My partner David and I met with Sig Rinde yesterday in London so that we could take a closer look at Thingamy, and so David could get his head round the concept. I would guess our session was a lot more sober than the Geek Girl Dinner or meeting with James Governor and Hugh Macleod that Sig told us about. It was strictly cappuccino and a lot of talk about workflow.
Coming face to face with the application is really the only way, at the moment, of coming to grips with Sig’s new view of enterprise software. I’m pleased to report that David agrees with me that Sig has, as they say, a “killer app”. We left the session both very excited about the concept, the potential, but concerned with the way Sig is positioning it. Sig is quite an evangelist for his approach, and he aims to turn the world of software on its head. We think he can do that, but by stealth and in stages, rather than by tackling the old order head on (and anyway, the old order has its place). First you have to understand that Thingamy is a kind of business process mapping application generator. When I wrote about it before we called it Sim Business. Sig’s idea is that rather than installing generic, commodity applications, you should define the workflows and objects and data and classification of your business with this tool, and do it very precisely. In that way you remove the many choices that need to be made with the compromise of generic applications, and in turn you remove the policing and management that conventional systems require. We can understand that, because we are just implementing a workflow solution to handle part of the supply chain of a printing and packaging company. We’re using a particular tool, a Marketing Resource Management application, because it was already installed, was close to what was required and was the least cost starting point to do the job. If we had Thingamy, we can see how we would implement the workflow to exactly match the process required, eliminate the choices and mistakes that can be made with our generic solution, and completely remove the management and policing job. It’s frustrating because Thingamy will be available to us in a stable version just too late to do this job.
So Thingamy is great, but we think Sig will hit problems where his solution buts up against a good or accepted existing application (which will be often!). I’ll give you a couple of examples. At one point I was saying that within a particular process I would come to a step where I need to write a letter. I thought it wouldn’t make sense to reinvent MS Word, so we should integrate with Word for that step, create the document and drop back in to Thingamy. Sig says not. He believes that you probably only use 5 or a dozen different templates for the kind of documents you need to write - invoice, proposal, debt chasing letter, etc. Rather than start with a blank page and Word, do it all in Thingamy. Another example - at the same printing and packaging company, their ERP package has some great drag and drop visual scheduling functionality, that works really well. Would we be able to re-write that? Why would you want to if it already does the job? So the Sig approach of replacing things like that will frighten off quite a few CIOs and Operations Directors.
We’re convinced that Sig needs to recognise that Thingamy should coexist with standard applications, with some form of easy, wizard based API. Then Thingamy has the potential to be useful to any organisation you can think of, where there are a myriad of workflows that aren’t handled by systems properly, and which need to be controlled, but also allowed to evolve on a regular basis. Unlike conventional software, with Thingamy you can do that.
We get our hands on the product for testing next week and we are already planning the first project we can use it on. We’ll be pressurising Sig to do some extra things, and get a version in to production status as soon as possible. But Thingamy needs to get friendly with the applications around it.
