David McCoy

Back in 1994 (or was it 1995), I saw the coolest software product I had ever seen up to that point in my life (including all the “wonderful” code that I had written).  I was working for Deloitte and Touche and was in Montreal, presenting on this new phenomenon that was just starting to gain buzz among the general market: “the Internet.”  That was fun in itself.  I was using a bare bones TCP/IP stack and Gopher, FTP, etc., to show how we, in Montreal, could access some political cartoons that were hosted in Eastern Europe. As I got on stage, I was informed, in a French-accented rush, “I am afraid we could not get a telco line for your presentation.”  Instead of panicking (heck it was only 400 people and all the global IT partners), I ran the entire demo using cached images from the FTP transfers I had done in preparation for the show.  Talk about dodging a bullet!  It was a beautiful thing, but this was not the cool software that I was talking about.  That was to come later that day.

We had had Jaron Lanier speak to our group on several occasions. Jaron, the father of virtual reality, was a dreadlocked wunderkind.  Following up on Jaron’s view of a virtual future, we arrange for a new company, Sense8, to demo their wares.  This was the cool software I am speaking of. Sense8 showed a horizontal, 3-D landscape littered with poles. On top of each pole was a rotating or blinking object-like platform.  The entire screen was buzzing with activity. Ideally, you would have worn VR-glasses and interacted with the screen in classic VR mode (flying over the poles, changing your perspective – just like what the kids now do on $19 video games).  The poles and rotating/blinking/wiggling objects represented stocks. If one was reaching a peak P/E, it was coded to act one way (say, blink). If one had unusually high or low volume, it was doing something else (rotating, perhaps). The entire canvas represented a portfolio of stocks and their current (simulated) real-time performance.  I am sure 14 or so years have added to the mythical experience that I felt upon seeing that software, but you can imagine how this influenced my thinking when Roy Schulte and I drove his Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) concept to the market back in 2000/2001, jointly delivering the world’s first BAM presentation and BAM research.  I had seen the future, and I wanted BAM to be the shining example of the new wave (FYI, BAM still has a long ways to go, but it is getting better).

We are now in 2008 and commercial applications have not yet become video games. But, there is a product that is starting to look like the daughter of an Apple Ipod and a classic application.  At Gartner’s BPM conference, I saw the new Vitria product, M3O.  Written in Adobe Flex, this product shows what you can do when you take your cues from consumer technology and clean-slate design centers.  I was impressed and might even have salivated, just a little.  Dale Skeen sure was salivating. He is proud of his new platform and was showing it to everyone who walked by. It is worth a view. Let me know what you think about this new design center.

I don’t expect us to be wearing VR glasses any time soon (although… see the interview Jackie Fenn and I did with Thad Starner).  However, I do expect our applications to become more and more at home in a consumer-driven, video-game rendered world.  I can’t wait. I want to be able to do my expense reports on one of the 100s of game machines littering my house.  Yeah! I can just imagine launching a missile right into the overpriced hotel-room-charges and vaporizing all those cab fares!