Business Rule Management Systems (BRMS) coupled with commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) applications are prevalent today. Together and separately, they provide rapid and satisfactory solutions to particular problems in specific business areas. In fact, the most common use of BRMS today is for self-contained point solutions in a functional area of a business.
BPMS Watch: Understanding and Evaluating BPM Suites
BPM provides more than just a new way of measuring and understanding your business. It also delivers a new technology platform that is critical to realizing the innovation, efficiency, compliance, and agility that BPM promises. That platform, called a BPM Suite (BPMS), supports the complete process implementation lifecycle, from modeling to implementation design, execution, and business activity monitoring, with feedback to modeling for continuous performance improvement.
BPMS offerings have matured greatly in the past year or two. Today most provide a unified design
The Future of Services Engineering
The services sector of business is different than the industrial manufacturing models that have been the primary references for the last century or so. Treating services businesses as if they were just a version of a manufacturer - just substituting the word “service”...
Rhode Island Reengineers State Government
Here are some news headlines that the governor of any state would like to trumpet: The state has slashed its wireless telephone costs by 25 percent. A new purchasing process has saved the state $62,000 in the acquisition of public-safety and police vehicles....
Connection-Based Architecture: Connecting Information Technology with Business Architecture
BrainStorm’s latest Business Architecture conference in Chicago has come and gone, and while mid-April snowstorms like the one that struck the conference are fortunately few and far between, unfortunately a constant chorus that was heard from presenter after presenter was not; to wit: business architecture is facing a crippling communications problem.
Discussion on Business Rules and Legacy Systems
Recently, Don Estes and I were working on responding to a government solicitation for the replacement of a fairly large, 30 + year old legacy system. The request for proposal (RFP) was quite well done including a comprehensive list of requirements. The majority of these requirements were expressed as business process and data models with almost 1,000 supplementary text based requirements included. In addition, the RFP referenced the need to manage thousands of business rules – but the actual rules were not provided. Our design for the new system clearly required t
The Globalization of Innovation
The BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) represent the fastest growing markets in the world. But consumers there are the “unserved” today as they simply don’t have the income to afford Western goods and service. So, who will serve them and tap this huge market? While others keep their focus on U.S. and other affluent Western markets, innovators from the BRIC countries themselves are flying under the radar, not just to imitate, but to innovate to reach the billions of unserved and underserved.
Case Study: Technology at the Speed of Business – A Common-Sense Approach to Leveraging Technology in a Business Setting
Janet LePage is a founding member of the TELUS Quickwins Team, which manages technological change for this $8 Billion Data, IP and wireless service provider. She has also worked for IBM and Business Objects where she held progressively senior IT positions.
LePage has been dealing with large-scale change at TELUS for the past several years. In order to manage this growth, TELUS had to redefine how to work with the introduction of new technology.
Business Process Management – Time for Change
In my previous article, “The Design phase”, I discussed the concept of designing the change from the current way the process operates to the improved way with very few constraints. Does this mean that you can do without rigorous deployment planning? No, but you need to separate the discussions: First focus on what needs to be done. What type of changes need to be made, what type of skills do I need on my projects to make those changes, and what changes are dependent on each other: understand the possibilities.
The Process Advisor’s Role
In most organizations no one oversees the performance and improvement of cross-departmental processes. Management books often assign the title “process owner” to this role. However, “owner” implies authority, which is usually missing in organizations that include this position. “Process advisor” or “process consultant” are more accurate, in that they reflect this reality. Usually, authority pertains to resources, staffing, and prioritizing projects.
The process advisor or consultant’s role is to monitor the performance of a process and continually improve it.