The idea for this book was born a couple of years ago when I was struck, once again, by the fact that the existing literature on business process management did not sufficiently address the need to integrate business process thinking with strategy, organizational structure and people issues. At that time, I intended to write the book in a traditional format.

I had almost completed the first draft when I repeatedly heard several senior internal consultants and middle managers complain that when it came to enterprise business process management, their senior leaders simply didn’t get it.

Creating business process models that can be shared effectively across the business – and between business and IT – demands more than a digest of BPMN shapes and symbols. It requires a step-by-step methodology for going from zero to a complete process model. It also requires consistent application of a modeling style, so that the modeler’s meaning is clear from the diagram itself. Author Bruce Silver explains not only the meaning and proper usage of the entire BPMN 2.0 palette, but calls out the working subset that you really need to know. He also reveals the hidden assumptions of core concepts left unexplained in the spec, the key to BPMN’s deeper meaning.

Our interconnected world economy behaves like a huge stock market, and the volatility that comes with this makes the traditional business focus on efficiency less effective because it requires a level of predictability that no longer exists. In our high change, real-time economy responsiveness trumps efficiency. The profits from responsiveness are the basis for sustainable prosperity in this century.

Agile and responsive organizations are structured as networks of autonomous business units that harness the power of three self-adjusting feedback loops to respond appropriately as conditions change and new opportunities arise.

Modeling business processes for SOA and developing end-to-end IT support for these processes have become top IT priorities for many organisation. The SOA approach is based services and on processes. Processes are focused on composition of services and in that sense services become process activities.

This book – released on August 28, 2008 – will show you how to bridge this gap. It describes a pragmatic approach to business process modeling using the Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) and the automatic mapping of BPMN to the Business Process Execution Language (BPEL), which is the de-facto standard for executing business processes in SOA. The book will also cover related technologies such as Business Rules Management and Business Activity Monitoring, which play a pivotal role in achieving closed-loop Business Process Management.

Download the complimentary book chapter below (PDF): “Modeling Business Processes for SOA” and save 15%.

Today’s business trends are driving organizations to build systems smart enough to cope with the demands of a more complex world. As a result, organizations must automate and improve far more of the decisions underpinning day-to-day business operations. They must treat these decisions as a corporate asset in the same way they treat their data as one -perhaps even more so. These decisions are too numerous and cumulatively too important to be handled in an ad hoc manner. Decisions (or at least the definition of a good decision) change rapidly and influence your organization’s behavior. A new systematic approach called enterprise decision management is needed.

Download “Enterprise Decision Management” from “Smart Enough Systems” (2007) by thought leaders James Taylor and Neil Raden to learn more.

Facilitation Skills to Make the Most of Project Meetings

HAVE YOU EVER BEEN INVOLVED in a project that didn’t require a meeting? Neither have we. Project meetings provide a forum for exchanging information, coming up with new ideas or alternatives, making decisions, validating work products, or just learning how to work better together. They can occur on a regular basis or on the spur of the moment. They may involve two people or thirty. But regardless, project meetings are intended to achieve results. And most times you, the project manager, are expected to make it happen – whether you’ve had facilitation experience or not. So in Section One, we’ll give you some guidelines, insights, tool, and techniques to help you make any meeting you lead more productive.

There are always more project meetings than time. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could maximize your effort by…