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Define Your BPM Strategy Before Selecting a Tool
With the wide range of available tools on the market today together with the large number of white papers, articles and books on BPM, determining the correct solution for your organization can be daunting. With so much emphasis on the effectiveness of BPM tools for improving productivity, streamlining the value chain and gaining competitive edge, it’s easy to get caught up in all the hype and end up with a much more sophisticated and expensive solution than the business really needs.
Why Business Optimization Efforts Fail
Many business optimization initiatives struggle in achieving success and up to 70% fail for one key reason – a failure to recognize and manage the impact of the changes on the organization. In this roundtable we discuss why your initiatives may be at risk and what efforts to take to mitigate those risks.
Presenters:
Marilyn Martin, Director Business Architecture Practice, Collaborative Consulting
Ms. Martin is the business architecture practice director for Collaborative Consulting’s national practice. She has over 30 years of experience both in the private sector and consulting, and has created and managed the implementation of business solutions for leading companies in a broad range of industries and product lines. Marilyn has a keen ability to identify the strategic imperatives of the business, design supporting business architecture, and identify and plan the initiatives required to execute.
Without Metrics, Process Improvement Can Be Hazardous to Your Business Health
Imagine yourself as the owner of a business domain within a government agency. Let’s say you’re the Deputy Administrator of entitlement programs in an organization that processes claims for benefits.
Implementing Decisions in Modern Technology
“Bridging the gap between business and technology for true collaboration” has long been the mantra of Business Rule Management Systems (BRMS) and Business Process Management Systems (BPMS). Although this has too often been a strictly technology-based approach, methodologies and approaches have been forwarded in both the rule and process realm. The problem?
Running Effective SOA Proofs of Concept
As I mentioned in the last article, Selling SOA to the Business, it is important to gain buy-in from the stakeholders for your planned SOA initiatives. However, at some stage you will need to expose the business to the technology and demonstrate the specific value it will have to them. In parallel you will also want to get a good handle on what is actually possible to deliver as opposed to the hype you have been fed by the analysts.
Becoming a BDM & BPM Evangelist
So, you have just returned from a great conference where you learned that BPM (business process management and BDM (business decision management) will address many of the issues you face within your company. You now have the proof, from the experiences of other companies, as to how these methodologies can benefit your company. You’re so excited over the opportunity to make real difference in your organization. You share your excitement with a few co-workers but quickly realize that getting upper management to buy into this newfound methodology may be harder than you think.
Dashboard Design
This month’s article provides tips on ways to display information in a way that is content rich. These methods display information in a way that enhances understanding, highlights important elements, and minimizes distractions.
In 1983, Edward Tufte published a remarkable book titled The Visual Display of Quantitative Information1.
The Corporate Strategy, Business Architecture and IT
The Corporate Strategy defines the mission, vision and long-range objectives for conducting the business and achieving enterprise success. The Business Architecture (BA) is a blueprint of the enterprise built using architectural disciplines to improve performance. Development of the Business Architecture is a strategic initiative, not a departmental undertaking, not the pet project of a middle manager nor the latest priority of the week. The purpose of the BA is simple and clear; it is a tool used to improve enterprise wide performance as required by the strategy.
3 Steps for Moving from BPM Projects to BPM Programs
The successes of initial BPM projects and pilots have given companies the confidence and vision to take their BPM efforts to the next level – moving beyond that first project to a broader program encompassing multiple projects that are part of a larger business process improvement initiative. This whitepaper describes how the movement toward broad BPM Programs has changed what companies need in terms of BPM technology and “know how”.
Flexibility by Design: Adapting to Changes at Run-Time in SOA Implementations
Flexibility and agility are two adjectives that we always want associated with the systems, services, and enterprise applications that we build. Business processes and requirements change over time, and we need service consumers and providers to be able to easily adapt to such changes in an enterprise SOA. After all, flexibility and agility are typically “selling points” for SOA and we need to meet these expectations. In practice, adapting to change is very doable, but it can be difficult.
BPMS Watch: The Next Innovation in BPMS
One of the most successful innovations of the BPMS vendors to date has been incorporation of process modeling within the suite. Process modeling used to be a standalone business activity, requiring expensive proprietary tools that gave little thought to any automated IT implementation.
Automated Process Discovery: How to Jump Start BPM Initiatives
Where does one start with a BPM initiative? The traditional approach involves significant investment in time and resources to map out processes, the outcome of which is often delayed and inaccurate. Join Keith Swenson, Fujitsu’s Chief Architect, as he demonstrates how Automated Business Process Discovery helps companies: -Visualize existing business processes – in less than two weeks. -Identify process bottlenecks, steps that get repeated, and “loop-backs” in processes.
Top Down Business Execution
A plan is not enough
A few months back, my wife mentioned that we had not had a family vacation in years, and it’d be good if I can plan something that the whole family would enjoy.
I got to work on it immediately. There are so many wonderful places to visit; so I took a systematic approach to cull down the list to a manageable few destinations. My research included talking to friends, browsing the web, and reading travel books. Finally, I hand the answer – Rome it’ll be. I have always been fascinated with ancient civilizations.
Lowering Administrative Costs with Oracle BPM
Hear first how the Supreme Court of Louisiana, the state’s highest court, needed to provide secure and standardized workflow and collaboration services for a community of justices and staff, and its external legal community. They wanted a central, online collaborative BPM system to process legal issues and address pressing challenges after Hurricane Katrina as well as increase justice and staff productivity.
Next get a sneak peek at the next release of the product that the Supreme Court of Louisiana used – Oracle BPM, version 10gR3!
SOA’s Transformation of Configuration, Change and Compliance Management
At the moment most of the SOA software configuration management discussion is dominated by service version control issues and the use of service registries to capture change management data.
Why a Business Analyst Must Understand Business Process and Procedures
The first time I heard the phrase business process reengineering was over ten years ago, and I was a system analyst working with a utility industry software vendor. A California locality had purchased our product to address Y2K issues, and automate all the city services. When I arrived at my client, I found that some of the city services were automated, some were not, and I had to determine a way to fit the manual approach into the system.
I found myself wearing multiple hats, and using my journalism training, which enabled me to research and identify the right people, determine a method of relating while building trust, and eliciting the necessary information to define the current and eventual future state of the processes and impacts to workflow with the new system.
Discovering & Hiring Collaborative Leaders
Many companies which have begun applying lean or agile practices in their work place are now finding they need to reconsider who they hire to fill the more collaborative and facilitative roles required by those methodologies. Unfortunately, most companies believe they can magically transform their firm into a highly productive and enjoyable place to work by asking traditionally trained managers to simply apply a few new practices like value mapping, iterative development and an intense focus on quality.
Best Practices for Driving Visibility Across the Global Supply Chain
Today’s supply chains are increasingly complex, with global pressures placing additional burdens on speed and efficiency. Since the supply chain is the life blood of your company, you can’t forecast and manage it effectively if you can’t see what’s happening. That’s why true real-time demand and supply visibility is critical to optimizing supply chain performance.
Business Architecture Tackles Complex, Horizontal Business Challenges
Senior management wants to get serious about consolidating and managing customer information. Customer contact and related information is scattered across dozens of business units, each of which updates and manages this information in unique, nontransparent ways. Continuing the current piecemeal approach to customer management, however, creates severe roadblocks to servicing customers more effectively, streamlining operations and competing with other companies in your industry.
Process Architecture: Seven Essentials
Chances are good that your company has embarked on efforts to document processes and procedures at the departmental level, creating a collection of swim lanes and flow charts that might soon reside forgotten on servers and hard drives.
