh the risks. I have been talking to few folks whom I respect very much and have invited them to join. I am very hopeful that some of them will see the benefits and come over (Mr. AP, AM, VP, PV, NP, DD, VC, NG and PB – are you reading this?).
Sign-on two new clients
To be achieved by Q2-2011

Even though Innowix has been doing well so far, we are dependent on one or two clients. This has to change to reduce the risks and dependency on one client. Hopefully this will materialize by early 2011.
Delivery of at least one project as prime (preferably leveraging the case management framework)
To be achieved by Q4-2011

This one is a tricky one and little difficult to achieve! However, without a successful implementation, a framework is no good. It will be very sad to say "There are no case studies for the Case Management framework"! Hopefully that will not be the case.
Achieve certifications in the area of Project Management Professional (PMP), The Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF) (http://www.opengroup.org/togaf9/cert/index.tpl) and IT Architecture Certification (http://www.opengroup.org/itac/).
To be achieved by Q1-2011

These are obvious and should have done few years back but I guess the timing is right now.
Work on few "Hobby" projects which may turn into new service offerings in future
Throughout 2011 (not having a specific target may not be such a good idea! Let's see how this goes through 2011.)
These are exciting times in the technology industry. New consumer technology platforms are emerging as giants in the IT industry and before we know it, they will be invading the Business IT. Apple and Google are classic examples. Some of the Business IT solutions are now trying to find their foothold in the consumer area. Then there are some who are trying to "cross-pollinate" technologies and solutions in various domains and we would love to be one of those key players. Innowix has been playing with quite a few ideas (some of them are good and some are lame – at least from my perspective) and one or two look promising.
These projects include developing applications on Windows 7 & Windows Mobile 7 and Android, iOS (including Apple TV!). The applications we are focusing on will be business centric and less consumer centric. However, if an idea comes up which makes sense then consumer facing application will also be a good starting point.
Building something like this alone may not be feasible which we are trying to manage the cash flow and future growth. So, I may be looking for partners who have similar interests. If anybody is interested in investing some funding, we are all open for it!
Offer Architecture Workshops to potential clients
By Q1-2011
Again, Innowix is partnering with couple of key partners who have been very supportive of us in our past endeavors. To drive further projects for Innowix and our partners, Innowix will offer a one day Architecture workshop free of cost to our clients where we will come in and review their IT processes and practices (Enterprise Architecture, Governance, IT Strategies, Technology Platforms, related implementation strategies and governance, Solution delivery methodologies and practices, Future trends and adoption approaches etc.) and provide high-level guidance on where they should focus. Obviously one day is not sufficient for us to gather and assess everything thoroughly but we are confident that we should be able to hit few high-level points effectively. Innowix also stands to gain an understanding of our client's industry and their IT practices to enrich and validate our IT architecture approaches. Our Innowix Architecture Framework will serve as a Solution Accelerator for such a workshop.

Conclusion and answer to question – "What does Innowix do"?

As I had mentioned in my previous blog post "Envisioning and Pragmatic execution - Two faces of progress" (http://bloginnowix.blogspot.com/2010/07/envisioning-and-pragmatic-execution-two.html), we have to maintain our balance while looking forward and running. Our future plans are driven by this philosophy. Few items are strictly for the "balancing and running" and few are wishes for "forward looking" projects and plans.

In general, Innowix is in the business of innovative application of information technology to solve business problems and improve business efficiencies. The focus has always been on IT architecture as streamlined IT architecture has the most positive impact on the application of information technology.

Your comments, feedback, inputs and pointers will be highly appreciated. Of course, if you wish to collaborate with us on any of these, please drop us a note via Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook.

Happy Third Birthday to Innowix – Tasks and Projects in Progress

2010-10-22T15:29:00.001-04:00

This is the second blog entry celebrating Innowix's 3^rd Birthday where we describe some of the work-in-progress projects and tasks.

Work-in-progress (To be completed in next 2 to 3 months)

Helping a bank in Asia Pacific with setting up a Business Process Management (BPM) Center of Excellence (CoE)
This is a very interesting project where I am utilizing some of the Innowix training material around BPM and validating the approaches and recommended practices. For any large organization such as this Bank's, the technology is not an issue but the application of technology within the constraints and frameworks of the organization becomes bigger challenge.
[Sidebar thoughts] The interesting thing is that the bank's BPM platform is FileNet P8 BPM. The issue I have is whether that is a long-term viable BPM platform for an organization when IBM has WebSphere Process Server (also being utilized at the Bank for system workflow) and Lombardi. Next few months will tell us how things are going to work out. I would love to see IBM's roadmap which should depict Lombardi forming a process modeling and Business Architecture tool with quite a few traits from Telelogic's Rational System Architect (creating that Social BPM framework), FileNet's Process Engine capabilities merging within WebSphere Process Server Platform with tight integration capabilities with FileNet's Content Engine and Cognos providing business monitoring capabilities (this last part as I understand is already happening). Let's see what IBM say at their Information on Demand 2010 conference and at Impact 2011 conference.
Respond to RFPs and deliver projects in partnership with couple of key players for State Govt clients in Health and Human Services (HIE, Child Support, Child Welfare (SACWIS) etc.), DMV, Education, Unemployment Insurance (UI), Transportation and other domains
Innowix has been very fortunate to have large consulting houses as our clients. We are tier-1 vendor for one of top five consulting giants in the State and Local Government business. However, from the growth perspective, Innowix has to look at and partner with other players as well who are emerging in this market. We are currently working with couple of such partners who play in different areas within State and Local Government space. Here's hoping to win and deliver couple of good projects together.
Working on building out a flexible framework for Case Management and few other foundation tools to augment technology in the market
I have been toying with this idea for some time now. More and more I look around and the need for such a case management framework is becoming more evident. However, I am planning to put something together which need not be a complete product which can be simply deployed and being used on day one but rather a set of components which can be integrated into a large line-of-business application which can rely on this framework. This framework will have key integration points for security, document imaging and management, reporting and customer management etc. More on this in future blog entries. The platform of choice is also open. Of course, putting something in the cloud will be the most attractive given the shape of IT industry. However, the architecture is flexible to leverage cloud computing platforms for all or portions of the framework.
Working on maturing training for SOA and Business Process Management (BPM) targeting Executives, Sr. and Mid-level managers, Architects and Designers & Developers
SOA is now so 2005 buzzword. However, there are still efficiencies to be gained from the adoption of such an approach. Innowix training material serves as an Introduction to SOA and goes into details about adoption approaches, best practices and governance aspects.
BPM is still a technology which will take next couple of years to mature. SOA forms the underpinning (plumbing approaches) of BPM (business centric application). Executing a BPM project or adopting BPM within an organization requires special attention to defining how businesses can leverage it to become more efficient. BPM is an easier concept for business folks to understand and adopt than SOA.

Next, review our future plans.

Happy Third Birthday to Innowix - Achievements

2010-10-22T14:55:00.005-04:00

Well folks, it has been three years since I started in this venture and so far it has been an exciting journey. It is not all smooth sailing as we had few ups and downs (mostly positives!). I am enjoying the lifestyle where I know my constraints and limits and what I can do with those limited means. No complaints or regrets whatsoever.

On this third anniversary, I thought of writing down the achievements, work-in-progress items and most importantly future plans.

Achievements

Definition and application of Innowix Architecture Framework and related Solution Accelerators
I have blogged about Innowix Architecture Framework before here. I had a chance to apply it to my second engagement for defining IT Strategy for one of the southern states. The framework helped define clear context for each branch of the organization and define their goals, processes, deliverables and transformation roadmap.
IT Strategy for a southern state
This project was completed back in 2009 where we helped the CIO of the Transportation Cabinet of this state define an IT Strategy for effective IT services delivery.
Architecture assessment and Performance Engineering for an Electronic Health Records (EHR) system for a healthcare provided in Detroit area
This project was completed back in 2008 where Innowix helped setup a Performance Engineering approach for a large EHR project running on Microsoft .NET platform.
DMV Solution for an eastern state
Engaged on a large project and led the architecture definition for technology platform and help arrive at application architecture. This is for a state government in the doming of Motor vehicles.
The project itself is an enterprise-wide system modernization and implementation project encompassing business processes for most of the agency and their field offices. We are utilizing IBM WebSphere suite of products.
Innowix led and completed the formal deliverables for the technology platform definition. Innowix was also responsible for planning out the functionality for first release of the project which went into Pilot this month and is being deployed around the state. This release consists of document scanning and management for specific business process based on EMC Captiva and IBM FileNet products.
We are now engaged in system design and development specifically in the area of implementing business processes on IBM WebSphere Process Server and SOA and Interfaces implementation using WebSphere Message Broker.

This has been a very exciting project where I have met tons of talent and a great customer team. Traveling to the location was a little downside but in an all it has been a fantastic experience.

Next up, check out what are we working on.

BPM Implementation - Answers to couple of questions on LinkedIn BPM Group

2010-08-22T23:40:00.002-04:00

Somebody asked a question on LinkedIn Group on BPM Implementation. The complete thread can be found at: http://www.linkedin.com/groupAnswers?viewQuestionAndAnswers=&discussionID=27533047&gid=73876&trk=EML_anet_qa_ttle-dnhOon0JumNFomgJt7dBpSBA

Here are the two questions and what follows is my attempt at answering these questions. Comments are welcome – either here or on the LinkedIn group.

-------------------

BPM Implementation

My organisation is in the process of evaluating various BPM vendors based on a POC by each vendor. Looking for inputs in 2 areas:

1. We would like to restrict the BOM to 'must have's". Can someone tell me what should be the ideal BOM to keep the budget within control.

2. What scope of work should we engage the vendor? for e.g. Can we have 1 of our employees trained by the vendor on the process designer/modeler? The objective being that we can have the vendor setup few processes initially to restrict customization charges.

-----------------

My answers…

On your Q1:

You should be looking at some of the evaluation criteria from different vendors to get an idea about key functions/features of a BPM system. BPM is a very broad subject area and it can cover many different things depending on who you ask. At the minimal, I would look for following "MUST HAVEs":

Support for system-centric business processes (Typically where humans are not involved). Usually the vendors support these using BPEL. Ensure the level of specification adherence for BPEL.
Human-centric business processes where human actions are required to move through process steps and complete. Usually vendors support this through their own proprietary extension to BPEL or through XPDL.
Document centric business processes where the documents are handled and processed through various steps both by humans and by system in some semi-automated fashion. Some organizations (or some departments within organizations) are heavy users of documents coming in (insurance companies, some government agencies etc.) where they have to process the documents, OCR them, categorize them into many different classes, route them to appropriate people, create responses or trigger the next steps in the process etc. Ensure that ALL appropriate parties in your organizations are represented in your "typical" process models.
Integration of these three different business process types as for a typical business processes, you cannot depict and manage the process using just one of the constructs above.
A modeling tool which can allow you to model, simulate (and allow you to optimize) and implement a process
A design, development and testing environment where you can implement and test the processes (realize process models). Please understand that for implementing a typically complex process, you will be invoking a bunch of services, handing things off to humans for exception handling and other decision making and finally moving few documents around to support the process execution. This requires an integrated set of design, development and testing tool where you can design and implement the services, design and implement the processes, create test stubs and drivers and allow a set of developers to complete the implementation of the process. Also, look for new standard for integrating external services called SCA (assuming you are looking for Java centric BPM suites).
Business rules design and integration is a new aspect which some vendors are introducing in their product line. If your business processes are constantly changing then you want to look at a rules engine.
A way for humans to review the process dashboard to claim tasks, route tasks to others, timeouts and escalations etc. This is also known as a task inbox. Some vendors (e.g., IBM) implement such a user interface and also provide detailed APIs for you to build your own.
Ask the vendors to provide some performance and scalability numbers (how many system-centric processes can execute at any given point of time, how does the system-centric processes scale for a standardized hardware platform that your infrastructure team has, how many in-flight human-centric business process instances can exist etc.). Of course, you will get typical answer that it depends and it does! It depends on the process complexity (number of steps, decision points, external service calls, data elements being transferred from step to step etc.). However, a good vendor will be able to provide some decent performance and volume numbers.
Once you have a process built, it is time to deploy it, run it and manage the execution. Here you are looking for a robust runtime environment with robust monitoring capabilities (I am talking about infrastructure monitoring and not the process monitoring – that topic is next).
Last but not the least, you are looking for Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) type of capabilities where you can identify the steps where the processes seem to get "stuck" or take the most time to complete and then you can analyze as to why. Most vendors with mature product offering will provide a good set of BAM capabilities using some reporting tools.
Last but not the least, the change management process for processes. Imagine, 2 years after you have implemented a bunch of processes you want to make the change in the processes (add new steps, route the steps to different group of people – say outsourced to some external vendor, or some regulation changed and now you have to collect additional data items etc.). This is where the vendors should be able to provide the ease of change. The problem is how to apply the change to those "in-flight" processes.
Licensing is another key issue. Depending on your deal size, vendors may throw in quite a few "freebies". However, think through some scenarios to ensure that a licensing model defined currently may change significantly if your process scenario changes and that will end up costing you a whole lot of money.

In summary, here are some MUST-HAVEs:

Support for BPEL (which level)
Support for human-centric business processes (how and which standards are used)
Support for document/content within the process
Modeling tools support
Design, development and testing tools and standards support
Performance and scalability
BAM capabilities
Change management
License costs

On your Q2:

I would prepare a detailed list of evaluation criteria and ask them to provide answers to those criteria. I would also create a good representative process models from your business (remember – involve as many departments to create realistic process models). However, once you give them the process models, make few changes (just like businesses do) and see their reaction to those changes. For a serious evaluation, get involved in all aspects – modeling, designing, implementing, testing, deploy and monitor. If you have time and money, I would also run some performance and load tests to see how the process infrastructure holds up under heavy demands. The scalability will affect the licensing!

I would also do some "paper analysis" to short-list 2 or 3 vendors and then do detailed hands-on evaluation. I would also request at least 2 or 3 client references which went through such evaluation and picked a vendor. Ask those other clients as to why they picked that vendor. Remember, vendor teams vary quite a bit from client to client and the vendor teams involved in such evaluations also vary in their experience and knowledge.

And lastly some shameless plug! Engage my company Innowix to help with such an evaluation. We have a detailed methodology for such a technical evaluation along with some readymade set of evaluation criteria for BPM suite selection which you can start from.

Good luck.

Hiren

Outline of Business Process Management (BPM) education/training material

2010-08-22T12:03:00.000-04:00

Here's a rough outline of the BPM material that I am putting together. I have quite a few items available in bits and pieces but I need to put them together in a coherent material which can be used for training different sets of audiences.

Any feedback will be highly appreciated!

1. What is BPM? Why is it important?

2. Business Introduction to BPM

a. Why is "Business" in the BPM important (duh!)? Or how does BPM help with the business value?
b. Relationship of Business Architecture and BPM

3. Technical Introduction to BPM

a. Reference Architecture
b. Industry standards
c. Tools and Products

4. Implementing BPM

a. BPM Maturity Model
b. Project level
c. Department or Organization level
d. BPM CoE

5. Upcoming technologies and Trends

a. New devices which improve business efficiencies
b. Complex Event Processing

6. BPM Governance

7. BPM Projects - Development Methodology (SDLC)

8. Business Activity Monitoring

9. Innowix methodology for BPM implementation

Innowix Services Overview

2010-08-22T00:12:00.004-04:00

To provide effective services in the IT domain to our clients, Innowix has created an architecture framework which helps guide execution of various types of IT projects ranging from Business Process re-engineering to simple infrastructure deployment. These IT projects can vary in size and scope and can encompass projects around definition and implementation of IT Strategy, Application Modernization programs, Enterprise Architecture programs, specific business systems development, technology implementation and infrastructure implementation.

Following diagram provides a high-level view of Innowix Architecture Framework.

Figure 1: Innowix Architecture Framework

The Innowix Architecture Framework consists of various areas predominant in Information Technology subject matter. The Innowix Architecture Framework consists of methodologies, guidelines, checklists, best practices and tools where applicable for effective execution of projects in respective areas. It also serves as a great reference for defining and managing overall IT Strategy for an organization. This architecture framework can be applied in managing and rationalizing the IT resources and assets in case of mergers of one or more business entities.

Innowix has successfully applied this framework for helping Transportation Cabinet of Commonwealth of Kentucky in defining their 5-year IT Strategy and Roadmap.

The Innowix Architecture Framework has following main subject areas and four supporting subject areas. Innowix services are organized around these subject areas:

Main Subject Areas of Innowix Architecture Framework and related services are:

IT Strategy
Business Solutions
Technology Platform
Infrastructure
Enterprise Architecture

Supporting Subject Areas of Innowix Architecture Framework and related services are:

Project and Program Management
Information and Data Governance
User Experience
System Development (Processes and Tools)

Following diagram shows details around services by area:

Figure 2: Overview of Innowix Services

More details on Innowix services can be found on Innowix website at
http://www.innowix.com.

Application Lifecycle Management (ALM)

2010-08-21T22:44:00.002-04:00

Application Lifecycle Management or ALM is a way to bring process management discipline to the software development area. Of course the main set of artifacts you manage within ALM are software development artifacts including requirements, design, code and test.

There are tons of tools which manage source code but there are not many tools around which do a good job of end-to-end traceability and management of the software artifacts and provide management tools. IBM has good set of tools and Microsoft's TFS is closing the gap. However, requirements management area is where there's tons of opportunities to optimize the processes with mature tools.

I am reviewing Jazz and IBM Team Concert platform to see if it allows third-party requirements management tools or not.

Of course, older I get I am realizing that the usability (or ease of use) is critical for successful usage of any tool. Installation and maintenance is secondary and IBM has to simplify installation and management aspects for their Rational tools.

Here's something new from Microsoft:

Visual Studio Database Guide

Envisioning and Pragmatic execution - Two faces of progress

2010-07-23T09:13:00.001-04:00

Hesitating to act because the whole vision might not be achieved or because others do not yet share it, is an attitude that only hinders progress – Gandhi .

Very inspiring and encouraging words! Just because a road is not there or a path not taken or something is not done in usual way doesn’t mean that the current status quo is the best option. Similarly, constraints are drivers for innovation often to try and find alternate ways of doing something and means of achieving one’s goals. That’s one of Innowix’s core values. We strongly believe that constraints (technological, financial, political or business) drive to innovative thinking and approaches and we see these as opportunities rather than constraints.

Of course, this philosophy also has to be accompanied by some pragmatism. Envisioning without constraints is great but execution has to be grounded in reality and pragmatism. I am sure all of you can relate to this easily.

That’s the dilemma I am under. There are tons of product/framework ideas that are I am thinking about. However, there are many constraints – mainly financial (read CASH FLOW!) which keep me firmly grounded in reality. Some of these ideas are simply incremental in nature meaning take something somebody has done and add to it to bring additional value. Some of the ideas are quite radical and when I talk to friends about those, I get very cold or unwelcoming reception. But then I remind myself of this quote and keep telling myself that I have to find ways to convert my vision into reality and I am working on those things!
So, dear friends, please keep those negative criticisms and comments coming. I need to hear that to better my vision and build a better case grounded in reality.

Thanks.

Follow-up on my earlier post on “Gadgets/Widgets in the Enterprise”

2008-06-17T22:07:00.000-04:00

This is a follow-up to my earlier blog post on Gadgets and Widgets in the Enterprise.

I am currently engaged at a client who is developing an enterprise application to manage their customer records. Their entire business revolves around their customers (well – if you are a hospital then your business revolves around your customers – patients!). The business users need to review information about their customers in near real-time and make decision and provide updates.

They have engaged a product vendor who had an existing product to manage this information. The product vendor’s architecture approach revolves around the gadgets/widgets based approach. They have broken down the user interface into many small blocks (which they call portlets). These portlets are put together into a page and displayed to the user. The pages and portlets are implemented using a combination of HTML and heavy JavaScript and are rendered to the browser (along with bunch of ActiveX for charting etc.).

The user has some flexibility to select number of columns to display portlets in. The vendor can control which portlets the user cannot remove from the page or move from its current position.

However, there are few problems with this approach.

1. These portlets have very limited capabilities to communicate with each other which force them to implement very self-contained portlets. This results in some duplication of code across portlets.

2. Their portlet runtime on the client-side is not based on any standard JavaScript library which makes it difficult to manage and maintain in long run.

3. Their server-side implementation is not based on any industry standard runtime (e.g., ASP.NET, JSP/JSF etc.) which create major hurdles in enterprise integration. For example, if they wanted to take few portlets and deploy it in their enterprise portal (say on SharePoint or WebSphere Portal), they will have to re-write these portlets as SharePoint web parts or WebSphere portlets. This defeats the whole purpose of “reusable enterprise gadgets/widgets”.

4. The portlets do not invoke loosely implemented services at the backend which make it extremely difficult to use enterprise data with other departments, agencies and business partners.

Given these issues and the fact that there’s a lack of enterprise SOA approach and enterprise repository for services and gadgets/widgets, the portlets usage will be restricted to this product implementation.

Hopefully a future version of this project will address some of these issues and make it easier for IT to deliver on the promise of business agility and flexibility using approaches such as SOA and Enterprise gadgets and widgets.

Until next time…

Gadgets and Widgets in the Corporate World

2008-02-19T00:11:00.003-05:00

Introduction

It is interesting to see how Google, Yahoo and Microsoft are slugging it out for yours and mine eyeballs. One of the latest tactics is to deploy Gadgets or Widgets that you install either in an online composite portal page or better yet on your desktop.

I guess it is easy to get the composite page implemented on the Internet (check out http://dropthings.com/ - looks just like http://www.igoogle.com).

I am more interested in the desktop based composite applications or “Desktop Portals”. The idea is very simple – install some type of runtime environment which can allow installation of various gadgets/widgets – small self-contained applications and let users personalize them with their preferences. In return, you get to understand the user’s interests. If you are Google, Yahoo or Microsoft, you can easily track who you are and what your interests are and potentially target you with ads which you are most likely to view and click (ka-ching!).

Things get interesting for you as an application developer, when you are targeting both web world and desktop world and trying to keep things in sync. How do you develop a single gadget once and deploy it either on the web (say for iGoogle) and then also for running on the desktop? I am yet to do research on the existing products available from “Big Three” to see how transparent things are for them. At least Google states that these two are separate environments and require different tooling and technologies. I will confirm that in few days.

My Experience with Google’s Desktop Gadgets

I tried out Google’s Desktop widgets development and it looks pretty straight forward. There’s an XML file which describes the layout of various elements to be displayed (labels, buttons etc.) and then there’s a JavaScript file where you provide various event handlers. Then there’s the manifesto file – gadget.gmanifest – which provide metadata about the gadget. That’s about it. You double click this gmanifest file and it loads the gadget into the Google Sidebar. Obviously I just looked at the “Hello World!” gadget so I am simplifying things a bit but you can pretty much do anything including call native OS facilities. Google also created a lightweight IDE to let you visually develop the gadget a bit. However, you are better off using some other IDE of your choice. I recently found this Notepad++ (http://notepad-plus.sourceforge.net/uk/site.htm) as a Notepad replacement and it is awesome! Check it out.

Adoption of Gadgets within Enterprises

Now, going back to the Desktop gadgets: I could not help but think as to how can we bring this simplistic development paradigm to the corporate world! This is how I see things happening:

1. Build a lightweight runtime environment for desktops/corporate web portals to host gadgets/widgets. Let’s call it AcmeDesktop for Acme Corporation. This runtime should handle security, inter-widget communication, auditing, tracking and metering, service invocation (SOAP/REST etc.) and basic user interface styling etc.
2. Create a developer’s guide/cookbook and possibly a customized IDE (use Eclipse and provide plug-in for AcmeDesktop development.
3. Create an asset repository for hosting gadgets – extend Rational Asset Manager or similar products (LogicLibrary or ComponentOne or something similar) to host these gadgets.
4.
Let’s power users develop composite applications by selecting the gadgets they want.

Examples of Enterprise Gadgets

I can think of few gadgets in the corporate world:

1. Dashboard gadgets – to display corporate KPIs or departmental KPIs
2. Unified communications gadgets – IM, Phone, e-mail etc.
3. Calendar and meetings gadgets
4. People lookup gadgets (and picking a person will trigger a message to the unified communications gadget for it to display that person’s status and whereabouts
5. Twitter for Corporations – A gadget to find out who is where at any given point of time – tie this to the security badges or RFID and you will be able to pinpoint the person you are trying to find (problem is that you can no longer hide!)
6. “To-do” gadget – For personnel doing repetitive tasks (such as case workers handling cases for health services), give them their view of Inbox through a gadget and clicking an item will open detailed application view (and if the application is built on the same platform then it will activate few other gadgets to display the demographics information about people involved in that case, case history gadget will display history info, case decision details gadget will display the decisions made and routing gadget will allow that user to route the case to somebody else).
7. Time sheet gadget – will allow you to easily keep track of time spent on various projects and also show a personal dashboard of the time spent by projects, by week, by day etc. Your boss will have another gadget which will show timesheet information for all the people reporting to him/her in an aggregated fashion.
8. Reminders/Alerts gadget – To remind you of all the corporate/admin stuff you have to do (like filling out the timesheet, completing the expense reports etc.)

Integration of SOA and Gadgets and related Ecosystem

Anyways, I digress – The point is that just like SOA’s value is in creating reusable services which can be composed into a composite application, I strongly believe that the next wave is about the gadgets and widgets which will internally use those services which were created when SOA was implemented and various services were created. All the issues that we saw with SOA – repositories/registries, governance, security and composition etc. will have to be revisited for gadgets/widgets.

I also see a move by Microsoft and probably IBM to create a generic “Corporate Widget Runtime” environment based on their technologies. Microsoft already has this in form of Vista Sidebar. This generic runtime will allow the corporate architects to customize it for their needs (e.g., enforce certain security standards, disallow removal of certain gadgets, enhance with additional auditing and tracking etc.) and then allow the building various corporate applications.

I also see various SaaS and product vendors providing gadgets/widgets which can be plugged into the generic “Corporate Widget Runtime”.

Realizing the Vision for Corporate Gadgets

So, what do we need to achieve this vision?

1. A standard describing the gadgets/widgets runtime environment. Does anyone remember OLE, ActiveX etc.? We need something similar but much more open and loosely coupled
2. Stronger typed and compile language to implement the gadgets/widgets. I guess JavaScript is “good enough” and may win in long run (like HTTP won over CORBA and RPC due to its simplicity)
3. A set of standards for inter-gadget communications
4. A standard and related framework to define, deploy and enforce various corporate policies for the runtime
5. A set of standards and development practices for gadgets and widgets (including registry/repository for storing and publishing the same)

Now, if you have not checked out, please review this W3C working draft - Widgets 1.0 Requirements W3C Working Draft 9 February 2007 at http://www.w3.org/TR/2007/WD-widgets-reqs-20070209/.

Nice start I guess! The document states:

This document specifies the design goals and requirements for a specification that would standardize the way client-side web applications (widgets) are to be scripted, digitally signed, secured, packaged and deployed in a way that is device independent.

Let’s see how this working draft gets matured over the period of time.

Available Technologies

For corporate developers, we have few choices when it comes to the Desktop Widgets.

If you really want to leverage an existing runtime environment, then Vista Sidebar is the de facto choice (unless you are an Mac shop then you can also use Apple Dashboard!). You can also choose Google or Yahoo runtime if you wish, however, I cannot comment on the richness of the platform, availability of APIs and the integrated policy framework.

If you want to build a “Corporate Gadget Runtime”, then you have following choices:

1. Use Microsoft .NET and WCF, WPF and WWF technologies – very rich set of development APIs and environment. It might be appropriate to develop the runtime using this but gadget development should be highly simplistic
2. Explore Microsoft Silverlight – the upcoming platform to compete against Adobe (This is a case of a traditional developer centric shop going into design world)
3. Adobe Apollo – Very rich environment for graphics and multimedia experience. I am not sure of their strengths when it comes to corporate development needs. May be in next year or so they will be mature enough – or if IBM or Oracle buys them out then it is a different story.
4. Eclipse Rich Client Platform – A very good platform to choose but you will have to simplify things significantly for your developers. IBM is betting on this and have built their next generation of Lotus offerings on this. Keep watching them.
5. I am sure there’s more that I am forgetting. I would love to hear your views/opinions on this.

Summary

Gadgets win hands down when it comes to simplicity of the development, deployment and use by end users. That is the huge plus for the gadgets.

The gadget development and adoption will be driven by the “Big Three” and corporations will eventually embrace them just like they have started to incorporate Web 2.0 technologies within their corporate IT strategies and infrastructure.

The corporate adoption of gadgets is a natural progression of the SOA; however, it will take couple more years before corporations start considering gadgets seriously.

A whole new ecosystem will get developed for gadgets driven by “Big Three” and supported by developers and SaaS vendors alike.

As I always say, we live in very interesting and dynamic times and things get much more interesting day by day. Until next time…

Hiren