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Interactive Q&A – A Standard Approach for Process Documentation
Every year, CIO’s and COO’s rank “Improve Business Processes” as a top priority for their organizations. So why aren’t more organizations diving in, documenting their processes and driving improvement? In short, because it’s hard. Most companies don’t have a standard approach for process definition and documentation. Rachel Pace-Maron, Director of Operations Support Service at PRC, was asked to document, standardize and communicate all of her company’s processes to help improve business processes across 15 domestic and 5 international call centers.
The business value of event processing: preparing the path
Today, organizations are taking advantage of the “real time” availability of electronic events, and using event processing technology to both improve operational business efficiency, and drive business optimization – instrumenting and analyzing business activity to drive decisions radically more transparently and efficiently.
How the Texas Education Agency is Driving Process Transformation with Business Rules Management
The Texas Education Agency (TEA) is responsible for providing leadership, guidance and resources to help schools meet the educational needs of all students.
Today the agency is driving process transformation by enabling business area subject matter experts to manage and maintain business rules within their processes. By enabling business users to manage rules, changes and modifications can be made rapidly whether it’s for new departmental policies or new education legislation.
It’s Time: Ditch your Business Rules
Larry was at the headquarters of one of the largest industrial organizations in the U.S. and his task, on behalf of a business rules technology vendor, was to understand why this client had decided to replace his client’s technology with a package. The decision could not have been taken lightly – this was a custom built order processing system, a huge system by any measure. It had been built but ten years previously at a cost that ran into eight figures. By the vendor’s count it contained over 20,000 rules.
Research Brief: BPM and Security
This Research Brief highlights a selection of the findings from BPMInstitute.org’s State of BPMSM survey. It reviews the security challenges associated with automating processes that involve sensitive and company-confidential documents and protecting the intellectual property of digital assets involved in business processes.
Achieving Organization Agility Using Decision Management
In today’s marketplace it is imperative that companies are creative about how they manage and evolve their business processes. Achieving agility is a critical organization driver for organizations eager to reduce time to market, foster innovation, and tackle complexity. Business rules help automate the decisions essential to the organization’s business processes – reducing manual steps, delays, and opportunities for errors. Decision management is the business discipline that best leverages business rules and puts analytics and optimization to work in every transaction.
Systems Engineering for the Process Age – Creating systems to adapt to agile business
In the previous article “Process-oriented Systems Paradigm for the Process Age”, I discussed the concepts that will shape process-oriented systems in the Process Age. In this article I will discuss how these concepts influence the development of systems. Some of the terms used here have been described in the previous article.
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Enterprise Change Equations
1. Approaches to ECE.
The change of such a complex system as Enterprise has to be considered at least from three perspectives:
- The philosophical equation of inevitable change.
- The business equation of embracing vs. ignoring change
- The human equation of Enterprise change success.
Three Continuing Barriers to Cloud Application Development
In talking with customers and prospects over the last few months, three themes that seem to be barriers to Cloud application development have repeatedly emerged. The first is that of Cloud security, the second Cloud performance and the third Cloud technology requirements.
Guerrilla SOA
About 15 years ago I came across ‘The Guerrilla Marketing Handbook’ by Jay Conrad Levinson. The concept was to create branding and lead generation through unconventional and small scale activities and events that could have as much impact as a large seven figure advertising campaign. Unfortunately, a lot of people took this as an excuse to commission irritating and humourless “viral” internet campaigns churned out by clueless marketing agencies. However, the concept of getting maximum results from minimum resources has stuck with me.
The Business Process Management DNA, a need for the “big picture”
A DNA carries the biological instructions that define, compose and create unique species. Molecules come together in a unique combination to form a “code” that defines a cell’s characteristics in an organism, and shape what the cell in intended to do. This article is not about genetic engineering, nor is it about medicine. However, it is about trying to lay out the DNA roadmap for what Business Process Management (BPM) should encompass in an organization.
Combining Cloud, SOA, BPM and Rules to Create Break-Through Solutions
Cloud computing is a style of computing in which dynamically scalable and often virtualized resources are provided as a hosted service over the Internet i.e. ‘the cloud’. The goal of cloud computing is to provide easy, scalable access to computing resources and IT services.
Enterprises large and small are drawn by the advantages of cloud, resulting in very low barriers to entry and exit and high agility.
Cloud computing is a style of computing in which dynamically scalable and often virtualized resources are provided as a hosted service over the Internet i.e. ‘the cloud’. The goal of cloud computing is to provide easy, scalable access to computing resources and IT services.
Management Strategies for SOA
Management Strategies for SOA
The SOA consortium has been running an annual contest for the best SOA Case Studies. Last year I attended the event and summarized the common characteristics of successful SOA implementations. This year’s winners shared the same characteristics:
1. Strong executive level commitment2. Educate the business of the value of SOA3. Establish a Center of Excellence4. Well defined business services5. Completeness of services6. Sound quality assurance7. ROI realized over time
The Decision Model: Empowering Decision Management
“The Decision Model gives form, function and a tangible visual representation to business logic” – The Decision Model (von Halle & Goldberg)
In order to implement Decision Management effectively, we need to be able to identify and manage the business logic (i.e. the business rules) underlying business decisions. It soon becomes apparent that classical methods of gathering and managing business rules (i.e.
Addressing Challenges in Communication & Media using BPM
Controlling costs and resources is just the tip of the iceberg facing communications companies in an ever-tightening financial and regulatory environment. Part of the issue is the underpinnings of their business infrastructure, such as…
Business Semantics – Information Alignment
Technology has produced many wonderful and useful things and has changed the way we work and play. It has also produced a good many solutions for problems that nobody thinks are important. Or, the technology based solution to the problem has a greater cost than the value that would be realized from the solution.
Target State Business Architecture an ideal model for forming an Outsourcing Agreement
Outsourcing
The term outsourcing is developing a whole new concept with the recognition that through scale opportunity service providers can not only provide more efficient processing but can also deliver high value adding based services directly to the customer.
However, the outsourcing of high value business processes can be quite complex and requires serious preparation before a decision can takes place to release responsibility to a third party.
The key questions facing the organisation are:
Building Strong Management Support for Your Change Management Program
Your kickoff meeting is scheduled and you have carefully put together your change management communication strategy and plan. You have spoken to the CEO and he is happy to speak at the kickoff and has given you his commitment to provide ongoing support. You have been diligent, meeting with him several times to go over the key points that you would like included in his messages. You have even begun to have informal discussions on the CM strategy and plan with key impacted stakeholders, and are gaining their support. This all sounds great doesn’t it? So why are you, getting resistance from your mid-level managers every time you speak with them?
BPM Center of Excellence
In my last article, I talked about selecting a BPM tool while keeping in mind both the short and long term needs of an organization’s process needs. But as we are all aware, whether we acknowledge it or not, tactical views and immediate implementation needs take priority over strategic needs. People tend to overlook long term process needs while focusing on only the immediate process automation needs. Moreover, while focusing on tactical needs, organizations tend to overlook areas such as process ownership and governance, roles and responsibilities, Service levels, and standards that should be associated with any process initiatives. More importantly these need to be thought through prior to embarking on the BPM journey. A BPM Center of Excellence (COE) can help with all of these areas.
Geo Transform: Geo Visualize the ROI on your SOA Infrastructure
A SOA implementation roadmap can be long and the SOA infrastructure, like “plumbing”, can be hidden from the end user during construction. During our SOA implementation, we used an “Early SOA” approach, where we connected a “faucet” to the SOA infrastructure and helped users “tap into” the value of the SOA infrastructure being built. Most Enterprises have Data and Processes with location attributes. We leveraged the SOA Infrastructure to transform Enterprise Data and Processes into an Open Geo Visualization Standard like KML[1] or GML[2].
