April 20th, 2006
Thingamy Thoughts
I had an interesting demo from Sig Rinde this morning of his ‘thingamy‘ platform. I take part in quite a few sales demos of other products and it was a different style to what I’m used to. Usually people start with introductions, background etc. and get an understanding of what the ‘buyer’ is looking for and then during the demo touch against various elements of those requirements. What Sig did was just plough straight into a demo and to honest I’m glad because he made me stretch my mind as to what is possible rather than just think about the problem I want to solve. However, I would warn against this with ‘end users’, it works with system integrators and consultants but in my experience most people don’t want their minds blown, they want their simple problems solved.
The platform itself was quite impressive and with its minimal design it kept you focused on the nuts and bolts and not the Web 2.0 smooth corners. However, because it’s a platform as apposed to an application there’s no reason a sprinkling of AJAX could be added to make certain actions snappier in their response. At the moment the best description I can give it is it feels like wire-framing on steroids!
Being a real time collaboration guy the biggest addition that I would like to see is ‘presence integration’. The idea behind presence integration is if another user has a role in creating or modifying some data that you are looking at then beside it is a status indicator that gives you an at-a-glance understanding of their availability to communicate with you. For example, you’re working on fulfilling an order placed by one of the account managers and you see they’ve put a quantity of 1000 and you think “that the amount is a bit high and they might have slipped on the zeros”. You look at their presence icon and see the current status is ‘in a meeting’ and instead of phoning them and interrupting it you send them an email or IM asking them to check the amount and get back to you. Rather than increasing the interruptions if people are taught to respect your status it decreases it significantly and allows you to manage your personal workflow.
The other addition that I would see very necessary to build into it is email in and out because it plays such a big part in communication these days. I’m sure will be easy considering they have an XML-RPC interface but I’d be interested to see if anyone else has raised this.
I’m looking forward to the getting my hands on it with Sig when he’s next in London. My next task is getting the client I’m planning on using it for to allow me to spend a bit of time with their staff to get a rough sketch of what their process is now so I have a starting point to build from.
April 21st, 2006 at 3:51 am
Mike, how can one not love this blogging thing, I mean, doing a demo and then get a full and no-nonsense report back - excellent!
I’ve heard the issue of demo-to-end-users before, actually Thomas Otter at SAP said the exact same thing - so duly taken to heart of course! (Although I think I’ll stick to you guys and let you who really are close to the front do that part if I may
The idea of a “Presence integration” is new - so far we have sorted that issue in a more asynchronous way, just by adding an “ad-hoc” internal communication process using a “communication object”, leaving the identification to customer issue, whatever to the tags. Works, and I am a real fan of asynchronity and keeping all communication as real system objects for future history and reports (that way a “customer file” also includes internal communication whhatever ity might be, should be useful!). Loose nothing is the credo.
But of course, will give it a think!
E-mail integration is not new on the wish-list, and should not be a biggie! In fact it would be important to be able to flip those blasted mails into proper data-objects inside the system so they can be used side-by-side with all other data. That’ll be there
Thanks again, and am looking forward to sit down together and plonk down a end-user-demo!
November 24th, 2006 at 4:26 am
Thingamy is an ultimately configurable process modeler that actually runs the processes. It could be a killer app in the right hands. It could be a consultant’s swiss army knife. It is an SMB’s dream: to be able to change processes on the fly and have a framework that can facilitate, communicate, and implement new workflows across entire organizations.