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The world, nature, life, everything is a constant process and are as such in constant change, like water in a river.

But you cannot tell water to change its path, you can only remove impediments to its willed path, namely where gravity wants to pull the water. The same principle applies to your world and your business as well.

That is how you can have influence the path, instil change and get results; remove impediments to change, then let the world, the life, the business change it's course.

Bonus: Many do not like change, but why fight resistance? Why not remove a few obstacles, open the door to change and let the nature of things play out by itself?

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All cartoons by our friend Hugh Macleod of Gapingvoid fame!

Go to Gapingvoid for more!

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Conceptual background

• Process is the core, it's the activities that creates the results and not vice versa.
• Real world objects are as simple as they get. Don't mash them up into documents that has your name and address in same data object - you're not a a house! You're only related to a house object.
• The relations adds knowledge and context so you can find what you look for when you need it. That's how Plato defined knowledge: "How objects relates to other objects".
• Processes can be divided into two types:
  1. Easily Repeatable Processes (ERPs) - the routine, predictable stuff like production and payroll.
  2. Barely Repeatable Processes (BRPs) - the unpredictable, knowledge work, services, health, governments and your every day life.
  3. ERP is a subset of BRP, your barely repeatable life consists of many discrete but easily repeatable processes loosely linked.

Thingamy is made to do BRPs in a highly effective and logical way, hence it can do ERPs as well.

User experience

Thingamy is in the cloud, using browsers only, and is particularly created for mobile devices like tablets.

Enterprise software should be invisible, focus should be on the work: Fewest possible features, minimal reports, fewest possible choices at all times. We do not try to compete with the "mature, flashy" stuff, we just want to deliver, assure, and record!

The architecture allows full layout flexibility, the system is multitenant on many levels and completely scalable.

User main area gives the tasks or the report views all dynamically created on in real time. The sidebar gives access to the report views as per role while what you can do or see is dynamically set during the flows - the system knows what you shall be allowed to see or do depending on where in a process you are and how are you related to objects.

Here's a simple view of a constituent's requests given his local council - including who's responsible just now and what's happening (if set for that level of transparency).

A request flow has been started:

Select responsible and set priority:

Once done it will now appear as a task for the local council worker chosen, where he will delegate or answer directly - each step smoothly following each other with automatic delivery of all needed to the right person at the right time.

Building models

Thingamy has two separate interfaces to the live instance - this is the "builder" where anything can be built from scratch or changes can be done even while live. Complex systems takes only days to create from scratch, once up and running changes can be done in minutes.

The build usually starts with "what value are you going to deliver" as it gives you the "datamodel" - the first classes, the cookie cutters that stamps out unique objects. Here's what a class consist of (properties and other settings) for the local council build:

Objects relates to each other, that's how knowledge applies and how the system can find the right object at the right time. These relations can be changed in the flows at any time to control who sees what and gets what tasks:

A relation is an n-triple - subject, predicator, object:

Queries are needed to find the right stuff, here's the list from the council build:

Queries are combination of and, or, not, etc etc and above all; what relationship has the viewer with the objects found:

Here's the list of ERP snippets for the council build, each having user chosen forks and operators that punts the flow to some next other ERP snippet:

The flows consists of any sequential set of instructions, the red are user involving tasks, green are for back end object manipulation, grey, blue and yellow is about the flow. All drag and drop of course:

Opening an instruction allows the builder to set the details, who, what etc.:

Reports uses queries (as does accounts, but they're number crunching oriented of course) and starts with base reports that can be combined to lists with related object or columns or mashed up reports of the other:

Base report settings:

Related report:

Lastly the roles defines only what reports can be had and what flows can be intiated directly:

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(More details in a separate page here.)

Our world view that spurred us to do something. It's a partial list, not purported to be entirely right, you might even disagree completely but that does not matter, it's still useful as an innovation tool. And keep in mind that the inertia of reality does not allow changes to happen in one go. Thus Thingamy is built so it can mimic the current situation for all aspects leaving the door to change wide open for those who wants to walk through it:

• The Organisational Hierarchy is kaput - as single purpose executor of the Business Model it requires reorganisation every time you need to get better, an utterly futile exercise most of the time. Replace it.
• Managing is a waste of time. Leadership I need, getting out of bed in the morning I can do myself.
• Legacy software models the "way we always did things" - usually a model from the days of paper, quills and desks. Model reality instead. When you make a request please do not describe what you know. If you describe a horse you'll get a horse, and Henry Ford would not have built you a mechanical horse. Nor would we.
• Tree-structures are faulty. "Where it resides" is only two dimensional and suitable only for places. Objects relates to other objects, that's how Plato defined "knowledge". And knowledge is useful... at least it allows you, or a system, to find the right object at the right time!
• Search is a sign of failure. If you had to search for your shoes every morning then you'd be rather miffed or what? Stuff should be where you expect it to be. Full stop.
• A report is simply logic applied to raw data. Apply when needed and keep all data in raw form. That will do away with applications, middleware, complexity and deliver far better reports.
• Double-entry book keeping (and thus modern accounting) was “invented” in 1494, based on paper and quills. Dump it and let the IT system that delivers the flows capture the real data and display it any way you want real-time. Why have a separate "accounting object" to represent a sale when a query over what objects changed ownership from us to somebody else in December would yield sales in December directly from the raw data!
• Budgets are completely silly. You know nothing about the future so forget it and leave such to soothsayers and magicians. Replace it with live benchmarking for example (like Statoil Hydro, Nestle and more).
• Think of processes as "what happens to things", not "what things happen". [Practical result: Current systems creates a 'activity" record for "sale" while Thingamy lets the "bike" object register what happens to it like "bike paid for" or later "bike changed location". Then if a change to the GAAP requires sale to be no more defined as "when payment happens" but to "when payment is in and it has been delivered". At this point the old records in current systems will only be valid for the previous GAAP while in Thingamy we can create a parallel GAAP report in an hour or two so you can get all prior and future years under both GAAPS so you don't have to compare apples with bananas!]
• Documents and forms are bad - they only document "what things happen" creating reconciliation, errors and rigid processes. Let the thing itself capture what happens to it (see double-entry book keeping above).
• Process is not a track, it's a football game where you see the goal and look for and try openings all the time. The ball is the flow.
• Flow is everything - flow is relationship, flow is knowledge, flow is context and flow creates value. Your business is all about flows, never forget it. Build the flows, then better the flows to better the value and your margins. Do it, then do it again, then do it more. Think extreme Business Planning.
• Search is a sign of failure. A system that has process knows where you are and hence what you need and should give you exactly what you need, not more, not less, and precisely when you need it. That applies to both information and tools of course.
• Communication is another sign of dysfunction. If all's transparent and disseminated according to needs little or no extraneaous communication will be needed. A proper system communicates for you.
• And don't even mention "dashboards", a clear proof that the system is merely an interface to a database with zero process and little value built in.

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The story:

Sigurd Rinde started Thingamy Ltd in 2000.

Actually it did not start as an IT project, not even as a commercial startup. It was an idea laboratory, nothing more to begin with.

After having spent years doing LBOs for his own penny, started quite a few companies Sigurd sometimes got stuck with running the companies. Not his favourite pastime. OK, Sigurd did love the strategy part, the leader role, the ups and downs, the adrenaline - but not the management part, definitely not.

As lazyness is the mother of all inventions Sigurd started out on a quest to find out why he disliked "management". It surely was a waste of time, pushing, cajoling, addressing exceptions all the time, meetings, email avalanches - so why all of that when value-creation suffered?

Add that the newest part of management sciences was 515 years old (double entry book keeping). At that time other sciences thought earth was the centre of the universe, luckily other sciences has progressed since then. Heck, the Roman army had found out that ten subordinates per "boss" was the correct ratio (see decurions, centurions), now 2000 years later, more than 100 years of business schools and 40,000 management handbooks in print at all times they now agree that the correct ratio is... ten subordinates per boss. Duh.

The proverbial apple falling in the lap was when one started to see "management & organisational structures" as having but one purpose: to make the work, case, patient and other flows move forward.

That's when Sigurd and a few co-workers started to create a dramatically different IT platform that could be a framework for any type of flow, most importantly to include support for unpredictable flows that after all is where most of the world's value creation happens.

The first payoff of starting in that end was that data could be captured automatically and in context, leaving some logic to be applied at the end to create any kind of report, including accounting. This could make all other enterprise software redundant. An interesting bonus indeed.

But as life is unpredictable, as planning is bad replacement for trying, it was required to create a system that allowed for extremely fast and flexible creation of domain specific enterprise solutions that could be tweaked on the fly without interrupting anything.

This led to a 12 years self-funded laboratory project with more full rewrites than could be counted, only to become domain specific and practical at the end of 2012. All delivered as a service in the cloud and for mobile devices of course.

So now Sigurd spends his time travelling and talking with customers often in close cooperation with our team of sales partners. The focus is now to help our customers and partners to realise the potential gains and create new services. After all, it's on the ground, in real life, that the new opportunities lies.

And of course, with real life implementation the tech focus has shifted towards user experience, reliability, scaling, and effective support to ensure that privacy is unbeatable (in fact it is by architecture), that we have no limits to scale and that everything runs smoothly. Our attitude to user experience is that enterprise software should be unobtrusive and that training and manuals should not be required.

So simple does it, do not expect the "mature, fancy, feature-rich" experience from us. Expect a truly different experience and above all dramatic effects for your organisation. This is the real next generation enterprise solution!

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