Articles

Business Architecture Tackles Complex, Horizontal Business Challenges

Author(s):

William Ulrich

President, TSG, Inc.

Senior management wants to get serious about consolidating and managing customer information. Customer contact and related information is scattered across dozens of business units, each of which updates and manages this information in unique, nontransparent ways. Continuing the current piecemeal approach to customer management, however, creates severe roadblocks to servicing customers more effectively, streamlining operations and competing with other companies in your industry.

Process Architecture: Seven Essentials

Author(s):

Karen Tricomi

Consultant, The Process Geek

Chances are good that your company has embarked on efforts to document processes and procedures at the departmental level, creating a collection of swim lanes and flow charts that might soon reside forgotten on servers and hard drives.

BPM SaaS Is Here – Is It a Storm Cloud For IT?

Author(s):

BPMInstitute.org

Business Relationship Manager - Product Lifecycle Management, Chevron Corporation

Some time ago during a discussion on ITtoolbox.com, I theorized about BPMS Cloud as the last, ultimate step, providing the final means to transition to a post-IT era.

SOA Governance for the Organization: Best Practices for Getting Started

Author(s):

BPMInstitute.org

Business Relationship Manager - Product Lifecycle Management, Chevron Corporation

SOA governance is crucial to building, managing, and maintaining a successful SOA implementation – indeed, without governance, well-intended SOA pilot projects spiral into chaos when they go operational. We have all seen it before – an organization spends a lot of money developing services, and they prematurely declare success when everything works well in the lab.

The Nature of Operational Decisions

Author(s):

James Taylor

Faculty Member, BPMInstitute.org and CEO and Principal Consultant, Decision Management Solutions

In previous articles we introduced Business Decision Management and answered some of the most frequently asked questions about it. Business Decision Management involves the automation and improvement of operational business decisions. This leads us to the topic of this article – what is different about operational decisions and other kinds of decisions?

First, let’s consider the kinds of decisions that organizations must make to succeed.

Business Process Leadership (BPL)

Author(s):

Tammy Adams

Managing Partner, Chaosity, LLC

The acronyms associated with BPM seem to grow in quantity year by year while the essence behind them grows at a much, much slower pace. If we cut through all the jargon, we can get to the simple truths. In this article, we’ll discuss one such fundamental truth – business requires both leadership and management to succeed. You can’t overlook or over-value one or the other; they have a symbiotic relation in any business, business function or business process.

Surviving the Business Architecture Center of Excellence

Author(s):

Geoffrey Balmes

Business Architect Executive, Independent Consultant

I have had the pleasure of leading several Business Architecture Centers of Excellence (CoE). They have not always been called that, however. Centers of excellence have been around for a long time but with regard to Business Architecture they have only been around for a couple of years.

When we formed those centers of excellence we did not have a blueprint or any kind of reference model. What we had was a need to see the big picture of where the business needed to go. We knew the strategy and we understood the goals and objectives.

Selling SOA to the Business

Author(s):

John Moe

Principal Consultant, J Moe Associates

(Or, Why Don’t They Get What A Service Is?)

In talking to many senior IT executives, whenever the topic of SOA is mentioned they invariable complain of two things. The first is that all the vendors are doing SOA – but all in different ways, making it difficult to mix and match. The second is that getting business buy-in to SOA from business managers is even harder than trying to wrestle their ‘Crackberries’ from them.

The problem is that without business buy-in, SOA cannot deliver its fabled benefits to the organisation – Agility, Growth, Innovation.

BPMS Watch – BPM and Its Enemies

Author(s):

BPMInstitute.org

Business Relationship Manager - Product Lifecycle Management, Chevron Corporation

My very first BPMS Watch column, over three years ago, was titled “Without a BPMS, It’s Not Really BPM.” And to a large degree I still believe that, although today I would probably tone it down to something like “without a BPMS, you can’t realize all the benefits of BPM.” That view is certainly less radical now than it was in 2005, as both developers and developer-oriented tool vendors have increasingly embraced the BPM Suite idea.

The Bioteaming Breakthrough for High Performance Teams

Author(s):

BPMInstitute.org

Business Relationship Manager - Product Lifecycle Management, Chevron Corporation

With the emergence and maturing of a vast array of corporate-strength intranets, extranets, portals, and Web 2.0 with its multitude of supporting real-time and asynchronous communications tools, there would appear to be a huge potential for technology to bring real gains to team productivity. This would seem to be particularly true for those teams that are physically distributed or that are highly mobile. Few people would dispute the potential benefits of effective real-time communication tools or of shared and secure workspaces.