Five years ago, telecommunications companies operating in Florida faced a baffling array of taxes levied at the local level. Each municipality and local governmental entity had their own tax tables and methods of collection. “As the U.S.
Interview with Brett Champlin: Chicago Preview
I spoke with Brett Champlin recently and asked him about the upcoming BrainStorm Chicago Conference(s) and what is new for 2006.
Problems Implementing a Balanced Scorecard
There is really nothing wrong with the concept of Balanced Scorecard. The main problem is that it does not provide practical guidance for deployment, and some executives view it as a “quick fix” that can easily be installed in their organizations. Implementing a balanced metrics system is an evolutionary process, not a one-time task that can be quickly checked off as “completed”. If executives do not recognize this from the beginning and fail to commit to the long term, then the organization will realize disappointing results. However, some approaches (e.g. Rummler-Brache) allow for a rapid start to the metrics system evolution.
Here are some of the key issues I have seen over the past several years that can cause a Balanced Scorecard initiative to fail:
Poorly Defined Metrics
Bringing Analytics into Processes Using Business Rules
As more and more companies adopt Business Process Management Systems (BPMS) to automate key business processes, they are also seeing the value of enhancing this technology with Business Rules Management Systems (BRMS). When processes rely on complex business decisions, it makes more and more sense to use business rules to automate these decisions. Not only are business rules better for delivering clarity and agility in decision-making, the use of a BRMS allows rules to be shared across processes, across BPMSs and between a BPMS and other implementation platforms.
SOA Maturity Model: Compass on the SOA Journey
As we start planning our Service-Oriented Architectures, we are faced with a host of decisions such as: Where to start? How should the architecture be built? What gaps exist within the current architecture and which technologies should be used to complete these gaps? Who should be involved and what training should they undergo to be prepared? These are some of the questions that one may ask at the outset.
Organizations are all inundated with information about SOA and the steps required to create, design and implement their SOA.
Process Powered E-Gov: Does Your Agency Grok Process
Peter Fingar is an Executive Partner in the digital strategy firm, the Greystone Group. He is one of the industry’s noted experts on business process management and a practitioner with over 30 years of hands-on experience at the intersection of business and technology.
Peter Fingar is an Executive Partner in the digital strategy firm, the Greystone Group. He is one of the industry’s noted experts on business process management and a practitioner with over 30 years of hands-on experience at the intersection of business and technology. He is coauthor of the books: “The Real-Time Enterprise: Competing on Time”, just-released, and “Business Process Management: The Third Wave.”
Fingar began his presentation by pointing out that government and business are essentially similar in that they both:
Process Documentation: What is End to End Anyway?
Documenting business processes has become an important initiative for many Organizations. The advantages of identifying, understanding and evaluating key business processes to determine their effectiveness in meeting business objectives has been recognized for some time. There are many methodologies and tools available today to aid in capturing information about how a business performs its day-to-day activities in order to achieve desired efficiencies and cost reductions. A common approach integral to most methodologies is to develop an end-to-end process flow.
Creating the “To Be” Process
One way of building To Be processes is to start with the ideal. The ideal stretches the organization to achieve results and execute far beyond the norm.
A powerful example of working from the ideal can be witnessed at Toyota. This company has a vision of an organization, process, machine, or person that:
Is defect free,
Can be delivered one request at a time,
Can be supplied on demand in the version that is required,
Can be delivered immediately,
Can be produced without wasting any materials, labor, energy, or other resources, and
Seeking the Upper Levels of the Rule Maturity Model
The KPI Rule Maturity Model (KPI RMM or RMM) has been a valuable management tool for organizations due to its simplicity and practicality. It provides a straight-forward, customizable business rule roadmap for organizations, charting success with a business rules...
BPMS Watch: Make Way for BPM 2.0
Two or three years ago, when I began speaking at BrainStorm BPM conferences, I coined the term “BPM 2.0” to refer to new tools that allowed “process without programming.” That technology, featuring integration adapters that could introspect enterprise information systems and turn them magically into “services” ready for orchestration in a business process, was the beginning of the convergence of SOA and BPM. Looking back now, however, I think a better term might have been BPM 1.1, or “integration without programming.” Today it’s safe to say that not everyone i