I was thinking a lot about the UI in our next version.
ActionBase V6 will have Office 2007 Like user interface and Ribbon command buttons instead of the ordinary toolbar scheme. It only made sense since Office 2007 is gaining momentum and since we believe most of our customers will soon migrate to Office 2007, a toolbar based UI will seem somewhat out of date.
As part of my ever going effort to better myself professionally, I am constantly amazed by just how little resources are actually out there…
Blogging seems to put you in contact with the ones out there doing the same job as you do.
Two very interesting product management blogs I recently subscribed to and highly recommend:
You can design the most beautiful product.
You can define features, advanced capabilities and other user experience mechanisms and no one in your company will even bother to read your requirements or comment.
But, you will never get everyone to agree on icons - everyone has a say about it… everyone is suddenly the “Michelangelo” of graphic design.
Conclusion for the product managers out there - Democracy is overrated.
Sure… this is SO true and goes for everything in this life.
But when you email your peers at at work, you are communicating with them - updates, files, requests, clarifications and what not. A human centric process management system must understand that communication is at the core of people at work. Today’s business process management solutions are not cut out for this task… and this is why people use email - cause it gives them a way to communicate in the process with no restrictions or boundaries. I believe a human centric process management system should embrace email as the base of it’s foundation.
One article I like about this is by Peter Fingar: http://human-interaction-management.info/
the ‘Human’ Factor is a problem for traditional BPM. When it comes to business processes that involve human interaction you can clearly see why BPM solutions fail.
Human work is:
If you want to manage a human workflow like fraud investigation or a product change request or any other, you need to accept the “chaos” and face the facts - structured, rigid process does not fit into this paradigm.
They call this new field in a variety of names “Human Interaction Management” or “Human Centric BPM” and even “Human Workflows” - but as soon as you put the “human” factor in there… you know that flexibility is the key… and this is why email which is completly free and none binding in any aspect is the ONLY thing that people have been using so far to manage such processes.
We recently gort back from NYC where we presented ActionBAse at the IORG conference.
IORG stands for InformationOverload Research Group - it is a group of analysts and visionaries who are dedicated to reducing information overload, a problem which diminishes the productivity and quality of life of knowledge workers worldwide.
I was amazed and intrigued by just how prominent this problem is and the toll it takes on our productivity and financial “bottom line”. Most of the information overload problem pivots around email and email overload and some presenters discussed radical ways of avoiding emailing from damaging one’s productivity to the extent of going “unplugged” for several hous a day.
I specially liked the “zero inbox” concet presented by Mark Hurst offering some methodology for handling the tsunami of emails we all get every day.
We presnted ActionBase as part of the Visionary Vendor Panel where we shared our vision for reducing email overload by creating context around activities and process we all managed thoguh email.
It is what everyone keep saying - email is NOT designed for action tracking and action management… but the strong affinity of action tracking and management to human interaction make it so attractive for this purpose.
ActionBase was admited to the Microsoft Accelerator program.
“ActionBase has been selected to join the Microsoft Startup Accelerator Program. Stewarded by the Emerging Business Team (EBT) at Microsoft Corp., the program is designed to connect high-potential startups committed to the Microsoft platform”
It is all over the news…
We are all pretty excited about the whole thing and we think this will be boost our progress. We met with our partners in the EBT team in Houston Texas during the world wide partner conference last month and discussed some very interesting ways that we can work together.
Our next step is to connect and join the TAP (Technology Adoption Program) for Office 14 which is due later this year… we want to make sure we are ahead of the curve and that future ActionBase capabilities will continue to empower office users.
Here is why i think anyone who takes the time to write a meeting minutes document is practically wasting his/her time.
In general we take the time to put things in writing as a way of documenting the decisions, action items and agreements made in a meeting. The problem everyone faces is that two seconds and even before the digital ink dried on your meeting minutes paper things start to change.
Responsibilities, due dates, the nature of action items etc… that is the dynamic nature of people as they work together.
Writing a meeting minutes document is like taking a photo of a specific point in space-time and thinking that this is what is still going on right now…
As things change, people seldomly revisit the document and edit these changes, so the document becomes obsolete, a fossil of a meeting that once took place somewhere in time.
What we really need is a way of extracting these logical entities (decisions, action items etc) from the document and be able to work on them in a collaborative nature like email.
Think of a mechanism that allows you to define action items in a document, and when you are done, these action items are magically transferred to the relevant people and as they work on them, any response, change or collaborative information gathered is documented on the same action item.
Furthermore, the next time you open the document, the changes made in ‘real life’ are propagated back to the document so your ‘photo’ is actually a ‘video’ or a real time snap shot of the ever changing reality - these are actionable documents we call ActionDocs.
So here we are at the Microsoft World Partner Conference in Houston, where the temperatures are sky high and the humidity is 120%.
What a great kickoff we had in the conference. We at ActionBase just announced our acceptance to the Microsoft Accelerator program which is a very distinct Microsoft program for hand-picked start ups. The conference is like nothing I have ever seen (and this comes from a guy who has been to several other Ms conferences and many of those times as a speaker…). This is truly a greta platform to connect, meet the right people and partner up to doing great business. Never thought I’d say that out laud… Good job Microsoft…
So we have enstablish the idea that email clients are not cut out for managing day to day work.
Working with several people and managing action items can not be done through email. We need a new breed of email clients that are action item oriented. this type of email system will arrange information that is otherwise scattered across email messages and collate them into one single entity - the action item.
Imagine sending a request to three different people to hand out their report. With regular email you are bound to end up with minimum 3 emails and 3 attachments… and when you take into account, questions, clarification, scheduling and status updates you get a pile of email.
A task oriented email client will behave like a wiki document in the sense that once you send it out, any response, question or comment made by recipients or yourself, will all happen on the same email entry… all the relevant information under a single line item - THIS IS COLLABORATIVE EMAIL.
In ActionBase we call this email - ActionMail.
ActionMail is the next generation of work email which is task oriented rather than message oriented.
