AppsJack Group to Change World in 2018

It was a nice Fall day and the biggest and best turnout to date happened for the AppsJack group last night at Big Fish Grill in Kirkland.

Alan Andersen, Andrew Sengul, Berry Zimmerman, Christian Harris, Dominic Wong, Dr. Tom Louwers, Ele Munjeli, Eric Veal, Jean Bishop, Jehan Bharucha, Kifaya Dawud, Mark Mueller-Eberstein, Megan Gaiser, Thomas Mercer, Mike Dodd, Reba Haas, David Slight, Sriram Sabesan, Steve Kubacki, Susan Stringer, Richard Webb

 Here was our agenda for the evening:

• Retrospective and feedback
• Success stories and new relationships from the group
• Best parts
• Worst parts
• Things to change
• Competition - what takes you away from it?
• Purpose and identity - who are we and why are we here, what's our name?
• Schedule and frequency, meeting types and formats, size of meetings
• 2018 Topics
• Ongoing relationship to APQC?
• Organizers / board
• Expansion, scope, milestones, organization
• Fees
• Partnerships, sponsorship, affiliations
• Podcast
• Subgroups and committees
• Technology, tools and online presence
• Venues, Seattle

Here are the main action items and to do's from the meeting:

• Plan in detail
• Change name
• Remove cap of # attendees
• Postpone start by one hour
• Change topics from APQC to BDN + Robots + Humans in 2018
• Get owners/hosts/leads for each 2018 meeting 
• Look into online tech that would help
• Book reviews
• Pre-reading and recommendations
• More detailed profiles for each member - stickers or badges based on the APQC model
• Patreon platform for contributions
• E2B as sponsor?
• Consider and help each other develop what "product" each of us is creating
• Opportunities to share stories and successes annually - a gala
• Leverage what is unique and beneficial about Seattle over other tech hubs like Silicon Valley - be unique, different and stand out.  We are practical and not Hollywood.  We are loggers and fishermen.

And here are detailed notes, outcomes and decisions from the meeting.  Join us at a gathering soon!

• Retrospective and feedback
• Lots of good feedback here.  People were here for:
• "High level thinking"
• Diversity of opinions and perspectives (learning)
• Academic, experienced and educated tone
• Consistent high quality
• Stimulation
• Idea sharing
• Cross-domain thinking and experiences, feedback and ideas
• Random networking
• Stories and experiences are illuminating
• Successes people have had
• Steve and Andrew met through the group and are collaborating
• Christian has met a ton of new people through it
• Thomas met Bruce Follansbee who has opened many doors
• Purpose and identity - who are we and why are we here, what's our name?
• Brainstorm on names, taglines and descriptions
• Descriptions and Taglines
• Thought provoking
• "It's all connected"
• Making Meaning and Money
• Names
• Think tank
• "Talk Tank"
• "Food for Thought"
• Talk, Inc.
• Rethinking business
• Humanist Technology
• Making Business Human
• Saving Business
• Business Humanity²
• Human Tank
• Business Reconnected
• Business & People Reconnected
• H2H: Human to Human
• Unf*ck Business
• Human-Centered Business
• Business Renaissance: Unf*cking Business - This was the most popular (or at least the funniest).  We will continue to think about the best name.
• Schedule and frequency, meeting types and formats, size of meetings
• 4th Tuesdays will continue
• 5 PM official start preferred but people welcome to show up earlier
• No limit on number of guests
• "Owners" / organizers for each meeting - sign up sheet
• 2018 Topics and themes
• Ele: "The automation apocalypse"
• AI vs. Automation
• Robot-Human Interface
• Steve offered this three-pronged approach:
• Economics
• Business
• Praxix / Products (concrete)
• Zodiac signs - Andrew Sengul
• The BDN model with David Slight: Drivers, Objectives, Benefits, Changes, Capabilities, Enablers and then switch between the tech/robot perspective and the human perspective.  
• Ongoing relationship to APQC?
• Nothing will be overt.  Could come up again here and there but it's over for now.  RIP APQC!
• Organizers / board
• Not needed.  Tap individuals as needed.  Build small, focused teams as needed.  Keep organic.
• Expansion, scope, milestones, organization
• Happy to keep it as an Eastside only event for now.
• Eric will talk to Michael Dodd and the Product Camp people about expansion of a group in Seattle.
• Fees
• Keep it free / optional.
• Can charge through meetup.  Runs the risk of turning people away; traction is preferred to profit.
• Some guests are willing to contribute capital.
• Partnerships, sponsorship, affiliations
• Keep this standalone for now to maximize flexibility.
• Podcast
• Yes, the podcast is good.  Keep it tied to the meetup on the same schedule.  Add 1:1 podcasting capability through Janis' Machala or Josh Golden's contacts.
• Subgroups and committees
• No need for this right now.  Will form as necessary.
• Technology subgroup: Ele, Andrew, Eric
• Technology, tools and online presence
• No agreement here.
• An online discussion forum could be good.
• Will talk with Andrew and Ele to decide on a direction.
• Venues, Seattle
• Big Fish Grill fine for now.
• Reba and Berry may have some functional options if we want to switch it up.

APQC Acquire, Construct and Manage ASSETS and Mega Project Management Meetup Summary

The business group met at its usual place and had a good turnout. The topic was Acquire, Construct and Manage Assets and I wanted us to explore 'mega projects'.  It was summertime and I hadn't promoted the event much but we had some old faces show up and some new blood as well.  In the house for the first time was Sri, a friend of Richard Webb's, and an incredibly sharp and talented management consultant.  Our topic for the evening was 'Mega Project Management Techniques' and it was within the context of APQC PCF's Acquire, Construct and Manage Assets category.  For fun, Richard and I sat on opposing ends of the large table so we could battle.

We had a $150 + tip minimum we had to meet so attendees were encouraged to eat and drink to their heart's content.  I enjoyed two IPAs and even sprung for the Filet Mignon (medium rare, of course), which was served with broccolini and I got fries and there was a slight truffle flavor happening somewhere on the plate, which was good.  Overall the meal was quite good, although the filet did not compare to the quality available at Jak's.

And so our discussion of ASSETS began and Richard, as is somewhat typical, took the lead and shared what he knew and thought about the topic.  Also in attendance were yours truly (Eric Veal), Bruce Follansbee, Thomas Mercer, James Murray (thanks for showing up, James!), Alan Andersen, Steve Kubacki.  Richard's friend Sri arrived toward the end as we were closing up shop.

Thomas offered that assets were rent producing.  We were working on a definition of asset that we could all get behind and I was also preparing for the recording in early September of the AppsJack Capable Communities Podcast on the Asset Management topic.  We wondered if assets were investments and thought they may need to have a positive ROI.  I suggested that assets created passive income.

We discussed the modes of acquiring assets: with cash, by making them, and by financing them through other means.  Richard talked about two main classes of assets: Cost of Doing Business Assets (like printers, for example) and Intellectual Property assets.  We wanted to keep drilling down on the definition of assets and more fully understand their properties and methods. So we did: we wondered if assets had a property of technical debt and we spent quite a bit of time considering if technical debt was an essential property of an asset (since assets, like anything, are probably not perfect).

The conversation shifted from technical debt (bad design and things requiring rework, really anything imperfect) to the role of the architect as the key person who creates and hands over assets.  Richard, who has been an IT architect for years had many things to say about the topic.  Richard shared some stories with us including a multi-million dollar project where he and the team dropped off a very large stack of documents off to the client about how to make a data center.  He described the pile of paper being feet-tall and the 'thud factor' of dropping off all that intellectual property to the client.  Richard pointed out another distinction in that 'only humans create IP'.  He described assets as an object with a unique ID, that they are "sellable" and containerized.  Assets have clear scope and their boundaries (what they are and are not) are well defined.  Richard wondered if there could be an Operating Expense asset and we discussed the new billing models with the cloud where people are renting services.  We also spoke about the cloud as a utility and some issues relating to the regulation of the cloud providers by providing some sort of efficiency index.

Examples of Goldman Sachs' position in the market came up for the second time in as many weeks.  On the last podcast episode, guest Mark Mueller-Eberstein made some guesses about how Goldman could enter into the crypto-currency space. Studying more about Goldman could be a good thing as for innovation.

James pointed out that business brokers use the formula EBITDA x Risk to get the business value.  So risk (in our case technical debt, for example) is a fundamental aspect of reducing the value of a firm.  Getting to a reasonable risk quotient is a trick.

We debated issues of "boutique services" and wondered how one-to-one services like Alexa and Google Home would be regulated in the future.  Richard shared about three key properties of modern software services, a subclass of asset: UX, Adoption, and Consumption.  The consumption part is what is metered in modern systems such as Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Bruce cited the book Fumbling the Future about Xerox's fall from its central role in office automation.  The group also had a long and detailed conversation about practices at Boeing.  Someone in the group stated that, "Boeing doesn't make ariplanes, it moves money."

Join us soon for podcasts on the Managing Assets topic and join us at the meetup in September when we will discuss Risk, Compliance, Remediation and Resiliency.

Managing Enterprise Risk, Compliance and Resiliency - Recap of October AppsJack Business Services Share meetup

The AppsJack Share team gathered on Tuesday, October 25th at Big Fish Grill in Kirkland, WA to discuss "Enterprise Risk, Compliance and Resiliency".  The guests were seasoned professionals who shared many interesting ideas about the topic.  Here are some of the biggest ideas and highlights.  Next month's topic is Managing External Relationships.

What is an acceptable level and/or amount of risk?

Risk can be scored and quantified but it is quite hard to measure.

Risk is comparative and/or relative, not absolute.

Failure Modes and Effects Analysis (FMEA) can be a handy tool for looking at the dark side of situations and understanding potential impacts.

Risk Priority Number (RPN) is used, commonly in the automotive industry, as a measure of assessed risk and helps identify critical failure modes associated with a design or process. RPN values range from 1 (absolute best) to 1000 (absolute worst).  RPN is somewhat similar to the criticality.

Quite a bit of conversation was had about differences between risk (perceived negative impact) and opportunity (perceived negative impact).  Weighing both of these sides is critical for decision making.  Both live within the context of uncertainty.  Information gathering, research and assessment are  good tools to reduce uncertainty and increase the ability to predict outcomes.

David Slight brought up the point about the cost to mitigate.  Just because a risk could be mitigated, the question is raised "is it worth mitigating?"

Risk reduction is indeed a measurement and tool that is commonly used.

Paul, a first-time attendee and new Seattleite (welcome to the group, Paul), shared about the tool of Potential Problem Analysis.  PPA is a way that can help analysts anticipate problems before they happen and to identify the actions needed to be taken to prevent them from happening, or to minimize the effect.

David said that many people assume that there is a 1:1 relationship between the problem and its solution, which is a fallacy.  And that risk is oftentimes hierarchically decomposed, which presents issues since things are multi-dimensional and multi-faceted (do not fall into simple hierarchies).  NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) provides a Risk Management Framework that is common in industry.

Fred said that a lack of a Business Continuity plan is one of the biggest risks that companies face.  Without this plan, they have no plan and are therefore at risk.

There are many types of risk: financial, reputation, technological, infrastructural, contractual, relational, global, service, project, corporate, enterprise, operational.  This page has many of the risk types explained and differentiated.

Controls and compliance are big parts of the risk management process and plan.

Eric shared about extremely significant cultural differences about risk between companies in, say, healthcare, and those in, say, fashion.  Stark differences in language and behavior can be seen between these two cultures.

Jean, who was at the group for the first time and is currently taking a Building your Own Theology class at BCC,  shared about a big difference between the occurrence of the risk and the actual harm that results from it.  The risk event and the following harm or actions are two different areas, each requiring management, caution and care.

There are many situations and scenarios where we as humans choose to "look the other way" from a risk or issue so we maintain focus on our current projects and mission.  We "accept" (by ignoring) the other risk and therefore are at risk to its potential harm.  Risk and strategy are closely related.

We spoke quite a bit about authorization and systems including roles.  The BART system (Boundary, Authority, Role and Task) is a good way to clearly define roles.

We moved onto the topic of resiliency.  We agreed that scalability was related, as is the idea of "foreverness".  A clear plan that is aware of various thresholds, steps and milestones can help with communications about foreverness, a commitment to permanence and resiliency.

Many organizational and management-level issues can crop up in the topic of risk, authority and resiliency.  For example, there are many scenarios when people have a lot of responsibility but no authority.  Legitimate power delegated is a key to organizational success and growth.  (Managing down the chain).

Reba and others commented on individual-level requirements such as "if I found it, then I fix it".  Leadership and care at the individual level are required for organizations to survive and grow optimally.  Tableau has a core cultural value of "We Work as a Team" and that works well but it can also get into a blaming situation where no one (only the team) is accountable.  I felt that a similar cultural value of "I either hand-off well or I win." was a good one.

"I either hand off or we win."

Bruce, an always great contributor at the meetings, shared the phrase "you can't manage a secret".  And Leland, also new to the meeting, shared about the need for positive handoff.

Ultimately culture and individual attitudes, aggregated, play into the ability of an organization to identify and effectively manage risk, be compliant and be resilient.  Next month, we will talk about Managing External Relationships that plays into this topic very well.  Keep your eyes and ears peeled for our podcast on these and other topics coming soon.

We are considering naming the AppsJack Share Podcast "WonkTalk", "Community", "Communities of Purpose", "Practical Organizational Theory", "Building Communities of Purpose".  Do you have a preference in the name?  Plan is to have a podcast about the topic preceding the month's meetup.  The reason for it to be before the meetup is to prepare some, get a high level framework and understanding of the topic, get feedback from our audience on the most interesting areas.

We talked for over two hours.

At the meeting were Eric, Paul, Dominic Wong, David Slight, Fred de Boer, Chris Ingrao, Jean, Reba and Leland, Andrew Sengul.

Managing Financial Resources for Businesses - Will FinTech Make Us Richer? Recap of March 24, 2016 AppsJack Business Share Meetup in Kirkland, WA

Tuesday, March 24, 2016

AppsJack Business Services Share

Big Fish Grill, Kirkland, WA

• Attendees:
• Samuel Rodriguez
• Eric Veal
• David Bleiweiss (first time)
• Bruce Follansbee
• Dominic Wong
• Chad Oda (first time)
• Fred de Boer (first time)
• Andrew Sengul
• TJ Elston

Welcome David, Chad and Fred to the group.  Please greet and welcome them!

No, we do not believe that FinTech will make us richer but there are a collection of tools and practices within this category that are essential for a productive business.  "You get what you measure" and you have to measure well.  So finance is a very key enabling process to businesses but without the proper values, vision, strategy, products, value proposition, sales, delivery and care for customer service, finance won't help you at all.

Main ideas covered:

• Good quote.  From TJ, a line from the movie Aviator about Howard Hughes with Leonardo DiCaprio:
• Mrs. Hepburn: We don't care about money here.
• Howard Hughes: That's because you have it.
• The purpose of finance.  Money is about measuring/weighing/sizing value(s) and not just about money.  Many things can get boiled down to an "apples to apples" model where money is the factor but many guesses need to be made in the model to put a monetary value to certain intangible values.  Finance is a measurement system that seeks to equate all things into a single system and common language to make businesses, transactions and discussions easier and more fluid.
• Balance required and you can't only look at money, profit and greed anymore.  Approaches like Triple Bottom Line, Balanced Scorecard and AQPC look to balance out our measurements by breaking them into a set of categories.  Portfolio management, weighting and balancing matters.
• AppsJack is about the Management of Things (MoT).  New idea: not just the internet of things but the Management of Things.  IoT proliferates irresponsibly and wastefully.  MoT seeks to balance and distribute technologies to places and industries and applications that need it the most.
• Focus first, diversity second.  We agreed that businesses need to find focus, a value proposition, clarity, value, a product and some success first before they can get into the realm of diversification.  Diversity is a good thing but it can be misapplied.
• Cool and new Financial Technologies.  Andrew shared about KDB and David shared about a new system called Aladdin from Blackstone that he uses that produces very amazing models.

Next meetup topic on Tuesday September 27th in Kirkland from 4-7 PM: "Successfully marketing your IoT Idea."  We are seeking people who have ideas for IoT products, or IoT products themselves and we would like to serve as a panel to build a model that helps them best invest in marketing efforts that will have the highest possible ROI for their product/service.

Managing IT in Context: Recap of July 2016 AppsJack Business Share Meetup, Seattle, WA

Well, the monthly fourth Tuesday AppsJack Business Share meet was held in Bellevue at Big Fish Grill on Tuesday, July 26th from 4 to 7 PM and went off without a hitch.  The event was well attended by new, familiar and awesome faces.  Thanks to Ruben Simpson for showing up, a new connection from Issaquah who is running an agency.

The new faces (first time attendees) at the event were Ruben Simpson, Ted Clark, and Karen Carnahan.  There was quite a bit of iced tea going around and the beer and wine seemed to flow fluidly as well.  I saw fish and chips.  "Regulars" included Eric Veal, Dominic Wong, David Slight, Joe Pham, James Tuff, Chris Ingrao, Andrew Sengul and Richard Webb.

The topic for the evening was MANAGING INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY: Are you doing it right? and there was a star-studded cast of industry experts to debate it.  The topics under discussion were all hot in 2016: IoT, Cloud Computing, the industry, relative strengths and positions of cities, Smart Machines, Robots and Drones, AI, Context-Rich, Intelligent Learning Systems and Bots, Visual Analytics, BI and Tableau, 3D and 4D Printing, modern IT practices.  Below are the major points, lessons, areas of interest and takeaways we covered.

VUI is and is gonna be YOOOOGE! Voice user interface (VUI) is and will be a huge area for the industry in computing.  Successes from Siri, Amazon Echo, Kinect and the like are driving this and solutions from companies like Twilio.  Microsoft offers Speech APIs on Azure.  For users, rather than needing to look directly at a computer and be attached to it 1:1, the user simply speaks and has it respond in interesting or necessary ways.  The voice interfaces will become better and better and their responses will be delivered to us through connected user interfaces like Google Glass, Hololens, etc.  This is immersive computing.  Richard Webb and Eric met at a Six Hour Startup in Seattle in 2009 where we used Twilio and RunMyProcess.com (now a Fujitsu company) to automate workflows.  The technology has been around and will get broader and deeper.  The ability now for the machine to respond to voice input is and will be a phase shift.

Use the right Strategic Frameworks.  We spoke of Red and Blue Ocean strategies, their applications and differences.  David Slight taught us about the differences in approach and the example of Cirque de Soleil was brought up as blue ocean strategy.  David and Richard Webb expressed the importance of the very simple VSE framework: Vision, Strategy, Execution.  Vision and strategy alone are useless and require execution; otherwise they are just ideas.  (Unrealized potential).

David and Richard carried on about the future of IT and told Eric that the BOST and BAIT (Business Aligned IT) frameworks were relevant and powerful areas to study. Surprisingly, ITIL was not mentioned though I saw it rise around 2007.

Richard joined us about 90 minutes into the evening and impressed everyone with his knowledge and opinions of the industry based on many years of experience and his current work with major clients making IT more modern and higher quality.  We talked about automation, policies and humans vs. machines including their associated ethics in this context.

The Future is near:  Governance and Regulation.  We started getting pretty futuristic.  Andrew brought up Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics.  And mentioned that there is also a fourth (also referred to as the zeroth) law.  The laws are:

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.
4. A robot may not harm humanity, or, by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.

Mr. Slight and Mr. Webb talked about ISA, the International Society of Automation, and David's work building a 3D virtual reality room, like Minority Report, for working on business models like his BDN framework (Drivers, Objectives, Benefits, Changes, Capabilities, Enablers).  He is writing code as we speak for Hololens to realize this vision.

Webb griped about the pace of technology's advancement and the complexity of keeping up with all of the tools.  Eric shared that one of his visions is to be able to keep up with the tools and tech indeed and use that (which we already do as a computing substrate).  We need better linkage between our tools and our business processes.  Companies like Alternativeto.net are doing wonderful work in this area and will probably soon expose APIs that make model driven architecture in a tool-agnostic approach like has been taught at the UW Foster School of Business for years more of a reality.  Companies like Microsoft are extremely strong with their use of workflow frameworks and things like Entity Framework to make modeling and business automation a reality.  Salesforce is in that race, too.  And Microsoft has the goal to take on SAP.

New technologies abound. Cucumber.io (collaboration around running automated tests in software) and Pickle (in Python, pickle is the standard mechanism for object serialization) recently came up in Richard's work.  Neo4j, the World's Leading Graph Database, was brought up in conversation as critical technology.  I believe Andrew is using it for some of his interesting projects.  Here is a listing of comparable technologies to neo4j. 

The book The Art of the Possible: Create an Organization with No Limits was brought up and Richard had a wonderful quote, "You are differentiating yourself by not being a prick."

Luminaries.  Richard talked about Grant Holland, a Senior Java Architect with Sun Microsystems, who is a close relation to the "Gang of Four" (GoF), Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson, John Vlissides, who wrote the book on Design Patterns in software development.  Here are more resources on Grant's work.  Joe, who is running a startup about insurance reform to benefit the end users talk about the benefits of Founders.org and their Advisor Template in particular.

Conclusion.  IT is a great topic but there were suggestions that "Digital" is a better word to describe it anymore.  David has strong beliefs that IT is going away as a function and that the capabilities of this function really.  This basically supports the idea of the AppsJack vision: the best tools for every practice.

Next AppsJack Share event: Managing Financial Resources.  AppsJack looks forward to the next meetup, which will be in Bellevue.  The topic will be Managing Financial Resources.  And the following month, the topic will be Managing Assets (they things that were attained with the money).  AppsJack looks forward to seeing you at an event soon and hearing about your ideas of the future, industry and what's possible.  Join the discussion today! RSVP for the August Managing Financial Resources event.