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Passing the Torch
In First Things First, I made a case for partitioning the front end of the development process into a concept planning phase and a detail design phase. In effect, this separates the “what” from the “how” in the process of creating and giving form to an idea.
The value of this is multifold:

Making Financial Services More Responsive
This webinar will discuss how to make your financial service organization more responsive to customers, opportunities and threats through event-driven processes in business process management (BPM). This will include the importance and meaning of events relative to a business process and the links between BPM and complex event process (CEP).

The Service Oriented Architecture Enterprise Architecture Framework (SOA~EAF)
Enterprise Architecture as a practice has been around for some time now. Many companies have reached a level of sophistication and maturity within their EA practices. They are well established with EA policies and governance institutionalized throughout the company.

Managerial drive for BPM Automation (Pillar Four)
“The management drive is the support and commitment of a company’s senior management, at the time to think and take the first and last step in a BPM tool process automation. This is the fourth pillar of importance for macro phases: process modelling, process construction testing, adjustments and/or changes to business rules.

4 Keys to Unlocking Operational Performance
Operational performance has become widely accepted as a critical success factor for companies across many industries. It is best described as the level at which all business units in an organization work together to achieve core business goals.
There are understandably many articles and texts dedicated to operational performance management. Many companies have created departments and job functions focused on translating the value of business assets into higher performance. However for those who are just beginning the journey there are undoubtedly more questions than answers.

Business Architecture: Status Quo or Game Changer?
We frequently debate the question of who owns business architecture, but this question hides a more fundamental issue that can dramatically impact the value proposition of business architecture. Motivation and intent will ultimately determine if business architecture is a “game changer” or just another management discipline delivering incremental improvements to the status quo.

Organizational Culture to BPM Automation (Pillar Three)
“The culture of paper in a business today is still considered important, as a means of support and evidence of any activity carried out within an established process. The change into a culture oriented to the use of information technology is mainly based on the commitment of the end user to live in an environment of automated activities and operational activities within the process where paper is used mainly in necessary control processes.

SOA and Service Management
Within the world of SOA the term service management usually refers to the control and orchestration of the invoked service (web. Business, composite, etc.), usually called SOA governance.

Instituting Change
This article may seem at times like a rant. It’s not meant to be. It just deals with the frustration that all of us who innovate in the development of planning processes feel when the most rational, carefully-planned, sure-fire, absolutely-self-evident advanced planning methods fail to stick in an organization!

Being Intelligent with SOA: Using SOA to Lay the Foundation of your Business Intelligence (BI) Initiatives
SOA purists might scoff at using SOA for integration [1], but for many enterprises, Service Oriented Integration (SOI) remains one of the prime motivations for embarking on the SOA journey. Agreed SOI by itself doesn’t achieve the avowed goals of agility or elimination of redundant IT infrastructure, but it helps the enterprise address real concerns, now. The SOA Manifesto [2] states that Business value is of higher priority over technical strategy; hence easier integration with SOA is a valid goal of a SOA initiative.

Manage the People or Manage the Process?
When you are trying to handle a problem, make an improvement, change the culture, or implement a key strategy where do you go first – to manage the people or manage the process?
Consider these four scenarios. Would you approach the situation by managing the people or managing the process? Rate each one against the 5 criteria and think about why you selected the rating. We will come back to these four scenarios at the end at the end of the article and consider them further.

Decision Matrix: Selecting a Business Process Management Vendor (Competitor Focus)
Read the analyst report “Decision Matrix: Selecting a Business Process Management Vendor”, and learn why Progress Savvion made the short list of BPM vendors.
Business process management (BPM) software solutions – often called “suites” – are one of the hottest areas in BPM, but choosing the right BPM solution for your organization may be a daunting task. Ovum, an industry analyst firm, recently conducted a research project that measures BPM vendors across three critera: market impact, end-user sentiment and technology offering.

Addressing Case Management Challenges with BPM
How can we improve customer satisfaction, loyalty and improve agent efficiency by using customer centric case management? We know that there is a much higher cost to acquire a new customer than getting repeat business from them. What can we do make sure we are managing customer interactions well so that customer get their issues resolved quickly and bring repeat business?

Actionable Business Architecture
Interviews from over a thousand CEOs in 2008 shows organizations are bombarded by change, and many are struggling to keep up1. CEOs view increasingly demanding customers not as a threat, but as an opportunity to differentiate. They are moving aggressively toward global business designs with deeply changing capabilities and increased flexibility.
The gap between their capability to manage change and the challenge ahead is growing. CEOs expect fundamental change, but they seem uncertain about their organization’s ability to manage it. Business pressures are compounding as IT constraints are growing.

Changing – A Core Business Competency
With the operational problems caused by the current economy and the uncertainty that possible new legislation is causing, the need to change quickly and effectively is greater than ever. Few companies are prepared or capable of rapid, efficient change – especially broad based change.

Putting Business Information Architecture to Work
In a previous article, we talked about using web semantic technologies such as OWL and SBVR to create conceptual models of a business. In this article, we explore an example of using a Business Information Architecture to solve a business/IT problem. The architecture exercise helped clarify thinking about the possible solution forms and served as a model for the corresponding IT application and data changes.

Can SharePoint 2007 be my Enterprise Business Process Management (BPM) Solution?
SharePoint 2007 provides a basic set of business process management (BPM) functionality. Many IT shops and business users who have SharePoint 2007 running in their environment may be wondering what BPM capabilities SharePoint 2007 does have, and how it stacks up to traditional packages that promote themselves as complete BPM solutions.
Most Enterprise BPM solutions are comprised of the following high level components:

Continuous Improvement with BPM and Enterprise Architecture Together
Today’s global environment requires businesses to work smarter and to improve the coordination between planning and execution to continuously improve business processes and optimize costs. While Business Process Management (BPM) and Enterprise Architecture (EA) each have value on their own, they are also naturally synergistic, and together provide better business outcomes and strategic alignment of business and IT.
When done together, BPM provides the business context, understanding and metrics, and EA provides the discipline for translating business vision and strategy into architectural change. Only when supported by appropriate collaboration and governance processes can BPM and EA roles work effectively together towards the common goals of the enterprise.

Six Simple Steps for Accelerating and Perfecting Requirements: A Framework, a New Model, and Visualization
Software engineering is a much younger discipline than are other branches of engineering. We see this in the continuing evolution of attitudes and approaches to requirements. In early days, there were no requirements. In later days, there were volumes of approved textual statements. Eventually, there were formal models. Today, sometimes models and statements are merely interim deliverables because code becomes the requirements.

The Value of Improving and Managing Processes
What is a process?
A process is a combination of steps and activities that creates some output or result. It represents the flow of work and information through an organization. It is the mechanism for creating and delivering value to a customer.
Process and Department