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Why Johnny Still Can’t Write Rules
Business rules administration constitutes the core value proposition of any advanced business rules management system (BRMS) solution and, quite often, represents the holy grail of enterprise BRMS implementations. With the promise of propelling IT into an agile, flexible, and faster policy deployment environment, business rules administration capabilities often serve as key drivers for many cost benefit cases. However, less than 60% of these implementations actually leverage the full promise of BRMS offerings, ending up by managing business rules projects much like any other conventional software project. More importantly, business rules are too often not managed by those who should be empowered to manage them – i.e., business owners and stewards. Why does this happen?
Special Report: BPMN and Business Architecture Modeling
Successes and Achievements
Over the past several years, many corporations have successfully completed numerous strategic Business Process Management (BPM) initiatives. Looking to build and expand upon these successes, many practitioners realized that connecting and integrating the individual models from strategic BPM initiatives could identify additional performance improvement opportunities and synergies between the previously modeled core cross-functional business processes.
Bearing in mind that activities integrate individual tasks, processes integrate activities, strategic BPM initiatives integrate processes, and then continuing with this rationale, one realizes the Business Architecture (BA) integrates all core cross-functional business processes from the strategic BPM initiatives.
Independent Research Firm Recognizes BPMInstitute.org as a Leader in BPM Training
About the Report
As more and more organizations embrace Business Process Management (BPM) for the design of enterprise organizational and information systems, the demand for BPM training increases.
Many companies claim they’re the best at BPM training. Who should you believe?
Believe what industry expert Forrester Research is saying in the 2012 Forrester Wave report BPM Training and Certification Programs. It evaluates top BPM training and certification providers, citing BPMInstitute.org as a leader in the BPM training market – and a top scorer in 7 of the 15 BPM skills development categories.
Download your copy of the Forrester Wave report BPM Training and Certification Programs and get their objective review of the top organizations in the BPM training space.
7 Steps To BPM Success
This paper provides the reader with a 7 Step model that seeks to suggest ways in which organisations can maximise their business returns. The model sets out to blend the benefits of non-technology approaches with the more technological ones.
Architecture-Driven Modernization: Transforming the Enterprise
For a number of years, systems modernization been has providing benefits to organizations seeking to analyze software architectures in support of tactical systems initiatives such as software maintenance. Modernization has also delivered benefits for project teams seeking to migrate from obsolete or aging languages and platforms to more modern environments.
While success stories abound for tactical modernization projects, they merely represent the “low hanging fruit” of what modernization can achieve. Modernization efforts are now reaching into more significant and far reaching domains, extending opportunities into the upper echelons of IT and business architectures. Achieving this goal requires a deeper understanding of the architectural impacts of systems modernization.
The ‘Understand’ Phase of Development
This article covers an issue within Business Process Management (BPM) redesign which is often not fully discussed. Frequently, development groups are eager to get the team fully engaged as quickly as possible. Looking at “as is” situations (examining, modeling) may receive slight attention as being “bygones” – “Let’s start with a clean slate.” The issue is deciding how quickly to begin computerized development after a project or analysis has been scheduled.
There are different aspects of business growth and development. One faction may wish to apply technology to change its business as quickly as possible, while another may prefer to proceed cautiously and methodically, moving only after research and through using a well-tested methodology. Which is correct? The classic answer is “It depends.”
Human Risk Biases
Except for natural disasters such as earthquakes, floods, or hurricanes, all risks are man-made. This article is a synthesis of three past Harvard Business Review articles. The bibliography is at the end of the piece. Project Managers (PMs) usually have very little control of the risk circumstances in which they are placed. Taken together, viewing risk from the combined perspectives of the authors cited should help PMs assess risk in their own environments. Summarizing the titles as follows: “Right Risks,” “Is it Real?” and “Hidden Traps” will help us consider the contribution of each, and then meld them into the PM’s decision process.
The Right Risks
Launching a Business Architecture Community of Practice
Business Architecture (BA) is no longer just an emerging discipline or an “interesting concept”. It is increasingly being leveraged by enterprises to provide tangible value. And within Wells Fargo, Business Architecture has been gaining momentum, slowly but surely, through the activities of a growing BA community, involved in numerous efforts in or related to Business Architecture.
First, let’s define Business Architecture. The following is a consolidation of several definitions that have been around in the industry, and it captures quite well the quintessence of BA:
Business Architecture is a disciplined approach to creating and maintaining business-specific artifacts that serve as a formal blueprint for the planning and execution of strategy across the enterprise.
BA covers the following major areas:
Forrester Consulting Study: The Move is on to Open Source Integration Software
A tight and uncertain economic climate has prompted organizations to seek out low-cost yet effective ways to meet their needs for application and data integration. Forrester’s research, commissioned on behalf of Red Hat, indicates that a growing number of enterprises across all industries are now considering, piloting, or deploying open-source integration solutions. This paper explores some relevant data on the adoption drivers, pain points, and usage trends related to the use of open source integration technology.
Special Report: BPMN and Business Architecture Modeling
This special report asks the question: “Is it possible for both the business process and Business Architecture Modeling approaches to share a common modeling language and might BPMN 2.0 satisfy both?”
Successes and Achievements
Workflow, Rules, and CEP Combine to Drive New Business Value
Over the past few years, organizations have broadened the role BPM software plays in process improvement. Five years ago, BPM projects centered on human-centric workflow designed and executed with process models. Since then, lines of business continue to demand software that is more adaptive to how they work, and vendors have responded with increasingly mature offerings.
This Red Hat sponsored IDC white paper explores the evolution of BPM, how an organization’s basic requirements are changing in the face of the broadening scope of BPM software, and how Red Hat competes in this space with JBoss Enterprise BRMS 5.3 and its recent acquisition of Polymita.
Get Out of the Gate Quickly: The First Five Steps to BPM
If you don’t get off to the right start with a BPM Project, there are all kinds of consequences such as:
- Needing to change process owners mid stream
- Wasting time focusing on the wrong goals
- Not involving the right resources
- Missing critical information and making poor decisions
- “Buying” the technology solution
Continuous Improvement – Now!
Do you notice any built-in contradiction in the title of this article? A naïve approach to Continuous Improvement (CI) would be to attempt to benchmark Toyota, and just do what they do. That would be OK if: 1) You make automobiles, and 2) You have fifty years of Toyota management experience. Without those advantages, you would do best to consider a modified strategy.
It’s not easy to change, and usually not fruitful to change precipitously. An anecdote from an unnamed country, several wars ago, decided to mechanize the cavalry. An inspector, reviewing the prototype of the new battalion, marveled in the shiny new personnel carriers and tanks. However, he then noticed two soldiers standing off to the side, apparently doing nothing. When he inquired, he was told: “They are there to hold the horses.”
Building Business Architecture That Endures
Two of my biggest passions are business architecture and participating in endurance events like an Ironman® or an ultramarathon. Having excelled in both over the years taught me a few lessons. At the end of the day, every business architect’s goal to improve decision-making and accountability for business outcomes is not much different from an endurance athlete’s goal to win. I even coined the term “endurance architect” to aptly describe what I do. In my opinion, an endurance architect is someone who can bring the lessons from the playing field to the boardroom and vice versa to achieve sustainable profitability and/or self-actualization. How do we achieve these lofty goals? Let me start with the nuances of strategy and outline the steps of achieving success through strategic co-alignment, with examples from an endurance architect’s point of view.
What is strategy?
A blueprint for the intelligent, integrated enterprise
For IT to support an organization’s business challenges today, it must provide the infrastructure, applications, and data services needed to make intelligent business decisions quickly. This whitepaper discusses the comprehensive integration required—across an organization’s entire value chain—that drives transformation to the intelligent, integrated enterprise.
Rapid, cost-effective deployment of data services in a service-oriented architecture
Service-oriented architecture (SOA), and particularly its most common implementation as web services, represents the latest stage of evolution in application architecture for the enterprise. Service-oriented architectures are enabling organizations to increase their agility in the face of change, improve operating efficiency, and reduce the cost of doing business—often significantly. In spite of these advances, many organizations with significant investments in data collection and storage technologies still struggle with how best to embrace and deploy the new architecture in a way that leverages data assets. This whitepaper discusses the numerous challenges faced by both large companies and federal agencies seeking to embrace SOA, and details a metadata-driven, model-based approach to addressing them.
We Modeled the Processes – Are We Finished Yet?
Not quite! I can’t tell you how many companies I have worked with who announced we have modeled all the current state process or say we want to begin by modeling all their As Is processes. And they ask, can you help us with that? There is nothing wrong with modeling processes, but it takes a long time and it doesn’t produce improvements. Modeling processes is just one of the first steps. I suggest modeling the processes you want to improve and do them in groups of three or one by one. Then analyze each and improve them to see business results.
So if you’ve only done the process diagramming, what do you need to do next? Look at the roadmap below showing the phases of a BPM/ process improvement project.
Process Based Governance and the Role of SLAs
By now, it is fairly well known that the root causes of excessive costs and errors, of delays and inflexibility, are related to the non value added handoffs across organizational boundaries. In most companies, work is fragmented across multiple departments, product lines and business units. No one has end-to-end ownership of the flow of work or responsibility for flawless service to the customer. In such environments, redundant activities and duplication of effort is common, errors are frequent, and overall responsiveness to customers’ needs is elusive. The key to resolving these issues is to take action on redesigning customer touching end-to-end processes and then install a governance framework which assures cross departmental collaboration, encourages different units to work together for value creation, and makes the changes stick.
The Importance of Integration Capability when Selecting a BPMS
This article highlights the importance that system integration capabilities should play when selecting a BPMS. Integration is often the largest challenges in transforming business processes and can often present one of the most difficult barriers to delivering rapid success.
Few business processes live out their life within a single system. Consider the example of winning a new customer, on-boarding them, delivering a service and gaining payment. It is not uncommon to find the following systems involved in supporting these processes:
Discovering the Value Streams for an Enterprise
How does a Business Architecture (BA) team determine the value streams for their enterprise? Is there a suitable reference available in the public domain of the Web for the team to analyze? Many are familiar with and frequently use the American Productivity and Quality Center (APQC) and its Process Classification Framework (PCF), but does something comparable to the APQC-PCF[1] exist which is organized around value streams by industry? Sadly, the answer is “no.” So what approach should the BA team take and how will they determine the value streams for their enterprise?
