Blogging Serena TAG - 1: Jeremy Burton Kicks It Off

I am sitting here listening to very hip updated covers of the Stones waiting for the opening of the Serena Tag 2008 conference. It makes a nice metaphor for the event. The conference planners have done a great job of creating the proper environment for a conference whose theme is “permission to innovate.” I will be blogging much of the conference. See also - http://twitter.com/kevinparkerusa for the Twitter coverage.

The music stops and Jeremy starts, talking about the coming era of innovation in IT. He is the CEO of Serena. In today’s downturned economy, companies are especially looking to IT innovation for gains in productivity. They need it. There is no choice. Agile is one of these trends. Agile development is counter to the old school waterfalls. Rapid iteration becomes a greater reality with Agile. We will learn more as the conference goes on. This is one of Serena’s major moves (see Serena Moves into SaaS, Project Management, and Agile Application Development). Jeremy also discussed web 2.0 with consumer innovation driving enterprise innovation, if business developers learn and adapt properly for business. First, there is collaboration and then ease of use. I would add transparency.

Jeremy then discussed millennials, those who grew up with the web. My own kids were ahead of them but I learn from others. They have taught me a lot about the web. I do think that the rest of us are educable if we only listen. That is what Serena is doing.

Jeremy then moved to what Serena is doing. They have a common instance of their global development rather than operating in silos. He next did a few demos. He compared dueling means to download Eclipse files. The traditional means, IBM Clearcase, was like watching paint dry. Their Dimensions blintzed IBM Clearcase. Jeremy said it was 60x faster on average. He challenged the audience to try it themselves. It reminds me of those turtle ads for internet downloads. Jeremy used snails as his comparison symbol. After Dimension finished quickly, we came back from time to time to see how the IBM download was progressing.

Now on to Agile. With old school development, you try to lock down requirements and fight change. I know this well from my former large firm consulting days. Some times we spend four people and two months just redoing the schedule and that was not even for a change but for a change in development pace. The snails won. Agile is like the new school Alpine climbing versus the old siege method. Hillary took several thousand porters with him to take Everest. BTW - Jeremy did continue to refer to back to the progress of the IBM download mentioned above with their thousands of virtual porters during his session. It was slow but steady.

Serena calls their new Agile project – Chopper – after the British motorcycle. John, the demo master came on stage through the sounds of “Head out on the Highway” They also use the scrum metaphor from Rugby for this Agile process, an interlocking movement. There was definitely a Brit theme going here, but then Jeremy is British. John showed us multiple views of a development process that works like a virtual scrum. More to come.

Jeremy continued his tour and next went to Serena Mariner. It is a portfolio management system. They have focused on ease of use and the ability to import Excel in a few minutes. You can also import MS Project files. I know the complexity of dealing with the MS Project for painfully slow iterations in the aforementioned example of several people for several months simply to make some changes because the project was behind schedule. Serena is offering Projects on Demand as an alternative that is not a siloed. You can open MS Project files within Projects OnDemand in a few seconds to have an open online collaborative environment. This is the transparency I referred to earlier. They are integrating Projects on Demand with Mariner.

Jeremy took us back to web 2.0. He said that mashups are a killer app for web 2.0. This is something I agree with and have discussed before. It makes applications that pull data from multiple sources possible. Jeremy remained us that business mashups are quite different from consumer mashups. Business is often about process. I could not agree more. Old school knowledge management only really worked when it was tied to a process. With mashups, this is even more important. In fact we could have used mashups to great advantage in the early days of knowledge management in the early 90s when we were trying to link information to process. In those days we had those thousands of porters hand building what you could do quickly with mashups now.

Jeremy mentioned they have allowed employees to use Apple Mac, smart move. They wanted to have a new environment to match the slick graphics that a Mac enables. I am writing this on a Mac so this works well with me. I was involved in developing some of the initial Lisa and Mac training in the early 80s close by to this session location and have been a fan ever since. I got a Mac again once I became able to pick my own. Their mashup composer is now available on demand in a robust visual environment. It is also free.

They next did a mashup demo linking monster.com and other relevant sites (e.g. facebook) and apps (Google email and calendar)) to go through the recruitment process. All the steps were completed by the recruiter with the same mashuped app. Then the interviewee came up and completed his part. He can see that Serena is using their own medicine. Candidates can also do homework on interviewers. He can see a YouTube video on Serena and relevant RSS feeds, among many other bits. The whole process can be transparent to those who need it, instead of getting lost in email. The process was completed taking bits and pieces from multiple apps without doing a major development effort.

Jeremy reminded us that they are putting everything into the cloud. It was a great start and preview of the conference.