Andrew challenges the reader with provocative statements. For example, he asks why leaders continue to struggle with successfully transforming operational performance and then suggests three possible reasons: “leaders don’t care, leaders can’t focus, and leaders don’t know how.” His explorations of these options makes for compelling reading.

In one of my favorite quotes he says “Even though business is arguably the most demanding of team sports, leadership teams typically don’t practice.” Great stuff!

Drawing from his own previously published work as well as a host of other well respected management gurus, Andrew provides a remarkably readable and useful guide to leadership activities, the practical application of useful methodologies and a look at how “outside-in” thinking and end-to-end process collaboration can rapidly transform any organization’s operation efficiency.

This book is not only a good cover-to-cover read but it is organized in such a way that it provides a quick reference to lists and subjects you will likely want to refer to again and again as you exercise your operational leadership.

Like almost every other blog entry you have seen recently, I am creating this blog post on an iPad. It has transformed the way I work in the few short weeks I have had it. This morning I held my first full-scale on-line meeting using the iPad instead of my desktop computer and it was great. Why am I telling you this? Not to tout the latest tech gizmo (although I admit to being a tech geek) but to point out what I believe is a fundamental change taking place between both business and personal computing.

At SaaSCon last week, held out here in the Bay Area, Todd Pierce, Senior Vice President, Information Technology at Genentech gave a talk titled “SaaS: Engine of Innovation.” In that talk Todd pointed out that Genetech IT supports a huge and diverse array of computing platforms and operating systems. This comes from a philosophy of providing the tools that researchers and others in the company want and need to perform their work. Genetech believes it is their responsibility to provide their employees with the tools those employees need to best do their jobs – not necessarily the tools that best fit a constrained IT enterprise architecture concept. That rang a bell with me. I remembered hearing that seemingly enlightened view somewhere else not long ago.

In a recent interview with CIO Insight Editor in Chief Brian P. Wilson, Google CIO Ben Fried talked about how corporate IT used to determine what the best available technology for a company was and then provided it to people in the company. Now, he says, access to the Internet has changed all that. He points out that people in the workforce today typically have better home technology than what they get at work. Not tied to corporate cost measures, designated vendors and long refresh cycles, many people have faster computers, bigger screens and better Internet access in their home than in the office. Google, too, has a policy of supporting the diverse environment of computing tools that their employees need to best perform.

The common theme here is that forward-looking organizations are paying attention to the IT needs of their workers by recognizing the impact the diversity of work and work situations have on the worker’s tool needs. Furthermore, they realize that allowing their employees to have a business computing experience at least as rich as what they have in their personal life may be an important factor in both recruiting and retaining high-caliber personnel.

I have been certain for some time that the ubiquitous web-browser would be the future way everyone worked and I still believe that much of the world’s clerical, administrative and managerial work will be done with browsers. However, I now see a new delivery method emerging that makes sense, as well. That method is device-specific interfaces that use behind-the-scenes web-services running on Cloud servers. These devices connect to the servers in wireless ways using whatever connection mechanism is available, wifi and cellular being the most common today. The device-specific nature of the programs using the web services can thereby evolve at whatever pace materializes. In a few short years we have seen the advent of browser-based technologies on laptops and netbooks as well as smartphone interfaces and now touch devices.

In the software business we have already decoupled most of the DB, ERP, HRM and CRM engines from the user interfaces. As web services and SOA technologies continue to gain traction we can expect more and more specialized engines running in the Cloud waiting to serve whatever device calls on them through a web service interface. You can bet Cloud Harbor and our partners will be writing both browser interfaces that fit the iPad screen and apps that deliver the iPad user interface experience – all while providing the computing power of our Cloud servers via web services.

I really like carrying a little glass window on the Cloud everywhere I go. You will, too.

George started by highlighting that the Cloud market is evolving and growing very quickly; according to Saugatuck Technologies, by 2012, 25% of every IT Dollar will be spent on Cloud services.  Other projections by several of the main industry analysts indicate that the BPM market is growing at a dramatic pace of approximately 30%.  The combination of leadership’s frustration with legacy systems’ cost and inflexibility, and the maturity of relevant technology, is driving the SaaS market to grow very rapidly.

Mark then brought us a perspective on the life-cycle of change at different levels of an organization’s different layers: Strategy, Organization, Software and Infrastructure.  If software and infrastructure are on a six to ten year lifecycle, but strategy is annual and the organization is changing on a three to six month cycle, how can systems keep up with the changing organization?  Organizations need a business process layer that is the bridge between infrastructure and execution.

There are four technology waves that are converging as the basis for PaaS and Cloud Services in general and BPM specifically: 1) SOA, BPM and middleware; 2) Cloud Computing (SaaS, IaaS, PaaS and Business PaaS); 3) Web 2.0; and 4) Telecoms IP Convergence “Open” VAS.  This can also be read as 1) interoperability, 2) turn-key pay-as-you-go, 3) collaboration among people and systems and 4) no bandwidth constraints.  Together these technologies power the Business Process Wave mentioned earlier. As I listened to George and Mark speak about the $15 billion dollar PaaS market, the convergence of technologies and market forces, the analysts predictions about trends in managing information systems going forward, and the compelling case studies that underscore the potential for organizations to do great things, I could only think what exciting times we will see in the next couple of years as the number of companies that get these powerful tools grows exponentially due to the lower cost of entry.  Now there is no reason for companies to put off implementing a powerful set of Business Process Management tools, because with a pay-as-you-go model, they will pay for themselves within 90 days or less.

Regards,
Gabor Fulop

We recently conducted an Application Development Training Course for our Partner Magnolia Consulting and some of our own Cloud Harbor folks at the Seaport Conference Center in Redwood City, California. The four day course provided practical hands-on training in the fundamentals of creating applications using the Cloud Harbor Business Operations Platform (BOP). The course covered the following areas:

• Application Solutions
• The Cloud Harbor Start Page
• Application Management
• Business Process Management
• Developing Processes
• Web Services and the SOA Grid
• Developing Web Services
• Developing User Interfaces
• Human and Transactional Workflow
• Modeling Data and Data Transformations
• Business Rules Logic

The training location was in a beautiful spot adjoining a marina right on the San Francisco Bay. All of our partners are trained and certified in application development using the Cloud Harbor Business Operations Platform and the latest Cordys technologies. Magnolia plans to build applications for the Cloud Harbor Marketplace and to provide Professional Services for Cloud Harbor licensees and subscribers.

A BOP XForm created in under 10 minutes

FASTER… A great example of this power can be seen in the way in which the Business Operations Platform (BOP) will automatically generate webs services from relational database files (which can be quickly created from existing spreadsheets or by hand in half an hour using readily available tools) and then in seconds automatically generate forms that allow you to display, add, change, and delete any and every record in the database. Absolutely no programming required! While some people will find the auto-generated forms adequate for their immediate needs, I don’t find the automatic form layout very pleasing to the eye. With the form tool, however, I can take the generated forms and pretty them up in short order. I can rearrange the layout, add graphics like logos and pictures, define server-side data validation and even apply my own look and feel through easy to change style sheets. This new BOP forms editor is by far the most powerful user interface tool available.

BETTER… In a recent phone call with one of the world’s largest consumer electronics companies I was challenged about building applications without programming. They had heard this before and just didn’t believe it was possible. For their environment they are right and I agreed with them. They have a huge investment in existing mixed technology stacks and getting the sophisticated connections across multiple systems and mixed services environments will undoubtedly require some programming of custom functionality. My contention is that if line-of-business managers, business analysts and IT analysts can perform 80% of the work and maintenance on new, innovative applications in 30% – 50% of the time traditional application building takes, isn’t that far better than having everything hand-built by programmers? As for small and medium sized businesses, I believe they can buy or build nearly all the applications they need with less than 5% of the overall development time requiring significant computer or programming knowledge. This small amount of expertise they may need can be acquired on-line at very reasonable prices or through an inexpensive monthly services agreement.

CHEAPER… To think you can get this power and elegance on your own servers at one-third to one half the cost of competitive products or as a SaaS product for $35/month per user or less is a game-changing proposition. Surprisingly few people and organizations are aware of just how far these next generation tools have progressed in the last few years. Many continue to exclusively use 10 to 20 year old technologies from vendors they started working with a decade or more ago. Browser-based applications, web services and new pricing and delivery models are the wave of the future and available today. You owe it to yourself and your organization to have a look at these new ways of building applications faster, better and cheaper.

Sound familiar? There is a way to break out of this complex, time consuming and expensive cycle of catch-up. But, it requires you to invest some of you most precious asset – time – to learn about your options and it requires you to look at things in a new and different way. A way that is likely as unfamiliar to your IT teams as it is to you and as everyone knows, change is disconcerting and often a little scary. Here is what you should do…

Get your executive business team or operating committee together and let them listen to what we have to say. Or, perhaps you want to hear it first. It won’t take much time and I assure you it will be worthwhile. Want to know more? Visit our web site at www.cloudharbor.com. Want to be really smart and get us on your calendar now? Give us a call at (650) 344-8372.

If you don’t know about BPM you owe it to yourself and your organization to find out more. You don’t need an IT technical staff to understand the benefits of this way of creating and changing the computer systems you use day in and day out.

BPM is the real deal. This new technology has matured to the point where every organization, regardless of size, needs to investigate and understand the significant savings and versatility BPM can bring to bear on each facet of the business. Make no mistake, BPM is changing the way IT resources are used and how line business folks can get more done faster than ever before. Whether you deploy it on computers inside your own organization or choose the new, low initial investment software-as-a-service ways of getting started doesn’t matter. What does matter is that you give this new technology an evaluation. Find the time. Do it now. Let us help.

Cloud Services platforms are an emerging technology far different from previous generation software. And the demands on the software are quite different than those on established enterprise software offerings. For example, the debate about multi-tenancy has become a “religious war” with pretty eloquent arguments on all sides. As a platform provider, however, I am firmly in the true multi-tenancy camp. The ability to have a single copy of the platform’s executable  code on a server has lots of benefits. Cordys is a true multi-tenant architecture from the ground up. One copy of the code per real server allows us significant economies of scale and simplifies managing complex, mutli-server environments. Simulating real multi-tenancy via virtualization is more expensive, and more difficult to manage.

The Cordys technology platform is built 100% on web services and all applications developed on the platform are also web-services. This Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is based entirely on standards like XForms, XML data storage for object persistence and XML messaging. That is the Cloud architecture of the future and it guarantees Cloud Harbor applications will “play nicely” with others in the Cloud. That is not to say that the platform doesn’t support conventional messaging and storage because it does – and in a way that perfectly blends the old and the new. For example, there are connectors for all the major RDBMS and practically every significant enterprise system from SAP to PeopleSoft. What makes these connectors unique is that they read and write to the RDBMS and other products in native mode but also automatically convert all those operations to web services for use in developing applications. In tech parlance they automatically wrap the operations in web service wrappers “on the fly.”

All this sophisticated programming doesn’t come cheaply in time or money terms. Cordys has been building this system for years going all the way back to the Baan software days (Jan Baan is the founder of Cordys) and has invested around $500 million U.S. in the platform. This heritage shows in many ways. Two of my favorite examples are Master Data Management (MDM) and Business Activity Monitoring (BAM). MDM allows developers to maintain a single version of their enterprise data across multiple systems and data structures, reading and storing that data in the proper format for each individual system. Some organizations sell this technology alone for hundreds of thousands of dollars. BAM allows the application systems to monitor and report on real-time information and the Cordys rules engine and messaging bus allow that information to be acted upon immediately. Both by humans and programmatically.

As if all this power wasn’t enough, the frosting on the cake for Cloud Harbor is that by design the entire software environment is contained in a SaaS Application Framework (SAF) that makes resource utilization reporting and billing easier for us. That framework also ensures the security of data and applications between organizations (while still allowing full multi-tenancy) and allows packaging of applications to be portable across organizations. That means we can store complete applications in our Cloud Harbor MarketPlace and deploy them to any of our subscriber organizations as SaaS offerings and we can do it instantly via program not through human-intensive manual intervention.

All-in-all, if I were to sit down today and design my perfect Cloud application development and deployment platform (and I did spend a few months doing that) I suspect it would look almost exactly like the Cordys platform. That’s amazing to me because I have years of BPM design and deployment experience behind me yet Cordys has been building this system for years. Now that’s serendipity and the big winner will be Cloud Harbor ISVs and subscribers.

In addition to the main Kasteel building there are also a number of guest cottages on the property. They are “across the bridge” from the main building nestled next to what I believe was a small vineyard. On the right is a picture looking at the back of the Kasteel from across the water. The dawn walk from the cottages to breakfast in the main building was both invigorating and an inspiring sight. A great way to start the day.  What was most unusual, however, was the way the daily program was conducted. While the meetings were all business they were punctuated from time-to-time with periods of cultural activity, as well.

On the left is a picture of one of these cultural sessions – a short pipe organ concert on a spectacular restored pipe organ in yet another of the meeting buildings. This session was just a part of the program track slotted in between new product announcements and customer case studies. I found the whole experience both unusual and delightful. It is a special place.

On the right is a photo of Mr. Baan (center) talking with a partner at one of the breaks between sessions. All the top Cordys executives made themselves full accessible during the entire conference. Furthermore, I got lucky and was also included in a private meeting in Mr. Baan’s office where the normal icebreaking chit chat was replaced by Jan showing us a few of the “things” scattered around his office. The ones he identified included a few bibles (priceless), a historic table (we were actually using it as our conference table!) and original Dutch Masters art on the walls that you would normally only expect to see in an art museum. All-in-all a great way to work intertwined with some terrific cultural learning experiences, as well.