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Adaptive Software – Systematically Responding to Emergent Environmental Change
This article is the first in a series of four to address the role of decisions and rules as an integral part of systems designed to adapt dynamically to changing environments.
Business Architecture: Scaling SCOR® to meet your needs
I have been in this business for 27 years and somehow never managed to do any supply chain work. So when a client asked me what I knew about the Supply Chain Operations Reference-model (SCOR1 ), developed and endorsed by the Supply-Chain Council (SCC), I had to admit “nothing.” So, being a good consultant, I set about familiarizing myself with SCOR: I did some reading, downloaded some PDFs, and attended a workshop. Admittedly, this does not make me an expert. It does not even make me particularly knowledgeable. It only makes “familiar” with SCOR.
Scrumming for SOA
In today’s market place of continuous change, enterprise agility is the ubiquitous fuel for continuous competitive advantage. But agile enterprises demand not only agile infrastructures and systems, but agile processes as well. Clearly, service based architecture has emerged as an enterprise-wide architectural blueprint and agile development is shaping up as a formidable development methodology.
Business Architecture Survey Results
In December 2007 through January 2008, the BPM Institute surveyed the Business Architecture Bulletin list to gain insights into the nature of business architecture work. The survey’s goal was to identify who is performing business architecture work, ascertain related goals, determine the nature of the work being performed and identify service and tool preferences.
Capturing Ideas
For fun, I recently googled the aphorism, “Good ideas are a dime a dozen”. There were over 3,400 hits. This old cliche is on too many people’s minds! Most of the occurrences I looked at were fairly recent, from business or marketing articles, and most continued on with a “but …” line that suggested that what is really rare and valuable is the agency or person who can bring an idea to realization.
Clearly, there is recognition that getting a glimmer of an idea is not enough.
Taking the Process Map to the Next Level – The Visual Analysis Map
What if you could create a visual that showed your data gathering, problem solving and analytical thinking analysis all in one place? What if you could have a map which would enable you to talk to stakeholders and executives and get their input on problems, time delays, and key quality issues? That’s what the Visual Analysis Map can do for you and your team.
Bioteams: The Next Frontier of Business Process Management
Support for collaboration is the hot discussion in BPM circles these days, and for good reason. It’s the human-to-human interactions of teams that count when it comes to innovation and agility. The age of the monolithic, vertically integrated company is long gone. In the interconnected world of the 21st century, you and everyone you work with must be able to function in and through internal and multi-company teams, and must also grasp what the latest concept of “team” really means.
Transactional Content Management: The Critical Infrastructure for Managing Horizontal Processes Across the Organization
We all know how processes typically emerge in an organization. They start in one area or department and are designed to solve a specific problem. We call this the functional-centric process model; it’s characterized by transactional processes being structured, managed, and measured via the functional or departmental unit. While this model addresses an immediate, department-level requirement, in the long run it can create a much bigger mess at the corporate level.
Cordys BPMS
Cordys was founded in 2001 by ERP pioneer Jan Baan, who remains as Chairman and a major stockholder. Cordys launched its first product in 2004, and today has around 40 customers worldwide. After initially focusing on a few big customers, the company is now expanding and working to establish a larger global presence based on BPM firmly rooted in SOA, leveraging a $67 Million investment by Argonaut Private Equity in April 2007. Cordys today has around 550 employees, over half of which are in R&D. Cordys is headquartered in the Netherlands, with a large development facility in India and offices in the US, Europe, and China.
Oracle BPM Solution v10.1.3
Oracle is well known as a world leader in database management and enterprise application software, and more recently as a leading supplier of application server and integration middleware. Following the acquisition of Collaxa in 2004, Oracle BPEL Process Manager became one of the most widely used standards-based process orchestration tools and a central component of the company’s SOA Suite, part of the Oracle Fusion Middleware platform. Still, the company was not ready to claim it offered a true BPMS until the announcement of Oracle BPA Suite in 2006, based on an OEM version of IDS Scheer’s ARIS platform with Oracle SOA extensions. Oracle’s BPM Solution, announced in Q3 2007 and reviewed here, combines BPA Suite and SOA Suite linked by shared metadata to support business-IT alignment and collaboration in the process lifecycle.
Singularity Process Platform 3.5
Singularity is a private company focused on BPM solutions for the capital markets, government, and telecommunications sectors. Founded in 1994 with headquarters in Ireland, Singularity now boasts 200 employees and offices in New York, London, Singapore, and Hyderabad. The company’s BPM Suite, called the Singularity Process Platform, was launched in 2000 and is now at version 3.5. In addition to the core platform, Singularity offers specific industry solution accelerators such as customer onboarding and “Know Your Customer” for financial services, customer provisioning and billing for telco, and benefits case management for public sector. Solution delivery is based on a rapid iterative methodology called ASAP featuring competing “hothouse” design proposals.
BPM can be a Life Saver in the Midst of Grey Wave
Like it or not, we are about to see an unprecedented brain drain when the baby boomer generation heads towards the retirement sidelines. This phenomenon
is known as the “Grey Wave.” Experts are saying that no amount of hiring and/or labor importation will be able to cope with the amount and pace of retirements. This means that large increases in productivity are not optional, but mandatory.
SOA Watch: When Considering Services…
Services are the building blocks of SOA, and like building blocks of a house or a building, the quality will define the value of the finished product. In this case, the SOA itself.
The Business Architecture Life Cycle
In the realm of Information Technology, a commonly-employed software development methodology is the Systems Development Life Cycle, usually abbreviated SDLC, which describes a systematic, if generalized approach to developing and deploying new software. While details can vary, the steps typically include analysis, design, implementation, testing, and maintenance.
BPMS Watch: BPM Hall of Fame
Is there a BPM Hall of Fame? I don’t think so, but there should be, to recognize the true pioneers and innovators in the field. BPM’s core ideas and technologies come from several divergent fields, and my list would include those who first introduced them – ideas about what a business process is, and what managing one really means. Thinking about who should be in a BPM Hall of Fame is a fun exercise, and you might it helpful in framing your own views.
BPM Done Right: 15 Ways To Succeed Where Others Have Failed
BPM’s promises are real, but the path to success is littered with pitfalls and shortcuts to failure. Best practices can help you avoid them. The good news is that BPM has now reached a stage of maturity which ensures that customers who are just embarking on using its methods and tools have a wealth of experience to learn from and build on. To succeed with BPM, you will need to develop your own best practices and constantly evolve them to stay ahead of the competition. The following “lessons-learned” provide a good place to start.
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.
BPM Supports a New Way of Working – The Dynamics of Swarming
What makes a flock of birds or a school of fish move as if they are a single entity? What makes them all suddenly rise, turn and accelerate at the same time? There is something else at work here than just a leader bird or a captain fish telling all the others what to do. This quick coordinated behavior from large groups of individuals is called swarming.
Deciding on the Right Level of Business Process Documentation
One of the most ambiguous terms in business today is “process documentation”. It has become the key phrase looked for whether it’s a prospective employee looking for that process-centric organization, an employer trying to lure talented workers or a CEO providing proof of compliance to corporate auditors or assuring the Board of Directors that the organization has achieved a process maturity level consistent with its key goals and objectives.
What is Business Architecture and Why Has it Become So Important?
Business architecture is the critical bridge between business strategic and operational planning and technology at an enterprise level. This Round Table will explain why it is becoming more important in 2008.
Business Architecture survey results will also be discussed.
Featured Speakers
William Ulrich, President, TSG, Inc. and Co-Chair BPMInstitute.org’s Business Architecture Conference Series
William Ulrich is President of TSG, Inc. and a strategic planning consultant.
