First of all I have Workstreams and Workitems that are part of the Workstreams. These can be decomposed into finer ones. Each Workitem has a status and an estimate about the remaining effort. This way I can aggregate the remaining effort for a complete Workstream.

I will explain in Webinars how I work with these. I have encountered several patterns of knowledge work, using these. I found it quite practical to define bigger goals and then to decompose these later into concrete steps. But I have encountered many more patterns of daily knowledge work than this one. I will also give a preview of the Software in the Webinars.

To each Workitem I can attach documents, pictures and notes. Thus I have all information available once I work with the Workitem. Or if I have information (e.g. an email) I ask myself: To which Workitem / Workstream does it belong to? Then I would attach it to the Workitem / Workstream and keep my email inbox clean. If I can’t attach it to a Workitem, then the email is not so important anyway. Or – of course if it is, then I would create a new Workitem first, belonging to a given Workstream.

But this was not enough. I wanted to keep under control until when I would have to complete what. Instead of maintaining a completion date for all 2.000+ Workitems (which would be out of date very soon) I defined Sprints – i.e. milestones with a predefined date. I assigned Workitems to these Sprints as I found feasible. This way I am able to see the remaining work for each Sprint. This is the only kind of “order” I give to my Workitems. Other than this, they are not ordered – so I don’t have to maintain too much unnecessary information as with other project tools that I know. This lets me be flexible and agile.

You might ask how I aggregate the remaining work for Sprints, if hierarchical Workitems are assigned to different Sprints. Well – I have solved this.

Then I was able to create Analytics for the progress of my work. I am able to visualize the remaining work of my Sprints as time progresses. This is my Burndown Diagram.

As time progresses I see how much I still have to do, and how successful I was to burn down the remaining work for the next Sprints and in whole. Of course, new work is added as well. Sometimes existing work is moved to another Sprint or a new Sprint is created and existing Work is assigned.

Do I feel I have my work under control? Yes. Is it flexible enough to adapt the plan to unplanned events? Sure. Is the could implementation an advantage or a disadvantage? I found it to be an advantage. I have access to the information wherever I am where there is a Computer or with my iPhone. Think of the famous new iPad – it fits perfectly.

Until today I am using this Workstream Platform all on my own. Later this year I am planning to use it as a collaboration platform, inviting others to work with me. Then the cloud implementation will play out its full strength.

I have come to the conclusion in the meanwhile, that the appearance of IT will change.

As noted in the article, there is a sense of IT limitation in the offices at the one hand and the reluctance to change in the IT departments. “Never touch a running system.” – an old proverb that contains much wisdom. Of course the problem is cost of change.

As noted in the article, everybody installs one or some forbidden tools on his office computer, much to the discontent of the IT departments. We can’t help – in the end we have to have the best tools for our work.

In the end the article shortly touches on cloud software, but does not elaborate its potential. But when I think of it, it overcomes many of the difficulties mentioned. There is nothing to install on the office computer. Just use the browser. Neither does it disrupt existing systems. There is no big change project. Just use it. Ok – if there is a project group or department they need to decide which one they would want to use and how they organize it.

I expect IT’s role to change over time. Instead of being responsible for making the systems run, they become the central point of governance which services are good to use and which they will veto against. They will have quality criteria that they will apply. This will relieve the IT department of much of today’s burden and let them concentrate on their core competency. Also it will release budget for interesting forward looking projects.

That’s not only, because individuals want to use the best tools possible. It’s also because other forms of work are strongly emerging, among which I want to emphasize Knowledge Work and Collaboration between organizational entities. More and more project groups emerge that work cross enterprises and organizations in non-standard – i.e. in unpredictable or only partially predictable processes and collaborations. Why is (was?) there such a hype about Google Wave? Isn’t that the reason? Google Wave is just a small forerunner of the tide to come. Completely new forms of applications will emerge that will offer functionality for organizing these new kind of processes. Multi-Enterprise Business Applications may be a good name for them.

And the processes they cover will differ from those processes that we know today and that are commodity. As I already stressed those processes will be agile, adaptive, unpredictable, partially predictable, collaborative, creative, knowledge oriented. I hesitate to call them processes, because “process” implies: First do that, then this. That is not the kind I am speaking of. A Knowledge Worker complies with such a process only in rare cases. Neither is it desireable. The Knowledge Worker needs enabling for the goal he wants to achieve and the he or she best knows how to achieve – and to have the freedom to try, to fail, to retry and to succeed. So we might call the new work pattern Workstream instead of Process.

So which IT department would be responsible for such a Multi-Enterprise Business Application? The natural answer is: It will be served as “Software as a Service” by an independent provider and the individual Enterprise will purchase users. That is another strong reason, why the IT will change – because there is practically no other way to address this emerging demand.

To quickly wrap it up: It was a good decision. I have built 9 Business Objects in the meanwhile of which the first one was the most difficult obviously. The others quite naturally follow. These are as of now: Workitem, Sprint, Book, Attachment, Note, Payment, Regular Payment, Statement, Transaction. Furthermore I have added Analytical Objects for the purpose of analyzing the Business Objects. I will explain by and by what they do. I will not explain the programming model and architecture of Microsoft Windows Azure in detail. You can inform yourself in public sources, if you want. The UI is HTML – so it’s not worse than salesforce.com. Plus I have added some diagrams in Microsoft Silverlight.

I was able to quickly implement the business logic, that I wanted to have. The programming language I use is C#, which I like. After implementation you press a button (ok, three, four) and then the application is running live in the cloud. It’s just so easy, lean and clean.

So the first Business Object I implemented is the Workitem. In salesforce.com I called it Goal – I am still a little bit indecisive how to call it. I can say so far that it is different from all other Workitems or Tasks that I happen to know. I asked myself what I need for my daily work. My work is that of a Knowledge Worker. It is in good part unpredictable, but not unrelated. Also it is not unplanned. And it has clear goals and a clear purpose. So for this requirement I tailored this Business Object Workitem and I worked with it for many weeks now. I have worked now with at least 3000 instances of it and I am more happy with it than with any other task or project tool that I used so far. I have my work under control now, notwithstanding the fact that many unpredicted events occurred and adaptations of the plan were either necessary or chosen by me.

And: It is served in the cloud. Obviously this means that I can access it from every computer with a browser, which I regularly do. Recently I was in a shop and wanted to buy a memory extension. I did not remember the model. So I asked, if I could quickly use the computer, logged into my Platform and looked it up. Just as easy. In other instances I just pulled out my iPhone, logged into my Platform – using the standard browser, and edited some workitems. I did not even have to write an iPhone App for this. Although I might in the future.

What did I do with the old workitems/goal instances that I had already created in salesforce.com including attachments and notes? Within two days I migrated them completely into my Azure Workstream Platform. How? Salesforce.com offers web services to read the content. So I pulled out the Web Service Description (WSDL) from my salesforce application – which as we remember were custom objects – into Microsoft Visual Studio, generated WebService Proxies for that, mapped them into my Business Object Structure and then pulled the content over. That’s it. From that point on I as productive in my own Azure Workstream Platform. And I am until today.

I will explain more about the functionality of the Business Objects, that I created, soon.

I expect that many of us will have to re-evaluate the things we are doing and how we are doing them. Cost pressure has arrived on a grand scale and will not be released in the coming year. We have to find more effective ways of doing our work or the work of our company. Therefore this will increase the pressure to evaluate and utilize cloud solutions. We can’t affort to ignore the economies of scale.

Furthermore many things will change. Re-organizations will take place. Be it company departments, that are affected, be it the personal job description, be it the project(s) that each of us is part in. Thus, standard processes need to change. They need to be adapted to new situations.  This is the time when BPM as it is known today will be questioned. The lifecycle of a typical BPM project is much too long to react to unforeseen changes, to necessary adaptations and to ad hoc processes. Included in this is the development cycle, if the BPM projects goal is a system specification for an implementation project.

Instead, what we will be looking for are effective tools to manage processes, that have not been foreseen, or at least deviations from known processes. Still we want to monitor what we are doing, how the process progresses, to manage collaboration and to monitor the collaboration. We need the control over these processes, to stay cool in all the turmoil, and still consequently pursue our goals or the goals that have been entrusted to us. Thus, a new breed of software will arise that goes beyond BPM. I expect at the end of the year we will have prototypes and first successful pilot projects for that new breed of software. This will be the foundation for the following three to five years for that new breed of software to be established.

That is what I expect.

Well – I thought I would go to the cloud. I logged in force.com and defined my own Business Object “Goal”. That for me was the better term than Workitem, because I think it is more important what to reach instead of what to do (and probably reach nothing at all). That helps me to keep focus. It is a constant reminder to me not just to do things, but always to ask: Why? What do I want to reach, if I am doing this and that – or just not do it.

I defined the “Goal” Business Object. I wanted to make it hierarchical with subgoals. However this is not possible with force.com. You can only have a two level hierarchy  of business object – like invoice header and invoice item. And you can not define the hierarchy within the same object (goal – subgoal = goal). Strange. What you can do however is to define a relationship of a goal to another goal and call it “subgoal”. This still gives me the usability I need. I get a subgoal create partition in the goal screen and I can navigate to the supergoal (after I have defined the field). So all seems fine? No. If I delete a supergoal I would expect, that subgoals are also deleted. Not so with that type of relationship.But in practice I can live with it, because I am not deleting Goals so often anyway, because I work with a status which is manually set. I keep the completed goals for reference purposes. More than once it happend to me that I asked myself: How did I do that three weeks ago? This and that proceture (e.g. installation of something – to a second computer). Then I was happy that I could just select the old goal and look into the detailed descriptions. The only thing that I am missing here is the same thing as with the missing deletion function: The deep copy is also not possible – i.e. to copy a goal with all of its subgoals, so that I can use it with a fresh status. For this coding  would have to be done – and I was not willing to learn APEX – the force.com programming language – at this stage. I’d rather live with the compromise.

So after a little bit of trying I was able to create my goals and subgoals, attach notes, attach files, attach tasks (which I did not really use), manage the status of them, prioritize them, even create relationships to other force.com business objects like opportunity, and search and create my own selections and reports. That was better than any tool that I had used before. And I could access it from everywhere – which I actually needed. I can access it with iPhone as well, even though the salesforce client does not support custom business objects (like my “Goal”). So I have to use the browser. This is not so user friendly, but possible.

In the meanwhile I created about 1.500 goals all in all, most of them subgoals and sub-sub goals. I could work quite well until I thought: How much work do I actually have to do? So I added the field “Remaining Days” and “Remaining Hours” for the Remaining Effort (I tend to keep it simple). This is an absolutely great feature: Add a field on the fly with an existing database and use it right away. However what I wanted of course was to aggregate the effort of subgoals and sub-sub goals to the supergoal – but depending on the status (not count completed ones). So I was at the point again of learning APEX or not. I had a look over it, but I thought: Why should I learn the proprietary APEX and then live with the limitations of the platform (e.g. only two level business objects)? How I resolved this situation I will report in another post.

Therefore I quickly extended Salesforce with what I wanted.

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It is a lightweight integration with minimum data redundancy. Within a matter of one hour I added four links into my Lead.

1. Link to XING Profile
2. Link to XING Group Membership
3. Link to XING Messages – Inbox
4. Link to XING Messages – Outbox

These Links are calculated from the Name of the Lead, so I do not need to enter them. The only thing I need to enter is the profile name in itself – in my example FrankMichael_Kraft. Probably this can be calculated as well – if I can confirm if they are constructed.

The resulting page is displayed within the salesforce Lead. I can interact with that page as well.

So I have minimum data redundancy: I need not to copy the correspondence into the lead for example. I just use Salesforce mainly to maintain the status of the Lead.

So what I like about the Salesforce approach to CRM is:

• There are ready-to-use Business Objects – I can start in a matter of minutes.
• It is relatively easy to add new fields and links.
• The new fields and links are operative immediately. No deployment, whatever. Just run.

What I do not like so much about the Salesforce approach to CRM (as of my knowledge of today):

• I’d prefer more a social approach to CRM. I disregard mass email production. This is my preference.
• It is not clear to me how Lead Activities integrate with Email outside of Salesforce CRM.
• To add a Link you have to manually add it to every (in my example 4) layouts to be complete.
• I first missed the link construction syntax. However there was no errormessage. Just no page displayed.
• In the customization of Leads it promises to be able to change the Lead Process. But all you can do is to remove one or more of the 4 predefined statuses. This is much less than I expected.

However I am quite happy about this lean solution, that I can use right away.

We see a demo of creating a development project and deploying it to the cloud.

It does not make sense to repeat all the steps here. There are good tutorial videos on the Windows Azure Platform.

Interesting from my standpoint is, that one has to choose a datacenter for their application to run (why?) and their data to store (why?). I would have preferred just “in the cloud”. However I was told by a Microsoft professional that it might have legal implications where the data ist. ok.

An interesting part of the demo is what I never saw before, the usage of the SQL Data Service. First, an ADO.NET Object ist created, then in the local SQL server the schema is created. Then the implementation with ASP.NET MVC (business as usual) is done. The program can be tested against the local SQL server instance. Later you get the cloud SQL Data Service connection ID via the Azure Portal and you connect to the cloud SQL data service. That sounds to be quite easy. Interesting from my standpoint was, that the Database Size for the SQL Data Service is limited to 10 GB. If you need more, then you need to create more instances or you need to utilize Azure Tables, which have a very different programming models. Azure Tables is not a relational database, but an entitiy data model. There are also no Transactions across entity instances. It is much more scalable. The programming model is different.

Therefore if there is the question, how much effort is it to migrate my existing application to Windows Azure, then the answer is: it depends. If you have a Web application with SQL Server, it should be quite easy if the limitation fits. If you want to use Azure Tables, this – in my opinion – is a different programming model. Even if you can make use of ADO.NET, you have to think about consistency of the data storage in a different way. However in my personal opinion database consistency is overestimated anyway (if we are not speaking about FIN posts for example). There are a lot of applications that do not need a very high database consistency and if they use Azure Tables, they can save a lot of overhead, that is not necessary for the use case at all.

The next presentation is titled RIA apps. However the applications were about connecting a smartphone via the service bus to a desktop application. This is interesting in itself, but with RIA I expect something like silverlight. An interesting emphasis was, that it is possible to request the service bus my mere http – which should be clear in itself – but the usage is, that it can be used to connect any kind of devices to it – and not necessarily only by the .net library. This is in general the open architecture of Microsoft Azure, also for data store for example.

A complaint that I have is the missing of a search infrastructure for Azure Tables. There is nothing and it is not known inasmuch something will be offered, althouh – naturally – many customers are requesting it. However it will be built or offered sooner or later – just because people need it.

Closing this remarks I must say, that the market is moving. My personal observation is, that even today much more is already technically possible, than that which is planned to be exploited. There are exciting opportunities ahead and nobody can afford to just ignore it.

Microsoft is offering not only inhouse Server operating system and database software, but goes into the area of cloud computing with Windows Azure. Windows Azure is the operating system, that takes care of MS datacenter memory and computing management. On top of this is the App fabric, that offers .NET services in the cloud and SQL Data services that offers an SQL Server to be used in the cloud. This is claimed to be fail-safe with regards to servers and drives.

Interesting to me is, that MS positions Azure for custom software mainly. I didn’t see why standard software can not be built on MS Azure, other than this has not yet been done. I agree, that it is not the same to just port existing software to Azure – even if there are many similarities. But there are also subtle differences in the programming model that can lead to a different architecture of the software than existing software. For example it is not imparative to use SQL Data Services, but one can use Windows Azure Tables. In this cast the SQL transaction is not available – still there are interesting programming models to be applied to this environment.

The value add that MS claims with “PaaS” – Platform as a Service – is more than virtual servers and monitoring: Managed Database SQL Azure, automatic OS Updates and integration with Inhouse Systems (via Service Bus). Furthermore services like federated identity services.
Personally I thing PaaS should be used differently. For me PaaS is what MS claims as PaaS plus a Business Object and Business Process Platform that makes it possible for the customer to define own business objects and processes by means of modeling. This is not, what MS understands by PaaS. But it is a new term and probably still under discussion. Of course this can be built, if you know how. At least I am wondering how Azure might be integrated with Microsoft Oslo.

Günther Igl presents the Microsoft Online Services. Office Web Applications for example shall be able to offer online collaboration and offline work. Furthermore integration with local sharepoint installations. Is this the microsoft wave? Not yet. But it plays in the collaboration area. They complete the offering of Exchange Online, Sharepoint and LiveServices. However I still have to understand what this has to do with Windows Azure, or is it a mere sales slot. I know at least, that it is possible to use LiveServices with Azure.
He sais, that Sharepoint allows with Sharepoint Designer to build Workflows and Silverlight Applications (?!). However this is not Azure. Probably they could be integrated with Azure. But why should you do that? If you did not want to build your own workflow – yes. However first, Azure has its own workflow services that can be used and I do not believe, that it is possible to build applications with SharePoint.

In the next presentation the architecture of MS Azure is explained. It makes no sense to explain all here. However some types of applications are presented, that could be realized with MS Azure.

1. Cloud only application – basically implementing a web site.
2. Extend existing application with cloud part. For example a local point of sales application, that stores sales data in the cloud, but can also operate offline and synchronize later.
3. Web Shop type – Have a web site with backend integration (e.g. SAP). This is done via the Azure Service Bus, that provides a public URL directory for private inhouse systems (of course with authentication).
4. Massive scalable Website. You have Terabytes of data (Youtube). This makes use of Azure Tables (massively scalable), Azure Blobs, Azure Queues with Work Roles for asynchronous work.

Not mentioned was the Multi-Enterprise Business Application (MEBA) approach that I find most interesting. I will elaborate on this in a different post.

The service guarantee of Windows Azure is

• Role Monitoring and restart
• Compute Connectivity
• Storage AvailabilitDatabase Avaliabiligy
• Service Availability

All of this > 99.9% , they say.

This was the morning, now we will have lunch.

These are interesting times, because the pattern of computing changes. The cloud has appeard. Unlimited memory and computing ressources to rent, save administration, have it available everwhere at all times. These are the promises. One of the most important promises: Save cost. This is of interest to many. But in my view the most interesting promise are applications, that have not been possible before – at least not without investing in own data centers.

So – I said to myself – if the cloud is so promising – then why not use it for myself. Just to see, if the promises hold.

The cloud in itself is in use by many of us – obviously. If we are using an email service like GMAIL, GMX- then this is a service offered by the email provider. Therefore I can access the email by a mozilla windows client, by the browser and by my iPhone. I you are using IMAP, then you benefit from the fact, that for example if you delete an email on the iPhone, it is deleted on the server as well, and therefore is synchronized into the other clients as well – i.e. you don’t have to delete the email many times.

So the advantage of the cloud becomes obvious with this example already.

The second step for me was contacts. Earlier I had my contacts in MS Outlook. All the time that my computer crashed, was new installed, new computer, new harddrive – I had the stress to save my contact data, notr to forget anything. Furthermore I had to synchronize my iPhone all the time with my Outlook by USB. So if I forgot to sychronize, I did not have the current information available.

Now it is different. I chose Google contacts. Now my contacts are in the cloud. They are synchronized with my mozilla email client and they are synchronized with my iPhone whenever I pull up my contacts there – be it the data connection of T-mobile or be it the WLAN, that the iPhone is connected to. Deleting a contact on the iPhone leads to a deleted contact in the cloud as well. I am much more satisfied with this solution.

My next step was my calendar. Previously Outlook I hat the same problems as with the contacts. Now that I went to google calendar, Mozilla Sunbird integration and iPhone synchronization, I have the same advantages as with the contacs.

The next step were bookmarks, that I changed from having them locally to delicious. Same story.

Each interaction takes one or two seconds longer, than before, because the cloud is sychronized right away. But for me the advantages outweigh this fact by far.

Actually people talk about that the data in the cloud is not so secure and available. I must say the opposite is true for me. Since I have my data in the cloud, I feel much more tranquil than before. If there will be a problem, it will be solved right away, because thousands of other users will complain on behalf of me. I can just wait until the problem has been fixed. But with these services I did not have an availability problem as of yet. Backup is done by the service provider.

So for me the cloud is a synonym for an unworried life – if you want so.

These are simple services, that everbody needs and are of general purpose. In a followon post I will elaborate on applications, that I did with the salesforce.com platform and the Windows Azure platform.