When you get started in BPM, the first step invariably is documenting your current, or as-is, process. You can gather the facts from process participants and process owners in a variety of ways – in a group, putting yellow stickies on the wall, or in separate interviews. But eventually you face the challenge of reducing that collected knowledge into a structured, semantically precise yet intuitively understandable, diagram – a process model.

The majority of process “models” in the wild are simply Visio diagrams, applying shapes and lines as the individual modeler sees fit.

Introduction:  Seldom a hot topic now, quality was the holy grail for business fifteen to twenty years ago. At the time, the automotive industry was learning the hard way from Japan that buyers could recognize quality and appreciate it enough to make it a priority in choice-making. The lesson was largely framed through the lens of manufacturing and the concepts of quality control developed by Edwards Demming – a prophet embraced by the Japanese, ignored in America and, suddenly, as important at home as he was abroad.

We are at an exciting crossroad bringing technology and business together, as never before. Global collaboration and emerging corporate cultures are creating a new type of innovative enterprise: one that is based on services. Service orientation is about culture, a new service-focused approach of doing business as the modus operandi. Service orientation is also about technology, a standard and effective way of connecting businesses. Enterprises can be empowered to live up to the potential of becoming dynamic, agile, and real-time.