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The Grail: Strategic Process Work
The notion of process is of utmost value to organizations, but the reality has often fallen short. The power of process is potentially far more powerful than today’s fragmented practices. With the right approach, however, process can have even more impact on organizational results than it did in the eighties and nineties. More specifically, process is the key to designing and operating organizations to deliver unique, sustained value.
So what is happening today?
Logical Data Models for SOA Information Exchange
In the computer industry the same patterns keep emerging with new names and different advocates. Model Driven Architecture is promoted as though it is a new revelation for modeling business information, when in reality it is just a new name for an established process. Data Architects have been defining harmonized logical data models for at least 15 years.
BPMS Watch: Roundtripping Revisited
In the early days of BPM – four or five years ago – everyone thought BPEL was the BPM standard, at least for runtime execution. Not long after, the importance of business-friendly process modeling came to the fore, and BPMN emerged as the standard for that. The mismatch between graph-oriented BPMN models, where you can route the flow just about anywhere, and block-oriented BPEL, where you can’t, didn’t seem to worry BPM vendors. After all, a model was just a model, a business requirements document in diagrammatic form.
Achieving Business Agility
Often, competitive environments change faster than a firm’s responding processes and decision making abilities. Most organizations fail at executing strategies designed to improve their position in the market.
A Systems Approach to Business Process Management
The Challenge
I have come across businesses where some problems are chronic. In other words, these problems have existed for a long time but nobody attempts to fix them because they are thought to be “unfixable.” I have also come across businesses where problems are approached with a quick-fix mentality.
Facilitation Skills for BPM Professionals
In the past year I’ve heard increased chatter about the need for improved facilitation skills in the BPM arena including at the November New York BrainStorm BPM Conference where facilitation skills were highlighted as a necessary competency of Business Analysts1. So what are these facilitation skills everyone is talking about?
What is Facilitation?
Simply put, facilitation is a structured way of helping teams think, discuss, and make decisions in order to achieve their desired goals. And, like any other discipline, it requires a specialized skill set. The larger or more complex the situation, the more honed the skills of the facilitator need to be.
Innovation Pioneer of the Year: You!
Erik Weihenmayer is an acrobatic skydiver, long distance biker, marathon runner, skier, mountaineer, ice climber, and rock climber. Erik graduated from Weston High School in Connecticut in 1987. As the school’s wrestling captain, he represented the state in National Freestyle Wrestling Championships. In 1991, he graduated from Boston College, and in the same year, he trekked in the Pamir Mountains of Tajikistan.
Power Off, Not Lights Out
I recently attended a dot-com launch. What was unique about this particular launch was that the company does not own any servers, and they do not have a data center or even rack space in a co-location facility! Instead they run on virtual servers controlled with a Web service interface, and store their data “in the cloud” using a Web service.
Virtualization is almost a cliché in 2007. IDC lowered its server revenue forecast as a direct result of virtualization. Especially because IDC’s report missed the new phenomenon known as “Web Scale Computing”.
BPM: Improving Productivity for Call Centers
Organizations that have call centers including help desks, outbound/inbound call centers or customer service desks are increasingly using Business Process Management (BPM), Portal and Web 2.0 technologies to differentiate the service they provide and make their operations more efficient.
But where is the low-hanging fruit?
Covering User Needs
Two problems frequently encountered in planning for new product development are what I call the “depth problem” and the “breadth problem”. In my article “First Things First”, I talked about the depth problem – basically failing to spend time and resources establishing what to make or implement (the right concept) before committing to planning how to make it.
SOA is SOL without BPM – Bringing IT and the Business Together
How many times have you heard that SOA is the next big thing? It’s particularly fascinating how the perspectives of customers and vendors evolve on “the latest thing” and where they find the value. The Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) wars have been interesting to watch for exactly this reason. Integration vendors, pure-play BPM vendors and leading application platforms all have an SOA story. The major vendors have focused education efforts on teaching people what SOA is, and how it can make their infrastructures more “agile”.
The Role of the Decision
The Decision’s the Thing…
“The play’s the thing / wherein I will capture the conscience of the King” Hamlet (II.ii. 582-583)
The Power of Collaboration: Collaborative BPM
Competitive advantage in business depends on the ability to excel in key business processes. Business Process Management (BPM) is typically delivered with an integrated set of tools that provide a closed-loop system for optimizing business performance.
Collaborative BPM expands the scope of traditional BPM and is moving to priority number one as organizations search for an integrated solution that provides an environment to coordinate the dynamic activities of human-driven, collaborative processes.
Services and Versioning
Service-oriented architectures offer many important advantages to the enterprise in terms of agility, flexibility, consistency, reuse, integration and others. But of course, there’s no free lunch. And one of the costs of these advantages is the increase complexity of service lifecycle management and versioning.
Once a service has its first consumer, we have bought off on having to maintain and support that service for an agreed upon period of time.
BPMS Watch: My BPMN Wish List
The Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) standard from OMG has a lot to recommend it, but it’s not perfect. Since late February of this year, I’ve been doing BPMN training, and through that I have come to appreciate the subtle power of the notation and how it maps – or sometimes not – to the way real business analysts and architects want to model their processes.
The Marriage of BPM and Six Sigma
BPM Six Sigma Context
BPM tends to focus on the automation of business process through the use of BPM suites. Every software system automates a process; and generally every process, efficiency, or quality improvement project involves use of software systems.
Process Centric
“It’s all about process” – As stated by Jack Welch, General Electric’s famous CEO, success in business is all about process.
How to Launch and Implement BPM and SOA Projects
The move to SOA and BPM means that application development can be more modular. But data is the essential foundation. BPMInstitute.org: You are now out on your own. What does BizThink do? Fletcher: We have a unique offering which involves process redesign and SOA and...
BPM Suites Increase Business Agility
The inability of earlier generations of application development software to support effective collaboration between business and IT is the source of a good deal of confusion, wasted efforts, and delayed ROI to the organizations that are implementing new application...
Bridging the Gap between Business Modeling and SOA
I’ve found topics to be more interesting if I can apply them to something or someone I’m familiar with. If a relative has cancer, I’ll listen more intently to news items about cancer treatment. If a friend is moving to Mexico, I’ll think about international events in a slightly different light. I call it the “relevance factor”. We each evaluate information against our own personal scale to determine what to do with it. If we can find some frame of reference for or application of it, we’ll pay attention and store it for future use. If not, we’ll dismiss or ignore it.
The New Frontier: Business Decision Management (BDM)
It has become increasingly evident that business rules are only a part of the whole puzzle of business logic in BPM, SOA, and Business Architecture.
