The outsourcing of parts of IT into Cloud has become more then a prognosis, it has become a reality.  Moreover, it has become hype, a new ‘big thing’.

The outsourcing of parts of IT into Cloud has become more then a prognosis, it has become a reality.  Moreover, it has become hype, a new ‘big thing’. Not many analysts and practitioners, though, have realized that this hype differs dramatically from all others: this one means that all previous hypes, intended to improve and modernize in-house IT have failed.

It has been almost impossible to open a business or IT-related magazine for the past decade without seeing an article about the infamous gap between Business and IT and the misfortunes caused by it.

It has been almost impossible to open a business or IT-related magazine for the past decade without seeing an article about the infamous gap between Business and IT and the misfortunes caused by it. So, let us skip the description of these misfortunes and concentrate on the gap itself.

Several months ago, I got an urgent request from OMG – the organization responsible for BPMN and other BPM standards – to give a short blurb I had written a permanent URL on my website.  The blurb was a promotional piece for my BPMessentials training called “Three Levels of Process Modeling with BPMN.” OMG proudly proclaims that BPMN assumes no particular methodology, but the notion of using it at three specific “levels” was just something I made up when I launched my BPMN course, to describe its value to different audiences.  Now OMG needed it as a “reference” for their OCEB certifi

Experience has shown that major change initiatives undertaken by government agencies seldom succeed according to plan. Too often, expectations are frustrated, budgets are over-run, schedules are exceeded, and/or programs are abandoned. Why is this story written so often, after the fact, about so many government programs? From years of working with federal agencies on some of their toughest challenges, I have found that leaders tend to underestimate the difficulty of the journeys they embark upon, at almost every stage of their more complex transformation initiatives.

Nobody really cares about standards… until suddenly they do. When a standard reaches some threshold of adoption, a tipping point is reached. Then, if you’re not on the standard you’re proprietary. Legacy. A dinosaur. Not where you want to be.