Windows Workflow Foundation in Advertising

What Windows Workflow Foundation does represent is Microsoft’s latest tools enabling developers to compose large and sophisticated software systems by visually wiring together software building blocks across a network of computers. I’ve always thought of this as a Lego approach to building software.

Written 19Jun2006 by Dr. Stephen S Kelley, CTO hawthorne direct inc

Last week, I downloaded beta versions of Microsoft’s Windows Workflow Foundation, Windows Sharepoint Services, and various tools and templates to program with these new products in Visual Studio. I’ve been playing with this software in my spare time. The main purpose and value of these various software tools is to quickly, easily, and agilely embody and change business workflows in software.

Modern business need to turn on a dime. The rapid pace of change in the media world makes agility especially critical for the advertising industry. However, computer software systems do not always support rapid enough change.

I worked in the Telecom industry from about 1995 to 2000 which was going through a very interesting time of rapid change and innovation. The main political and business driver for this was deregulation. The main technical driver was the use of computer and network technology in telephony. After many years of a fairly static and limited set of features, there was an explosion of new features in a highly competitive marketplace: calling cards, voice mail, integrated messaging, callback, Internet Telephony, mobile phones, follow me services, etc.

Some paraphrased quotes from the leaders of the companies I worked with are:

“As per minute prices drop, it will be all about enhanced features.”

“If half the services we put out don’t fail, we’re not being aggressive enough.”

“We need software that will let us configure, try and deploy new services in weeks or days, not months and years.”

These quotes, especially the last, I think are extremely relevant to the emerging modern advertising agency. Fragmentation, rich media, Internet media, behavioral targeting, video on demand, peer to peer, RSS, PVR, podcasting are a few of the buzz words describing the explosion of new possibilities in the advertising world. For each of these and many other buzzwords, there are an array of players from small to large starting, dying, merging, and morphing. Clients expect advertising agencies to navigate this vast, quickly shifting landscape to get their message to customers wherever they may be in an effective, accountable way.

Software is needed to manage buys across the media landscape, track response, and provide both bottom line detailed information on results and ROI. Moreover, this software needs to enable feedback mechanisms to dynamically modify the campaign to maximize results based on previous history.

There are many great examples of software doing this across one or two media types (e.g. TV, banner ads, paid search) but the issues and solutions are much larger. Campaigns span multiple media types of which more are constantly emerging. Fragmentation is increasing the number of channels within each media type. There are an increasing number of potential partners and vendors who are constantly changing their services. These are just a few of the factors contributing to the complex data needs of modern advertising campaigns.

Microsoft’s Windows Workflow Foundation completely solves these issues! Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately) it does not. Moreover, software is only a small, but very important, part of dealing with these issues. What Windows Workflow Foundation does represent is Microsoft’s latest tools enabling developers to compose large and sophisticated software systems by visually wiring together software building blocks across a network of computers. I’ve always thought of this as a Lego approach to building software. These ideas of distributed component software have a long history with Microsoft and others under various names like CORBA, OLE, COM, DCOM, RMI, .NET etc. since at least 1990. Microsoft and other companies have had visual design tools for wiring together these software Lego blocks for many years.

So what’s so special about this new batch of tools? From one perspective, these tools are more of the same old silicon snake oil to solve all our problems. From another perspective these tools are a major advance in building sophisticated and complicated software systems by visually wiring together pre-built and custom software components running across distributed computer systems. Microsoft has put the concept of agile workflows front and center in this latest round of products and leveraged its commitment and experience in a fundamental, modern component software framework represented by .NET.

Enough acronyms: the point is that modern advertising companies need to create and tailor different advertising campaigns integrating diverse media types with complex data streams easily and quickly. Decision makers need to be able to direct software architects to do things like drag and drop media types onto a designer to configure a new product, hook decision and approval icons up to media performance change alerts, add and configure client interface functionality blocks intuitively, visually and quickly. This software workflow design needs to bridge the gap between the business world and the software world so decision makers can communicate the business processes without understanding the technical details and software architects can easily and quickly create and change software that faithfully implements these business processes without months and years of work. And after that, they need to be able to change it all around next week and every week to take advantage of constantly changing opportunities.

Windows Workflow Foundation shows that Microsoft is seriously focused on solutions like this. And in areas where Microsoft is interested, there are usually others leading and following. These tools are far from perfect and take significant skill and commitment to master. However, I firmly believe that for many areas of the advertising industry, this is possible for IT departments that commit and invest to master the tools.

If you want to give your IT people what should be a fun assignment, allocate some time for them to play with Windows Workflow Foundation. My boss didn’t even need to allocate time for me to do this; I play with this stuff at home for fun. Be warned, this is beta software and you DON’T want to use it on production systems. To get started, go to Microsoft’s home page for Windows Workflow Foundation.

Despite this rosy outlook from the software side, my knowledge and experience firmly convinced me the software and technology are the easy part. The business decisions and deciding what software to build are the real issues. I plan to explore other areas of using software and technology in the advertising industry in future posts.