Articles

Model to Execution: Guidelines for Converting a Use Case into BPMN

Author(s):

Tom DeBevoise

Co-Author of The Microguide to Process Modeling in BPMN 2.0, www.tomdebevoise.com

Organizations improving performance and aligning or reengineering processes endeavor to define their core business processes. They often use ‘happy days’ use case scenarios, or they create workflow diagrams in Visio. A ‘happy-day path’ only considers flows that occur when no exceptions are encountered. So, someday the team needs to visit ‘unhappy’ branches. Converting the use case or work-flow into the formal needs of a business process model can be challenging. So I offer these simple guidelines.

The Role of Business Architecture in the Coming Meltdown of Web 2.0

Author(s):

BPMInstitute.org

Business Relationship Manager - Product Lifecycle Management, Chevron Corporation

The amount of information on the World Wide Web is enormous beyond belief.

SOA And Mashups – What to use when

Author(s):

Raj Ramesh

Chief Story Teller, TopSigma

Say I am a business manager at an insurance company and my job is to recruit insurance agents. These agents in turn meet the insurance needs of their customers and build their own customer base. If an agent does well, the company does well. With a finite amount of recruiting dollars available, I need to be able to make the best decisions on where to focus my recruiting efforts.

BPMS Watch: Process Model Portability: Does Anyone Care?

Author(s):

BPMInstitute.org

Business Relationship Manager - Product Lifecycle Management, Chevron Corporation

Among the numerous virtues of BPMN, foremost is vendor independence, giving process modelers many tools to choose from, all describing processes using the same shapes and semantics. That’s huge, since without low-cost (or even free) tools you’ll never establish a culture of process broadly throughout the business. Occasionally, however, a student in my BPMN training will ask the embarrassing question, “So that means I can take the models I create in this class and import them into the BPMN tool we use in our company…

Integrating Testing and Training with the Process Life Cycle

Author(s):

BPMInstitute.org

Business Relationship Manager - Product Lifecycle Management, Chevron Corporation

Earlier this year I wrote an article outlining the critical relationship between the Process Life Cycle and the Project Life Cycle. This relationship, when treated as a partnership of equals, can improve the success of both the technical and the process improvement interests. In addition to the Project Life Cycle, there are two other important relationships that should be considered when developing or enhancing a business process.

SOA Watch: SOA and Adapters

Author(s):

BPMInstitute.org

Business Relationship Manager - Product Lifecycle Management, Chevron Corporation

Once upon a time, whenever we connected application A to application B, or applications A and B to an integration server, we had to interact with those applications using some sort of interface that (hopefully) the applications provided.

What is a Process?

Author(s):

BPMInstitute.org

Business Relationship Manager - Product Lifecycle Management, Chevron Corporation

For years my partners and I at the Performance Design Lab have defined a business process as “a sequence of steps or tasks that produce a valued output”, or words to that effect. Every definition of process I have seen in the books and articles written by others use pretty much the same verbiage. Nothing wrong with the definition – it does describe what a process consists of – but it does nothing to indicate some of the key principles of process design, nor does it do more than hint at why processes are so important (i.e., “valued output”).

So we have come to modify our definition

Questioning Innovation

Author(s):

BPMInstitute.org

Business Relationship Manager - Product Lifecycle Management, Chevron Corporation

A dictionary definition of innovation is “introducing something new.” But these days, with the rise of the buzzword “innovation” in the business literature, you’d be led to think that innovation itself is something new. Let’s see if we can net out what’s new about innovation by asking a few questions about this hot business topic.

What’s New About New?

Here we go again with yet another hype curve, the Innovation Hype Curve. Why all the newfound interest in innovation? In short, globalization.

Getting Started is Hard to Do

Author(s):

BPMInstitute.org

Business Relationship Manager - Product Lifecycle Management, Chevron Corporation

At this point, the business benefits of business process management seem clear. Virtually every sector of society, including areas that seem relatively impervious to dramatic change, such as higher education and government, are becoming much more outcome-oriented....

Governance is Key to BPM Success

Author(s):

Andrew Spanyi

Faculty Member, DBizInstitute.org and Managing Director, Spanyi International

If all you want to do is execute a one-time improvement to a small business process then governance issues may not be high on your agenda. But if you wish to fully leverage the power of BPM and apply the key principles and practices to your company’s large business processes, you will soon discover that governance is the cornerstone to sustainable BPM success.