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BPM SaaS Is Here – Is It a Storm Cloud For IT?
Some time ago during a discussion on ITtoolbox.com, I theorized about BPMS Cloud as the last, ultimate step, providing the final means to transition to a post-IT era.
SOA Architecture Considerations
An important part of analyzing necessary capabilities for a future Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Enterprise Interoperability environment is to envision, explore and lay out the core architectural principles and templates of a holistic service-based organization. By defining a notional landscape of patterns and best practices, a clearer picture of the integration between application architectures and integration architectures can be developed.
SOA Governance for the Organization: Best Practices for Getting Started
SOA governance is crucial to building, managing, and maintaining a successful SOA implementation – indeed, without governance, well-intended SOA pilot projects spiral into chaos when they go operational. We have all seen it before – an organization spends a lot of money developing services, and they prematurely declare success when everything works well in the lab.
Smart (Enough) Systems
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.
The Nature of Operational Decisions
In previous articles we introduced Business Decision Management and answered some of the most frequently asked questions about it. Business Decision Management involves the automation and improvement of operational business decisions. This leads us to the topic of this article – what is different about operational decisions and other kinds of decisions?
First, let’s consider the kinds of decisions that organizations must make to succeed.
Business Process Leadership (BPL)
The acronyms associated with BPM seem to grow in quantity year by year while the essence behind them grows at a much, much slower pace. If we cut through all the jargon, we can get to the simple truths. In this article, we’ll discuss one such fundamental truth – business requires both leadership and management to succeed. You can’t overlook or over-value one or the other; they have a symbiotic relation in any business, business function or business process.
Surviving the Business Architecture Center of Excellence
I have had the pleasure of leading several Business Architecture Centers of Excellence (CoE). They have not always been called that, however. Centers of excellence have been around for a long time but with regard to Business Architecture they have only been around for a couple of years.
When we formed those centers of excellence we did not have a blueprint or any kind of reference model. What we had was a need to see the big picture of where the business needed to go. We knew the strategy and we understood the goals and objectives.
Selling SOA to the Business
(Or, Why Don’t They Get What A Service Is?)
In talking to many senior IT executives, whenever the topic of SOA is mentioned they invariable complain of two things. The first is that all the vendors are doing SOA – but all in different ways, making it difficult to mix and match. The second is that getting business buy-in to SOA from business managers is even harder than trying to wrestle their ‘Crackberries’ from them.
The problem is that without business buy-in, SOA cannot deliver its fabled benefits to the organisation – Agility, Growth, Innovation.
BPMS Watch – BPM and Its Enemies
My very first BPMS Watch column, over three years ago, was titled “Without a BPMS, It’s Not Really BPM.” And to a large degree I still believe that, although today I would probably tone it down to something like “without a BPMS, you can’t realize all the benefits of BPM.” That view is certainly less radical now than it was in 2005, as both developers and developer-oriented tool vendors have increasingly embraced the BPM Suite idea.
Automated Business Process Discovery & Visualization
One of the biggest challenges faced by companies embarking on a process improvement and governance initiative today is illuminating the exposure to compliance failure, fraud, and other legal and efficiency issues lying hidden in their operational workflows. Fujitsu’s Automated Business Process Discovery and Visualization Service eliminates months of time and labor-intensive exploration and lets organizations immediately discover what often remains completely invisible. Learn more about this innovative offering from Fujitsu and how can you benefit from it.
The Bioteaming Breakthrough for High Performance Teams
With the emergence and maturing of a vast array of corporate-strength intranets, extranets, portals, and Web 2.0 with its multitude of supporting real-time and asynchronous communications tools, there would appear to be a huge potential for technology to bring real gains to team productivity. This would seem to be particularly true for those teams that are physically distributed or that are highly mobile. Few people would dispute the potential benefits of effective real-time communication tools or of shared and secure workspaces.
Better! Cheaper! Faster!
Have you ever worked on a project where the rules to be automated were very complex? Where the business representatives described the rules differently (but essentially used the same logic)? Where the rule inter-relationships made it seem like the rule logic was circular? Where they were difficult to document in a clear and precise format? Where it seemed like the stakeholders each spoke a different language? Where defining the concrete rules to be automated seemed impossible? Well, you are not alone.
Requirements and Design Approaches for Adaptive Software
In the first article of this series, the idea of an emergent environment was introduced. There are several key properties of a setting where an emergent approach for process development can be highly effective. These include environments where there is:
Lack of CertaintyDesire for AgilitySkills Disparity
Process Mapping – Collaboration is Key
Wherever a business is on the continuum of process analysis, improvement, or re-engineering, the initial step is to understand how people do what they do. A process map can get you started.
A process map defines how an organization performs work: the steps involved and their sequence; who is responsible for each step; and how work groups interact.
There is no shortage of software tools to help map your processes, and myriad formats to choose from. No matter what format, tool, or technology is chosen to document the “As Is”, though, collaboration is key.
Case Study: Architecting a Segment Across Geographic Locations
Many organizations have headquarters and field offices. Distance and separate management structures can make forming a cohesive architecture difficult. The challenge grows when the complexity and size of the organization require a segmented architecture.
Our approach addresses this challenge. Segment and Regional Architects examine intersections of shared systems and/or business processes between field offices and headquarters for a segment, and the redundancies each sees from their perspective, while looking for opportunities to leverage enterprise-wide solutions.
Can Enterprise Afford To Be ‘Not Ready’ For BPM?
Whether they realize it or not, the only thing Enterprises do is run Business Processes (BP). However, how effectively and efficiently they do this depends on the state of an Enterprises’ Architecture and the state of mind of the companies’ leaders.
Most Enterprises still have their processes formulated by Business Analysts (BA) as textual requirements. Then these requirements go to the IT side, where digital simulations of them are designed. These simulations are supposed to behave as the original processes were intended to.
BPMS Watch: Hey You! Get Outta My Pool!
One of BPMN’s most important elements is unfortunately also the most misunderstood. It’s called a pool, a rectangular shape that serves as a container for a process. So in that sense a pool is synonymous with a process, and that’s as basic as you can get. The confusion sets in when you understand that a business process diagram (BPD) – the top-level object in BPMN, describing a single end-to-end business process – frequently contains multiple pools.
A Formula to Measure Business Agility
This weekend I spent an afternoon sitting in a coffee house in my downtown Chicago neighborhood pondering what it means to be agile and how to measure it. The place was busy but I got lucky and snagged the cushy armchair next to the plate glass window in front that looks out on the sidewalk and the apartment building across the street. Watching the other patrons, looking at the people who pass by, and enjoying that burst of mental energy induced by a fine café-au-lait is often a good way to get inspired and be creative.
Using the Tools of Structure
Problems worthy of innovation range across the map from seemingly simple ones like the design of low-function objects (think tableware) to complex systems so multifunctional it’s hard even to know where to start. For complex problems, as you might expect, we usually insist on some kind of structure to work from; but for the “simple” ones, we almost never feel the need. Somehow it seems right to innovate within structure for a big problem, but its OK to treat lesser problems as one-shot idea generation exercises.
Reasons for Six Sigma Deployment Failures
As a Six Sigma consultant I am often asked: “Have there been any Six Sigma deployments that have failed?” My answer is ambiguous enough to make me sound like a presidential candidate. That answer depends on your definition of the term “failure.” My definition of a failure would be a result that does not deliver the Return On Investment (ROI) anticipated by the company. Using this definition, I am not aware of any company that would admit to failed deployment.
