More on Moore’s Law

My father and I got up this morning to catch the 6:50 AM plane, but unfortunately, when we got at the airport, there wasn’t any room for my luggage, so they put me on Standby for the next flight, at 10:30. We left the airport, had breakfast and came back. Everything went fine, despite the heavy rain, and we left on time. I arrived in Denver, waited a bit, then took the next flight to SFO.

I got a bit lost on my way out, having to take the BART then CalTrain, but I managed to get to Redwood station, where I called everyone on my Craigslist list of appartments. I then walked to Audrey’s appartment (aka Cat lady), met her, visited it. It was bigger than I thought, so I took it. She has two cute little cats, both very shy.

End of day one.

After trying the tutorials a couple of times (the first two) I ended up mimicking the screencast, and then got it to work. From then on, the other tutorials are easy, but when I decided to make my own Business Process, something I thought would be simple, I didn’t turn out easy.

Since I worked on Amazon’s web services before, I know a fair deal about them, so the Business Process I decided to do would query Amazon for a parameter, and hopefully we would get an answer back, a piece of information related to the query.

The process would start out by asking the user for an ASIN, Amazon’s product code, and use their webservices to return the product’s corresponding name. In order to do that, you need two files, a wsdl (Web Services Description Language) and an xsd (XML Schema Definition) that I got from here. They produced some errors when imported into the Designer though, as indicated by the small red crossed box added on the icon.

Well, that didn’t turn out well, and after trying to get it to work, I realized my understanding was not sufficient to get it to work. Some of the errors were too arcane. So I installed 5.0 (beta), in case the imported files would be better supported, but still got many errors, so I gave up on just playing around with the software, and started reading a series of Reference Guides.

I also read an interesting article comparing the Scandinavian to the English ways of introducing SOA to the enterprise. It turns out that the Scandinavian – SOA-as-a-tactic way leads to quicker adoption and better understanding, than the English SOA-as-a-strategy, where SOA is adopted in one swoop.

This tailors well with the thinking that maybe Intalio should aim at getting their foot in the door – use the suite to solve something problematic but relatively small, letting the client develop their own expertise, and let BPM usage spread throughout the company.

Having read essentially two of Geoffrey Moore’s books (Dealing with Darwin and The Gorilla Game) , I wonder if Intalio should augment its marketing effort towards Outsourcing consultants, as they do for Business Process consultants.

The books are all about Core vs Context, the former defined as what provides sustainable competitive advantage, and the latter all the rest. Now Core can be Mission-critical (or not), but it is far too important to mess around with it unless you have the expertise. Context, although it too can be Mission-critical (or not), is not essential – by definition – in providing a competitive edge, and the ressources it consumes should be reallocated into Core. This can be done by Outsourcing what one company’s Context is, to another company whose Core it is, and that can spread cost over several similar clients, at best charging Marginal cost for it, instead of Full cost as when it was in house.

Now here comes my thought : the Outsourcer probably has a fair amount of idiosyncracies in the Context’s processes. These, the Outsourcee cannot accomodate easily. Business Process management would then be a nice tool for spotting these particularities and have them resolved, before the Outsourcing begins, therefore reducing the risk of failure in Mission-critical Context handover.

If this thinking has any merit, the people to pitch sales to would be Outsourcing consultants, who could suggest using Intalio’s suite as a preparation tool before actually outsourcing.

I got confirmation today from Ismael, an Intalio email address, and a copy of two presentations to read.

When designing my own process, from the page here, I got stuck when trying to integrate the webservices. I need to select the TimeService, which I cannot find. I instead download the example here and use Intalio’s version. I then get stuck a bit further with insufficient explanation on how to use the Data mapper.

Version 5.0 (beta) on linux, was not of any particular use in finding out how to use the mapper ; the additions and especially change in UI are welcome, and a step in the right direction.

When paying attention to the how-to, it says you have to unpack to a directory containing no spaces (cf. orange color), so that solved the problem for Intalio-Server.

A bit underneath, there is a small repetition in the prerequisites, it reads : “Geronimo, the bundled Application Server is not compatible with not compatible with Java 1.6″

After that, installing was a bit of a pain : there are a series of things to do, notably add an environment variable for java (remember to put a trailing backslash, this is necessary under windows), which by the way has to be a past version. This should be automated when installing, and updated for all new versions of java.

That being done, a browser pointed at port 8080 allowed me to log in. On to the Absence Request scenario included…

First, images load slow, they should / could be hosted on flickr or Amazon’s S3. Second, and although the tutorial is clear, the instructions should be given on the page itself. That would make the training faster. Having played a fair amount of video games, I know that commands vary significantly from one game to the another, so the designers have come up with efficient teaching methods. A sort of hand holding method should be used. No problems encountered here.

The screencast they have is very nice, and although the speech intonation might need some work, the pace is nice.

I’ll be trying the Hello World process tomorrow.

Well, here I go.

Today I officially start preparing for my upcoming internship on the 18th of June. I’m supposed to help out in marketing Intalio’s Business Process Management Suite (BPMS), but quite frankly I do not know much about what it is, so I must read up on it. My school has not taught me anything about it, even though I am 1 year away from an MBA, maybe there is something to do here.

Here’s one good article on BPM. You’ll find out quickly that there is a horrendous amount of acronyms in the domain, making it hard to read and understand. Here is the wikipedia entry on Business Process Management and on Business Processes. That should get one started.

Now knowing all this, next is playing around with Intalio’s software. They have apparently two programs, Server and Designer, all there is a slew of libraries and other stuff I haven’t looked at. They provide a 10 Step instruction page with, surprise-surprise, a 10 Step instruction page. You can see they tell you to install some runtime components, but they are nowhere to be found. A repository search yields no match. I can only guess it is the Server package.

So now I download and install the Designer, and barely pay attention to the legal agreement, like most people do. It installs well, with one caveat : it does not ask to leave a shortcut, so I had to dig down in my hard drive and hunt for the executable. I then launch it, and see an overcompressed presentation image while the program loads. Whatever space was saved from making the image look that way is insignificant compared to the size of the program itself.

I then proceeded to install the Server, but when extracting the file I got an error. Off to download it again just in case. It would have been nice to have an md5 hash.

By the way, Intalio probably uses some Content Management System (CMS), and that, in my opinion, makes websites cluttered, poorly organized, strange and unintuitive. There’s nothing like a hand cranked User Interface (UI) tailored to the company. I have never found Corporate websites useful, and I often use Google to find what I am looking for even once inside them, rather than their search box or whatever. The site could use a facelift.

The download is finished, but the extraction gives me the same error, maybe there’s something wrong with it. Anyway, its late and I’ve got a lot to do tomorrow, so that’s it for today folks.