Are Facebook and Twitter innovations or just apps ?

We obviously live in an internet era.

Many recent graduates are forming startups hoping to reap the rewards like Yahoo (in the oldest days) Google (in the old days) and Facebook/Twitter in the present.

These are popular services, no doubt about it, and the press just can't stop talking about them. Valuations and IPOs are completely without realism. It's like saying that the most successful company in world commerce is the Yellow Pages.

These silly valuations come from investors fear of missing out on the next big IPO.

But are we forgetting something ? All these billion dollar-valuation companies are all single dimensional. They are all just web apps. Software really. So while their services may be innovative in their offerings, they are really just very big software houses.

I see complaints that the US is losing it's edge in innovation and R&D. No surprise really. While US is busy building web apps, China and Korea and the rest of the world are doing R&D in flat panels, lasers, semiconductor materials, acoustics, vehicle safety, and green energy. Multi-dimensional.

Business Modeling with BPMN

Very often we find that the Requirements Management process leads to a dead end. Typically, this is a revelation that the origin of the project are not well understood - and it is time to do some Business Modeling - to clarify exactly why the project is needed and where it fits into the grand scheme of things.

Over the past decade or so, I have used elements of UML to document the Business Processes, but found that something is still lacking. Activity Diagrams and Business Use Case Models can only go so far. 

I have found a very valuable tool in BPMN 2.0 - the Business Process Model and Notation - in particular the Level 1 and Level 2 conformance subclasses that limit the icon set and greatly increase the adoption rate among our client organizations. Naturally, a set of icons alone won't do the job - Bruce Silver's BPMN Method and Style goes beyond notation and offers a Methodology of process, notation, and best practices.