Process, process, process!

James McGovern comes right to the point on the project management overhead which is currently embraced as the way to do everything from opening a can of beans to putting a man on Mars.

Why on earth is so much process present? Why does it take three documents and six meetings to write six lines of Java? There are twice as many pages of documentation as lines of code! Well, having worked with the people involved on these documents, plus the development, and the testing, not just on this project but several others, I think I've figured out the purpose: process is being used as a substitute for competence. The funny thing is that I too am losing my sense of humor and are starting to become borgified and believe that CMMi is the perfect way to use process as a substitute for competence. With enough steps, documents, design reviews, and test plans, I think that the proverbial 1,000 monkeys with typewriters really could produce a functional IT system. The incredible amount of mutual reinforcement breaks the task down into such minute pieces that each piece is comprehensible and completable by anyone with even the slightest modicum of coding or testing ability. The added advantage is that no one is required to think let alone understand. It even helps project managers to a pretty good degree of accuracy how long each minute task will take, and can thus do a pretty good job coming up with a (obscenely long) timeline for a project in any stage of development.

Things that are worth five minutes conversation between principals involve battalions of portfolio, programme, project managers and their panoply of governance police without consideration of the competence of the few people that actually do the creative stuff or the fact that the individual commissioning the work has the authority and responsibility to do just that. To move on from the 1970's waterfall, we need clear but much shorter chains of commands along the lines of Jean Luc-Picard "Make it, so!" to a small team of competent players responding "Yes, sir"

Parsing calendar entries

John Udell raises the challenge of translating the human formats of a calendar entry into a machine format. Google Calendars quick add feature does make a fair effort and responds as the human intended in most cases.
From the examples given by John

Tue, 4/1/08	ok
2 Apr - Wed 10:00AM-10:45AM	Gets date wrong (time of day ok)
Weekdays 8:30am-4:30pm	ok
Thu, 11/15/07 - Fri, 4/11/08	ok
Every Tuesday of the month from 10:00-11:00 a.m	ok
Sat., Apr. 05, 9:00 AM Registration/Preview, 10:00 AM Live Auction	ok
2nd Saturday of every other month, 10:00 am-12:00 pm	ok

The API seems to provide a neat packaging of the requirement as a service which could be used in many ways. Problems that are encountered, like the example above, might eventually be dealt with by the team at Google but seem tractable through pre-processing.

Intalio offering BPMS as a service

Intalio has announced availability of its novel approach to running BPMS as a service

The Intalio|On Demand servers are powerful enough to run hundreds of thousands of process instances concurrently. Each server has the equivalent of 1.7 GB of memory, 160 GB of storage, CPU capacity of a 32-bit 1.0-1.2 GHz 2007 Opteron or 2007 Xeon processor.

The underlying operating system is rPath Linux, following the Just enough Operating System (JeOS) principle. "This makes the appliance more efficient, smaller, more secure and higher performing than an application running under a full general purpose OS (Wikipedia, JeOS)". The Intalio|On Demand software appliance contains a bare minimal Java 1.5, Open SSH, and Intalio|Server.

The compute power comes from the Amazon Web Services Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) which gives a fair amount of assurance that capacity and connectivity will be there when you need it.

An organisation using this as a production solution will need to consider its exposure to

• failure in the cloud removing access to fundamental business process engine and related dashboard information
• privacy and security of data passing through a commercial computing host in a jurisdiction that may not have the same legislative protections as your business domicile

But at the extreme, you can develop and test a fully functional BPMS and integration solution on a laptop and then deploy it across the cloud to a worldwide collection of services.

NSW Police ask public to be cameraphone cops

Vikram draws attention to a move to encourage citizens to capture crimes on their cellphones and send the information to the police in NSW. Although increasing the surveillance society normally makes me very uneasy and the police forces across the ditch (and here in NZ) are not always noted for their probity, I think that this is a step in the right direction. This is a step up from the well established 111 (911, 999 ...) call with better information content. The French have laws against recording violent crime unless you are a professional journalist which seems a bit repressive, even for the Europeans, but there is a measure of sense in this. How about encouraging a society where it is normal to report crime to the legitimate enforcement authorities rather than publish for a dubious or prurient purpose? There is a problem however with the general capture storage of surveillance material ... Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

Children to be added to Britain's DNA database

Mark Townsend and Anushka Asthana in The Observer, March 16 2008 report on the burgeoning DNA database. Now the police are looking to capture data on children who might be thought by someone to be a potential future criminal.

Gary Pugh, director of forensic sciences at Scotland Yard and the new DNA spokesman for the Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo), said a debate was needed on how far Britain should go in identifying potential offenders, given that some experts believe it is possible to identify future offending traits in children as young as five.

Why do we need training for BPMN and BPMS?

BPMN is intended to formalise the definition of real world business processes. BPMS implementations take a formal definition of business processes (which should be derivable from the BPMN) and control the flow of information around the process. How difficult can it be to develop the design tools to the point that they help the designer think in the 'best practice' of business process and follow the rules of BPMN?

Ismael Ghalimi in Process Discovery describes his plans for experiencing the development of a BPMS-based solution for a well defined requirement. Like most users of a new tool he is going to do it without training. OK, he does have an advantage over mere mortals from close involvement with the underlying standards and a key-player in this emerging market but I look forward to seeing the commentary on his effort.

...model the process at a high level, using an off-the-shelf process modeling tool. For this purpose, I will use Intalio|Designer, but I will do so before having attended a formal training session. The reason for it is the following: while I have been working for Intalio for over 8 years now, and originally came up with the idea and the name for the Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN), I have never fully read its specification, even less learned the proper way to use it with a process development tool capable of turning pretty pictures into executable code. As a result, I expect this first modeling exercise to produce a process that will look nothing like what I will be capable of doing after having attended the Intalio Traning, and learning more from the gap should be a key benefit of the overall experiment...

Although there is some good training for process design becoming available, I question how much we should be reliant on it to get to work with a formal language (BPMN ), with absolute rules, that is intended to describe things that we are familiar with in everyday business. It is not teaching English to Korean speakers!
I would like Ismael to also consider how the Intalio Designer toolset could be improved with an autopilot or helper that leads you through the process of designing a process and explains the rules of the BPMN as you go.

Privacy and Text Communications

We appear to be facing another challenge to privacy in New Zealand which would take us further towards the surveillance society. The police are seeking the storage of all text communications to facilitate their enquiries. Fortunately, this requires a change in law and will get a bit of discussion. It is to be hoped that the Office of the Privacy Commissioner will be active in the debate.

The relevant rule applying to the retention of text data in NZ is found in the TELECOMMUNICATIONS INFORMATION PRIVACY RULES

Rule 1
Purpose of Collection of Telecommunications Information
Telecommunications information must not be collected by a telecommunications agency
unless:
(a) the information is collected for a lawful purpose connected with a function or
activity of the agency; and
(b) the collection of the information is necessary for that purpose.
Note: Except where it is itself a party to a communication, a telecommunications agency will rarely have a lawful purpose to collect the content of any telecommunication. Indeed, it is unlawful to intercept the content of a private communication in most cases (Crimes Act 1961, Part 9A). There are some limited exceptional circumstances relevant to telecommunications agencies (e.g. where acting pursuant to an interception warrant to assist the Police or SIS). Employees of network operators can, in the course of their duties, intercept telecommunications for maintenance purposes but it is an offence for an employee of a network operator to use or disclose information so obtained for unauthorised purposes – Telecommunications Act 2001, ss.114 and 115).

It is apparent that there is no technical requirement to store all texts to provide services to a party in the communication. Vodafone NZ does not do it and Telecom NZ is going to stop the practice.
Although it may be attractive to the enforcement agencies to be able to dip into a historical pool of all telecommunications in pursuit of information about possible criminals and crimes, this would be a fundamental turn-around in perception of the privacy of communications. It is ridiculous to suggest that telecommunications providers should be breaching this basic requirement of the Privacy Commissioner to be "good corporate citizens" as suggested by Police national crime manager Win van der Velde quoted in Dominion Post 8March .