Retrospective: One Year On, First Customers, What Next

If it's possible to put a precise date on an idea, then Sabisu was conceived a year ago on 22nd February, 2010, at a TIF forum event about cloud computing. Euan Semple (twitter: @euan) gave a keynote that made perfect sense. 


Although we had a decent manufacturing focused forms tool in production at the time we felt it was too limited; our customers were facing problems that a forms tool - however we imbued it with disruptive qualities - wouldn't fix. Particularly regarding MES layer (InfoPlus 21, PHD) collaboration, or the overheads in getting ERP data.


It wasn't just that we weren't the best in our chosen field, we weren't even in the right field.


So this time last year the seed was sown. Lots of thinking and book reading later, we starting cutting code in June 2010, aiming to build a platform that would ensure manufacturing management teams could make faster, better decisions without depending on IT experts to get data to the right people; that would put control of the data in the hands of the decision makers.


A couple of weeks ago we started to softly roll it out at our first customers. You'll be seeing the case studies soon and they're pretty compelling stuff - we're pretty enthusiastic as you can imagine, but even we're surprised how well users are taking to it.

Where next?

Well, like all start-ups we're convinced we have a world-changing horizontal application. However, our focus for now must be on building Sabisu into a true portal for collaborative decision making and our next job is to evolve the main site at http://www.sabisu.co to reflect that.

Beta 1.0.2 available

We're delighted to say that a new beta version is available.

Changes as follows:

• Theming has been introduced so communities can customise the appearance of the platform and corporates can carry some of their corporate branding through to the platform. We've kept it pretty limited for now.
• Welcome pages have been updated, not least to include a link to our demo company.
• When registering with Flow as a service user, you are now only asked to provide your company name. This is in preparation for a better situated form to get the relevant company data from a customer at a later point.
• All the emails sent from the platform have been rewritten so as to be clearer.
• Fixed a bug in the Community application which caused users to be added to multiple communities.
• Fixed a bug in the Community application which caused a user to not be joined to the top most community when joining a sub community
• Sign out button now signs you out properly and completely.

We’ve also reworked the http://www.flowtools.co.uk site so as to reflect the benefits of the platform more consistently.

A lot of time has been spent over the last week or so on our on-premise server but this will start to reflect on the cloud solution too. More to come soon.

Beta 1.0.1 released

We'll be moving to using build numbers rather than version numbers shortly. However, here are the notes for today's release: 

- Widgets are now correctly brought to the foreground when you click anywhere on or within the widget (only works in IE). On other browsers the user still has to select the widget title area to bring the widget to the foreground.

- New feature on the widget side menu tab which allows a user to view related widgets that are not currently in use on the page.

- Where a sub-tab function is dependent on a certain widget being present, that widget can no longer be removed by the user e.g. when editing a Form, the Form Editor can no longer be removed from a sub tab but all other widgets can still be removed. Otherwise, widget adding and removing is unchanged.

- Widgets now have a maximise option which maximises the widget as to the size of the viewable workspace. Minimising the widget will return the widget to its original size and position. (In IE the widget sidebar menu tab does not show when the widget is maximised).

- Fixed a bug that caused the sidebar content to not expand to the screen height in Chrome.

- Changed the Flow Charts to make them more efficient.

- Changed the sidebar content to get its content on demand rather than when the platform is first loaded

Beta 1 available

Today the first beta version was released at http://www.flowtools.co.uk.

Significant changes have been made to improve stability, hence we feel it meets our quality criteria for beta release. We expect to be in beta for some time now whilst we work on giving you what you need to exploit the service delivery capabilities of the platform in the simplest way possible.

The more visible changes made this time are:

• Sidebar updated to reflect the grouping of widgets into applications.
• New users to the platform will get some helpful introductory pages to get them started.
• All options in the top bar have been shifted into a drop down (we'll need the space later).

You'll notice that we've not sorted the SSL cert out yet. That's because we're considering a rebrand and a new URL. More on that soon.

Alpha 4 available

As noted on the main http://www.flowtools.co.uk site, we released Alpha 4 at the start of this week. Registration is still on a invite only basis; there's an enquiries button on the login/registration page if you want to get on board and try it out.

Regular users will notice that the livery bar has a new, lower profile, cool all-black look; we think it really separates out the static livery bar from the dynamic, data driven, user controlled workspace area.

All existing communities are now locked down; users are welcome to join the Turkey Farm Plc community if they wish to see the demo graphs and so on in action. All users become part of the Flow community by default so you're in the same boat as a lot of like minded individuals.

Widget drag and drop should function much better as we've overhauled that too.

We're hoping to release Beta 1 soon; probably around the 8th November.

Flow is Meaningful

“When facts are commoditised, understanding follows...In the miscellaneous world the task is to build meaning.”                                                       
                                                               David Weinberger, Chapter 10, Everything Is Miscellaneous

When defining Flow as ‘meaningful’, a number of words suggested themselves as alternatives; understandable, conversationalist, valuable, connective, coherent, cohesive, salient, relevant, informative.... 

Flow is all of these things, but the quote above sums it up best of all; Flow allows understanding to be derived from data.

Simply categorising data is useful for finding what you want, so allowing users to choose, say, the categories under which a piece of data should be logged has some use is a basic, one dimensional form of metadata; your users are augmenting the raw data with more information that allows the company to make use of it.

Flow goes beyond this, allowing users to highlight and tag data at will, in any combination they like. This meaningfully enhances data by generating metadata and is transforming. It allows the data to be found, shared, and placed into context for others. And the best metadata generator any organisation has is its people, because they have the expertise.

Knowledge Management was very popular in the late ‘90s but it failed as a concept in its execution; there was no way to get all the tacit information out of people’s heads. Perhaps the Knowledge Management vendors of the time expected resident experts to write a book? What happened in practice is that forums and wikis found their way onto some corporate intranets but that was about it; no solution has the immediacy of Flow, where conversations and metadata are tied to particular source data points.

So if an expert looks at a manufacturing process and sees a correlation between two trend lines, then they should be able to tag that, adding their expertise and insight for others to draw on. Everything of interest that happens could be tagged, building up a huge repository of information that was previously held in expert’s heads.

Facts are commodities; and streams of facts, of data, are being produced by organisations at a huge rate - too fast to handle. By aggregating this data into something meaningful, then providing a platform which allows users to add their knowledge to the raw data, the data can begin to be understood and the understanding shared.

Flow offers a platform that helps organisations realise the value of their hidden knowledge. It provides a platform for extending this capability worldwide; expertise shared on a global scale.

Flow is Social

Jeff Jarvis (@jeffjarvis) describes an alternative view of an organisation in “What Would Google Do?”; he proposes that it is drawn as a network diagram rather than a hierarchical chart. This would include all the suppliers, customers, members of the public and so on that interact with it, working out why each relationship existed; goods, services, revenue, knowledge.  It would show that the exponential growth in influence of an organisation lies not with looking inwards, rather growth would be maximised by identifying new network nodes and working with them. Light up lots more nodes, get lots more influence.

That’s why the network is crucial. You could think of Flow as taking social networking principles and applying it to actually doing work. You could say “it’s like Facebook, but you’re actually doing work” and not be too far off; Flow exploits the exponential value of networks (as described by Metcalfe’s Law).

Inter-organisation networks therefore add huge value and Flow can allow an organisation to take advantage of the network effect without a huge implementation or culture change effort; Flow will just take advantage of the communities that already exist unrecognised, as users define working groups.

Flow will bring what Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg called ‘elegant organisation’ to the way organisations do things already; in terms of an application platform, it’s de-obstructing the process of working with partners – it’s facilitating, then ‘getting out of the way’ as discussed here.

Each organisation is already part of numerous external communities. Flow is unique because it can bring those communities together in one place. Instead of building a bespoke database, engaging a third party to host it and then working out how to update it, we believe it should be a simple case of designing a process and – click – sharing it with those users who share a community.

The key is to give the power to the users by making it easy to form useful cross-functional groups. It doesn’t matter whether they’re tiny or big, with a couple of users or a thousand; in fact, in terms of contributing to the community conversation the smaller might well be more productive. Communities are free; create one when you need it. Projects are great examples of short term communities.

There are many places that communities may add value; a supply chain can truly be a chain of partners working together; peer organisations can work together on common problems; suppliers can service or easily gather information from all their customers through a single point. 

Communities are at the heart of Flow and conversations are at the heart of your business - and sharing a widget, or a process, is the start of a conversation. Your organisation is made up of users that already share, discuss and collaborate and Flow will capitalise on that by making conversations easy, then capturing them in a central place where they knowledge they contain can add value to the organisation.

Your organisation is full of conversations right now, none of which is being captured. Those conversations may be about the canteen, the weather, a crucial line of business problem, football, late running projects and so on...Flow makes it easy to discuss elements of your business and every time this happens, someone in your organisation is adding value to that data; they’re turning it into knowledge.