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Model to Execution: Guidelines for Converting a Use Case into BPMN
Organizations improving performance and aligning or reengineering processes endeavor to define their core business processes. They often use ‘happy days’ use case scenarios, or they create workflow diagrams in Visio. A ‘happy-day path’ only considers flows that occur when no exceptions are encountered. So, someday the team needs to visit ‘unhappy’ branches. Converting the use case or work-flow into the formal needs of a business process model can be challenging. So I offer these simple guidelines.
The Role of Business Architecture in the Coming Meltdown of Web 2.0
The amount of information on the World Wide Web is enormous beyond belief.
SOA And Mashups – What to use when
Say I am a business manager at an insurance company and my job is to recruit insurance agents. These agents in turn meet the insurance needs of their customers and build their own customer base. If an agent does well, the company does well. With a finite amount of recruiting dollars available, I need to be able to make the best decisions on where to focus my recruiting efforts.
BPMS Watch: Process Model Portability: Does Anyone Care?
Among the numerous virtues of BPMN, foremost is vendor independence, giving process modelers many tools to choose from, all describing processes using the same shapes and semantics. That’s huge, since without low-cost (or even free) tools you’ll never establish a culture of process broadly throughout the business. Occasionally, however, a student in my BPMN training will ask the embarrassing question, “So that means I can take the models I create in this class and import them into the BPMN tool we use in our company…
Lombardi Teamworks 6.0
Lombardi Software is a private company focused exclusively on Business Process Management software. Lombardi designs, sells, and supports process improvement solutions for organizations in industries ranging from financial services to manufacturing to energy and telecommunications. Based in Austin, Texas, the company was founded in 1998, and has approximately 190 employees.
Lombardi’s BPMS, called Teamworks, is best known for human-centric processes that change dynamically based on business factors, such as dispute resolution, product returns, tax reconciliation, loan origination, or supply chain management. Lombardi describes Teamworks as focused on “operational processes,” meaning complex flows spanning organizational and system boundaries, characterized by four distinct attributes:
Integrating Testing and Training with the Process Life Cycle
Earlier this year I wrote an article outlining the critical relationship between the Process Life Cycle and the Project Life Cycle. This relationship, when treated as a partnership of equals, can improve the success of both the technical and the process improvement interests. In addition to the Project Life Cycle, there are two other important relationships that should be considered when developing or enhancing a business process.
SOA Watch: SOA and Adapters
Once upon a time, whenever we connected application A to application B, or applications A and B to an integration server, we had to interact with those applications using some sort of interface that (hopefully) the applications provided.
Bridging Business Models to System Implementation
In order to be successful, you need to understand your business and gracefully evolve that understanding into the design and implementation of your business systems. Application development and implementation starts with the business (or enterprise) and ends with an implemented set of system applications and components. This paper describes the Metastorm approach and technology for using enterprise modeling in the modern application development and implementation life-cycle.
Collaborative BPM in Financial Services
Struggling to get a grip on technology applications in the financial services and insurance space? Join leading IT research firm Forrester and Appian and as they explore modern process-based technologies and approaches.
Recent advances in Business Process Management (BPM) software coupled with proven best practices are having a tremendous positive impact on process-based areas across the enterprise. Rules engines and workflow systems are being replaced by sophisticated BPM platforms that enable business to respond with greater speed to ever-changing market conditions.
What is a Process?
For years my partners and I at the Performance Design Lab have defined a business process as “a sequence of steps or tasks that produce a valued output”, or words to that effect. Every definition of process I have seen in the books and articles written by others use pretty much the same verbiage. Nothing wrong with the definition – it does describe what a process consists of – but it does nothing to indicate some of the key principles of process design, nor does it do more than hint at why processes are so important (i.e., “valued output”).
So we have come to modify our definition
Just Make ERP Work! How BPM Bridges the SOA – ERP Gap
Does your Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system actually do what you want it to do? ERP applications were supposed to seamlessly solve all of our supply chain, order management, and deal approval processes. But these processes cross departments, people and functions, yet your ERP systems do not. So how well are ERP applications really working for you?
If you want to crush your competition, it is imperative that you tune into this webcast and learn how Business Process Management (BPM) is the missing link for making ERP work.
Questioning Innovation
A dictionary definition of innovation is “introducing something new.” But these days, with the rise of the buzzword “innovation” in the business literature, you’d be led to think that innovation itself is something new. Let’s see if we can net out what’s new about innovation by asking a few questions about this hot business topic.
What’s New About New?
Here we go again with yet another hype curve, the Innovation Hype Curve. Why all the newfound interest in innovation? In short, globalization.
Getting Started is Hard to Do
At this point, the business benefits of business process management seem clear. Virtually every sector of society, including areas that seem relatively impervious to dramatic change, such as higher education and government, are becoming much more outcome-oriented....
Governance is Key to BPM Success
If all you want to do is execute a one-time improvement to a small business process then governance issues may not be high on your agenda. But if you wish to fully leverage the power of BPM and apply the key principles and practices to your company’s large business processes, you will soon discover that governance is the cornerstone to sustainable BPM success.
Popkin and Dwyer Show How Enterprise Architecture Creates Successful SOA by Aligning IT with Business Goals
A successful SOA implementation isn’t guaranteed, it comes together when business and IT coordinate their efforts. But bringing IT and the business together can be daunting. They knock heads. When they talk, they don’t seem to speak the same language. To promote the cross-functional, cross-discipline collaboration between business and IT you need to successfully implement your SOA by leveraging the planning, impact analysis, and communication platform established by Enterprise Architecture (EA).
Seven Deadly Sins of Business Rules
“According to CIO magazine, up to 71 percent of IT project failures are caused by an ineffective requirements process.”
Business Rules are the orphan child of the requirements process, and our failure to address this issue continues to contribute significantly to IT failure.
What follows are seven deadly sins that continue to relegate rules to a second class status. We discuss the root cause of the problem, and postulate on potential solutions.
#1: Business rules are captured during design, if at all.
Business Architecture: Driving the Services Portfolio
Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) looks and sounds very technical. “Architecture” most certainly sounds very specialized. Anything “-Oriented” ranks right up there with “framework” as being steeped in mystery. And what’s a “Service?” It took the business community long enough to figure out what a process was. Now we’re supposed to know what a service is! No wonder SOA has been and still is an IT-driven initiative.
But should it be? IT is certainly involved; someone has to establish the infrastructure. However, should IT decide what services to develop and when?
Expanding SOA Throughout the Enterprise
How are the business and IT environments changing to meet the challenges of today’s fast-paced global business landscape? They are both striving to become more agile. IT is being focused more on increasing profits, revenues and efficiency than just reducing costs. The business is examining ways to improve customer satisfaction and competitive advantage by collaborating throughout the value chain to deliver more innovative and competitive products and services.
BPMS Watch: Step Up Your Modeling Game With Subprocesses
One of the most powerful features of BPMN is the least appreciated… by modelers and tool vendors alike. I’m talking about subprocesses. Most of the process models I have seen would be much improved if they were used more liberally, and more effectively.
In BPMN, a process is viewed as a flow of activities, and an activity – a rectangle in the diagram – can signify only one of two things: a task, meaning it has no subparts of interest to the model, or a subprocess, meaning the activity has subparts of significance to the model.
Defining the Nature and Role of the BPM Professional
As I attend and present at industry BPM conferences, I often survey the participants, asking them to raise their hands if they are from IT departments. Generally, about 30 to 45 percent of the hands go up. I then ask people to raise their hands if they are from the...
