If you don’t have the time to listen to this issue’s Featured Archive, this article serves as an Executive Summary of the presentation, “Business Value of Process Standards” by Jeanne Baker, Director and Chair of BPMI.org and Sterling Commerce. Baker discusses the emerging PBM standards, which will help companies of all sizes benefit from BPM by identifying new opportunities for growth and competitive advantage.

BPMS Watch: Selecting A BPMS
Monthly Column by Bruce Silver, Independent BPMS Industry Analyst
Service-Oriented Architecture Implementations ‘Flattens the World’
Thomas L. Friedman’s book, The World is Flat, provides several helpful insights into current business and technology environments. Some of these insights bear directly on the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) world, particularly with regard to how services can be accessed and used regardless of geography or technological origin.
In the non-SOA world, applications and architectures are designed with a single or limited use.

Aetna Facilitates Business Rules Development in Key Project
This interview originally appeared in the members only BPM Strategies Magazine. Join today to receive your own copy.

Fragmented Business Processes Destroy Value
When organizations become fragmented, it requires more work to deliver value to the customer and the ability of the organization to adapt to environmental changes is diminished. In extreme cases, the loss of value is deadly and businesses go extinct.
What causes businesses to become fragmented?
Business fragmentation occurs when critical processes aren’t managed as an integrated system. Workflows become a complex series of handoffs between functions, jobs and information systems. Each handoff represents an opportunity to introduce error, delay and added cost.
When organizations become fragmented, it requires more work to deliver value to the customer and the ability of the organization to adapt to environmental changes is diminished. In extreme cases, the loss of value is deadly and businesses go extinct.
What causes businesses to become fragmented?
The Great 21st Century Business Reformation
If you don’t have the time to listen to this issue’s Featured Archive, this article serves as an Executive Summary of the presentation, ” The Great 21st Century Business Reformation ” by Peter Fingar, Executive Partner in the digital strategy firm, the Greystone Group. Fingar explains How BPM will bring about epic change through operational transformation driven by the fusion of business operations and technology.

Selecting the Best Method for Process Baselining
When launching a process improvement effort, your foundational step is understanding how your business currently works and how it needs to change. I call this “process baselining”. It gives you the baseline or starting point upon which your process improvement efforts can be built. Baselining involves:
documenting the process steps along with their supporting information (i.e., roles, timing, volumes, metrics, etc.), understanding the places where the process breaks down (breakpoints), identifying areas of waste (i.e., redundancies, delays, etc.).

HVB Americas Implements Straight-through Processing
Eastern and Central Europe are in the midst of dynamic economic changes. Last year, 10 countries joined the European Economic Union and others, including Bulgaria and Romania, are slated to join in the coming years.
The Need for a Standard Business Process Depiction Language (BPDL)
What’s at stake.
As companies move towards a process centric organizational model, the standardization of their business process maps becomes an increasingly important issue. The maps need to have the same general format, use the same set of symbols and be able to be read the same way.

Performance Improvement Requires Multi-tiered Approach
Gregg V. Rock talks with Dr. Geary A. Rummler, industry pioneer in process and performance improvement
Dr. Geary A. Rummler’s book, Improving Performance-How to Manage the White Space on the Organization Chart, is considered one of the groundbreaking works in business process and performance improvement. As a co-founder of the Performance Design Lab, he has continued to evolve and expand the theory base and methodologies that can lead to breakthrough approaches to management systems, measurement, strategy, and organization structure design and implementation. His latest book, Serious Performance Consulting According to Rummler, is designed to enable performance consultants to move beyond their focus on individuals to produce organizational results. He talked to Gregg V. Rock, Editor of BPMinstitute.org.