In a previous life I was in charge of management reporting for the pan-European logistics organization for Compaq. My team was responsible for monitoring and reporting the daily, weekly, monthly and quarterly performance and progress of the operations. We provided reports on shipments-to-date, invoices send, estimated shipments for the remainder of the day, week or month, order cycle time and average shipment lead-times, and on and on. None of these metrics would keep me awake at night or would cause heavy discussion on accuracy and validity of the metric.
Managing Processes for Performance
Business process management (BPM) technology continues to grow and mature.
The Future Impact of BPDL on Business
Gaining visibility of a corporation’s Business Processes stands to be one of the greatest industrial and commercial breakthroughs of this century for the corporations that step up to the challenge…and the probable demise of those who don’t. Here’s why….
Increased Speed and Risk in Operations – many organizations are still in the Business Process – “horse and buggy” era…these businesses still rely on big binders full of written procedures covering how their business “does” its business and its procedures.
Process improvement: A Case Study in Revenue Generation Process Improvement
The Sales team wanted to increase revenue. Senior executives favored buying a CRM solution but IT suggested a process review first. A process difficulty assessment was completed and the problem processes identified. The team worked with business areas to implement...
BPMS Watch: Analyzing and Optimizing Process Performance
The hottest trend now in BPM suites is integrated performance management. While BPMS and its workflow ancestors have always featured basic process monitoring and work statistics, the kind of performance management now emphasized is more closely aligned with metrics strategic to the business: the percentage of orders filled immediately, or conformance with service level targets, broken down by customer type. These once were the sole province of business intelligence (BI) software, but performance management analytics and real-time business activity monitoring are now being bro
The Big Deal: Business Governance of Business Rules
The words “business governance of business rules” is an extremely important, if not explosive, topic. It alludes to turning over the keys of the business back to the business itself. Yet, doing so is an organizationally complex issue.
A reasonable goal is to provide an easy way for business (versus technical) people to write or change the rules of the business, such that doing so maximizes the understanding of the rules, while minimizing the pain (and rigor) of writing them. If writing them properly is too difficult, they won’t do it.
So, it is advantageous to start with a
Transition of a Business Analyst to a Business Rules Analyst
Who is a Business Analyst?
Business analyst studies the overall business and information needs of an organization in order to develop appropriate solution strategies. As the key liaison between business and information technology departments, the business analyst is responsible for gathering and documenting business requirements and translating them into functional system design specifications that can be successfully executed by IT development teams. A business analyst acts as the communication central between the business and the technology people.
Sarbanes-Oxley Compliance Can Lead to Great Improvements in Company Alliance and Partnership Results
The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 has caused big changes in big business with a hefty price tag. Not only must publicly traded companies document and comply with the financial reporting and internal audit control requirements of the Act, they must also continuously attest, measure and document changes of the related processes to ensure continued compliance.
The challenge of complying with Sarbanes-Oxley requirements inside of a company is notably a time-consuming, costly and arduous task. The good news is that the internal control systems that companies are building will
Business and IT Alignment: Is it for real?
BPM is touted as the technology that will finally bring business and IT together. Not that we haven’t tried to do this before. For instance, many people thought object orientation would do the trick since it tried to model the real world as closely as possible. Did it deliver? To a certain extent, but not quite. Primarily, it ended up as a productivity tool and paradigm for IT (with sometimes questionable success), not the ‘be all’ and ‘end all’ for modeling and executing business requirements.
Solving the Business/IT Alignment
David Heidt, a Managing Partner at Enterprise Agility, works with Fortune 1000 clients in the areas of business process analysis, requirements management, iterative development and implementation of enterprise solutions using model-driven development. Heidt is also President of the Chicago Chapter of The Association of Business Process Management Professionals.