Business Analysts develop requirements as process experts – not as content experts. Business analysis is the same regardless of the industry. Facilitators guide groups as process experts – not as content experts. Facilitation is the same regardless of the business. So, a Business Analyst should be a Facilitator.

• Time: Wednesday, June 8 · 5:30pm - 8:30pm

• Location: Valicia’s Ristorante, 2155 Long Pond Road, Greece NY
  When the session is completed, the attendees will be able to:

• Understand and describe why Facilitators and Business Analysts have the same skills.

• Incorporate facilitation into their role as Business Analyst.
• Use Facilitation skills to help develop requirements.
  
  
  
  Gary Rush, IAF CPF, Founder and President of MGR Consulting (mgrconsulting.com), attended the U.S. Naval Academy, has written numerous “how to” books and continues to be the leader in the field of facilitation and Facilitator training. He was Chair of the International Association of Facilitators (IAF) from 2008 through 2010.
  Gary created FoCuSeDTM – the next revolution in structured facilitation. The FoCuSeDTM Facilitator Academy is the most complete, most comprehensive, and most effective facilitation class providing detailed training on the concepts of Holistic Facilitation. His facilitation technique is used widely around the world and his alumni are amongst the most successful.
  Register via Eventbrite

I’m a longtime fan of Covey’s Habits of Highly Effective People. What I like most about the habits is that they are a system. The habits are not a simple set of best practices, but a rich network of interrelated behaviors that reinforce one another.

Here’s the habits, which I like to remember in the form of a litany:

“Be proactive, begin with the end in mind, and put first things first. Seek first to understand then to be understood, think win-win, and synergize. Sharpen the saw, teach the habits, and introspect.”

There are three sets of behaviors within the habits: public, private, and renewal, which I express in the three sentences of the litany.

• Personal: Be proactive, begin with the end in mind, and put first things first.
• Public: Seek first to understand then to be understood, think win-win, and synergize.
• Renewal: Sharpen the saw, teach the habits, and introspect.
  Originally, there were seven habits, but after a while, Covey realized that there was a eighth habit, always implied, but not called out separately: “Teach the habits.”

Ironically, Covey himself practiced “Teach the habits” by writing the original seven habits book, but had to go back and practice it once again in an “eighth habit” book.

Likewise, in the litany, there is added a ninth habit: Introspect.

In the Seven Habits, there is a key question that Covey asks us to consider:

• “What is one thing you could do, that, if you did it on a regular basis, would make a tremendous positive difference in your personal or professional life?”
  (Or: What am I not doing that I should be doing in order to be more effective?)

In my mind, asking this question goes beyond a background process. The question helps us choose which jungles to harvest. I see “Introspection” as a separate habit, a final link in the chain. A thoughtful answer to the “regular-basis” question closes the loop and brings us back to Habit 1: Be proactive.

Brother Covey also numbers the public habits slightly differently than the order found in the litany. The canonical order for the public habits is “win-win”, “seek-first”, and “synergize” (4, 5, and 6). But, from a systems perspective, that order seems sideways to me.

The order of the personal habits (1, 2, 3) lead us from bootstrapping, into goal setting, and onto prioritization. Likewise, the public habits should lead us from empathy, into collaboration, and onto teamwork.

With the litany, I’m never stuck when someone asks me: Can you name the seven habits? The litany walks through the internal creation of an idea and its external manifestation, step by step.

Just don’t get me started on remembering the NATO AlphaBravo alphabet. :)

A key takeaway from Dreamforce 2010 is that the Saleforce cloud is expanding beyond sales and that 2011 will see the launch of several exciting tools for enterprise development. When the current roadmap runs its course, there will be five ways to build Salesforce applications.

1. Appforce (classic Force.com) - Today - Appforce is the tried and true platform we use today, which combines Salesforce CRM, the force.com platform, and the VisualForce user interface library.
2. Siteforce (web sites) - GA Summer 2010 - Siteforce combines content managmement with database management to create compelling web sites, for internal or external use.
3. VMForce (enterprise Java apps) - GA in 2011 - VMForce is SFDC’s partnership with VMWare to deliver an enterprise Java cloud.
4. Heroku (Ruby apps) - Today - Heroku is an established, cloud-based Ruby web application platform, available through its own website.
5. ISVForce (AppExchange) - Today - ISVForce provides the tools and technologies partners need to package applications for distribution.
   Supporting the five development streams are two other products

• RemedyForce - Today - IT help desk.
• Database.com - Summer 2011 - By providing a trusted database platform for any language and any device, Salesforce hopes to help more customers move enterprise applications to the cloud.
  A key point is that Salesforce is providing a separate application platform and a separate database platform. Developers can use the platforms together, or mix-and-match with other platforms and services. You might host an ASP.NET application on your own server, or on Azure, but reach out to database.com for storage. Or you might host an application on Siteforce and reach out to your own web service for crucial data.

Mobile applications are a great fit for cloud based development tools. There is no app server running on your mobile device, but by reaching out to a cloud database, you can connect the mobile app to other people in your enterprise.

More about Siteforce
The Siteforce mission to make the building and management of web sites dramatically easier. Technically, Salesforce is combining a cloud version of dreamweaver with a cloud web CMS with 24x7 hosting technology and an easy point-and-click, drag-and -drop design interface that non-techical people can use to build applications.

Developers can drag existing applications into the CMS and build templates that people can use to build websites. The Siteforce architecture will also provide different views for different devices, simplifying mobile support. Since people do not want their web sites subject to scheduled mainenance, Siteforce will use a different infrastructure that will sites to stay online 24x7x365.

Initially, the primary focus for SiteForce will be on marketing web sites, but the platform will be expanded to make building collaborative sites easier too. An open component architecture allows developers to build connections to the SFDC database and develop functionality like forums and wikis. Using the component architecture, Salesforce is expecting that the development community will provide a wide array of custom Siteforce extensions and components through the AppExchange.

Siteforce also includes full support for VisualForce pages and integrated authentification with the customer service and platform portals. Salesforce is extending its offering to appeal to both code-driven and visual developers.

More about VMForce
The Saleforce vision for VMForce is simple: Give Java developers a path to the cloud so that they can run their enterprise applications on our services. Java developers can use their existing tools, using the SpringSource tools suite, based on Eclipse. Developers can deploy to our cloud service simply by dragging a WAR file onto a Salesforce server. Developers can also use Java JPA code and Java objects to connect to database.com. The focus is on the Spring Framework and standard Java (rather than the full J2EE stack). Apex and VisualForce are not going away – Salesforce is extending its offerings to appeal to a wider range of developers.

Getting Started
While some of the new SFDC development offerings are a work in progress, you can get up and running with a free Force.com site today. Just vist free.force.com and dive in.

This holiday season saw a landmark event. High profile companies, like Mattel, posting a Facebook site URL in prime-time advertising. As it turns out, you don’t need to be a big name company to have your own Facebook site. Anyone can do it, it’s free, and it’s simple as pie.

The reason it’s free and easy is that Facebook doesn’t actually host the site. Facebook provides a namepace and an iframe that points to a site you control. The pages are loaded from your server, wrapped in a Facebook pane.

There is a Facebook JavaScript API that you can use from any site. With the API, you can like pages, authenticate against Facebook, write to your wall, and such. But with a Facebook site, you can do anything that your own website can do.

If you don’t already have a website of your own, you can create a static site using published Google Docs. Just create a document, and share it with the world, and you can wrap a Facebook site around it.

Here’s how to get started.

1. If you don’t have a Google Docs account, you can sign up at http://docs.google.com/demo/ and create a page to share.

   • Select Share and change the visibility to public
   • Then Share and Publish to the Web

2. Login to Facebook. (As if you ever logout!)

3. Register an App Name with Facebook. (It’s free!)

   • Your Facebook account name might be a good one for starters.

4. Under Facebook Integration, enter your App Name as the as the Canvas Page, and your public, published Google Doc page as the Canvas URL. . Under IFrame Size, select Auto-Resize.

5. Open apps.facebook.com/{Your-Canvas-URL}

6. Voila!

   • If the apps isn’t found right away, check the URL, and wait a few minutes for it to propagate.

   • If t still doesn’t show, open Advanced in your Apps Settings, and Disable all the options.
     For more tips about using Google Docs as a Facebook Canvas, see this Metaprime blog - http://blog.metaprime.at/how-to-build-a-facebook-landing-page-with-google-docs/.

You can also use a Google Site as a Facebook Canvas. Just keep the site layout within a 870px width or a 740px page with a 130px sidebar. (Though, to appease the API, you might have to add an extra “?” at the end of the URL. )

Google Docs and Google Sites are a great way to maintain a static site within Facebook. For some ideas about what you can do with a full web server, visit the World Wildlife Fund Gift Center and the Facebook Platform Showcase. Common Knowlege also has a great webinar on Facebook Sites and Pages.

Facebook integration is a great example of how difficult problems can be solved with simple interfaces. Fire up your Facebook account, and give it a try!

Non-profits come in all shapes and sizes. Two organizations that touch my own life almost daily are LibriVox and WBER.

Simply put, LibriVox provides free audiobooks from the public domain. Now entering its sixth year, LibriVox volunteers have completed almost 4,000 reading projects. Laid end to end, it would take two and a half years to play to every LibriVox recording.

While you won’t find the latest James Patterson in the LibriVox catalog, you will find immortal classics like Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Das Kapital, Don Quixote, Sherlock Holmes, and my new BFF, The Autobiography of Ben Franklin.

LibriVox offers several ways to search for books, including title, author, and genre. If you’re just getting started, genre is a great way to browse the catalog.

All of the books can be downloaded in MP3 and other formats, making it easy to enjoy the book on any device. I listen to mine on a simple Coby MP3 player that I can use when walking the dog or plug into the auxilliary jack while driving.

Though, I hear that life is more than audio books … there is also music!

Technically, WBER is closer to an .EDU than an .ORG, but as a community-supported radio station, it looks and feels like a non-profit.

Every day, WBER brings its listeners to an eclectic mix of the latest alternative rock, on the Internet as wber.org.and via the Rochester NY airwaves as 90.5.

As part of its educational mission, on weekdays during the school year, WBER turns its broadcast venues over to local high school clubs. While, the school day afternoons can be choppy, the rest of the broadcast day is a smooth, professional experience.

Fun fact: WBER was the first radio station in Rochester NY to offer Internet streaming. I know this since at the time I was working with WXXI, and, with my help, we were second. :(

After a long day of peering over requirements, it’s great to kick back with a great book from LibriVox or a great tune on WBER.