Getting started with Business Activity Monitoring

Next to some other projects I'm currently working on a Business Activity Monitor. One can say, that this is a dashboard for business processes. The creation of such a thing can be quite hard in case you need to fill in the data manually. On the other hand, if you have something like an ESB or run everything over JMS or execute your busines processes on a BPEL engine exposing events, you shouldn't have any problem to set up such a thing.

All these things can (or at least should be able to) provide data via events. An ESB will be configured to send certain messages to a BAM logging service or register the BAM for JMS messages. Another nice option would be registering an BpelEventListener at ODEs BPEL engine.

What is missing now is the BAM. WSO2 started a nice implementation. What is missing there I guess (just read through the concept so far) is the option to assign costs to tasks and therefore calculate process costs. Future releases (or event the current?) will need to provide such things.

Visualize not comparable data

Over the weekend I was called to help at presenting information. The data was a survey concerning social networks and their marketing potential. As many surveys, questions like "how important is ... for ..." where asked and the answers where don't know, not, little and very. So, how to present this data? My client didn't want the usual bar chart you should use for that as the only info you've got is a number of votes. The data will be presented in a marketing paper so I can understand the need for fanciness and partly wrong usage of data. So I had to come up with some bubble chart. As I only have the amount of votes and a bubble chart needs at least three numerical attributes, I was able to convince my client to use a spider chart. The last problem was that the answer possibilities are hard to compare. What's very important compared to not important? A better question would have been, how much percent of your marketing budget are you willing to spend on this and that? That's an open question with a numerical value you can easily compare. So I have to convert the votes for options to a comparable single numerical value. The easiest way is weighting. Give three points to very important, zero to not important and so on. Depending on what you want to say, you can change the outcome of the diagram by using other weights. Like I could ignore the don't know answers or I can punish them with a negative weight. So by adding up the weight, calculating a dummy numerical value I came up with the chart presented in this post. It's a perfect marketing chart as it looks nice and doesn't provide any usable information (except for marketing people). If you want some charts too, contact me.

Master of cunning

As I described a few month ago, I am starting a new way of communicating. I always chose the direct confrontation which succeeded most of the time but took quite a lot of energy which resulted in suffering. I now changed my mindset and I find first improvements. This might be a bad case of Post hoc ergo propter hoc because I graduated and my bosses ignore opinions from a lower level.

Nevertheless, there are two key components of my mindset that may result in less energy loss.

1. Persuade, not fight: There are numerous cases where you as employee know a lot more than your boss. Bosses should hire people that are better than them in at least one domain. And with the years, there will be many domains as life goes on. You as export should try to persuade your boss by presenting facts and options. There are some tips around the Internet, how to persuade. If it does not work, don't worry, there is another component in my mindset for that.
2. Accept your position: You trade your time and decision making power for money. There is a contract between you and your employer. You don't owe your employer anything else and your employer doesn't owe you anything else. So your boss decides, your job is to provide the best options you can come up with. In case you boss chooses none of your options, don't worry, you trade your time for his or her money.

Don't give up to fast on the persuade component. You should try to build leadership skills yourself and act accordingly to better understand your bosses. Look at it as a sort of game where you need to level up quite a lot to become Master of Cunning.

Create your own model to understand complex things

I'm currently guiding some coworkers through the process of system analysis. I finally got permission to reengineer some descriptions we got from the UK and create a proper process model out of it. The nice thing about it is, I do not have to the boring detail work. I'm just there to explain the method, set some goals and help out when problems appear. Just like being an advisor for dissertations.

Btw, in case you want to hire me as advisor, just contact me ;)

There are some methodologies to turn information into knowledge and to use experience to turn knowledge into wisdom. I will just focus on turing information into knowledge within this post. There is a model by Probst et al. that describes what elements knowledge is based on. The thing I want to focus on is Systems Engineering. There are several books about that topic but I will provide you a super easy to remember methodology I learned from Haberfellner.

Start top-down - coarse grained to fine grained - but don't forget the details
I know that people want to start bottom-up because most of the information is provided in a very detailed manner. You will feel lost as soon as you want to get all the details in the beginning. On the other hand, you will have to run an endless amount of problem solving cycles when you just do top-down.

Use the big problem solving cycle
The problem solving cycle has four to seven steps, depending on the source. I like the big description best, because it include the top-down with details approach. By thinking about your problem, you can go up and down all levels without defining solutions. Do not ask any "How to ..." questions during the explore phase as they always lead to solutions and you don't want to be biased when defining your goals.

How does this help with creating a model? Well, you use the problem solving cycle to identify a problem that states something like "I need to represent [insert something here] visually on any detail level as model". And, as I said, you don't want to start at the bottom, as most of the time, there is too much information. Don't get biased by details but don't do the problem solving cycle over and over again because you didn't look into details before.

As a writer of scientific papers, I can make everything fit into everything by creating the right model. You should know that in case you need to work with a model you're not satisfied with. With a little bit of modeling experience, you can create a model that fits your needs and somehow reflects the provided model as well.