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Process Optimization for the Real World
Many Business Process Management (BPM) vendors talk about how their software allows you to optimize processes with just the click of a button. It’s a nice dream to believe in this “Nirvana” extending to processes outside your immediate scope of control, but the reality is that most people find that their corporate cultures do not empower just one person alone to change thresholds, adjust approval levels, or make wholesale changes to longstanding business processes. In most cases, process involves collaboration and involves other groups and decision-makers.
Goals and Definition
This article is about getting started on a development project. In a way, it is about problem finding. In particular, it is about deciding what is of concern and what is not, and what aspects of policy are important in setting a course toward a plan.
But before I get into that, I have to get something off my chest. It is becoming a real peeve, but it is highly relevant to this article and so worth talking about up front.
Everything is Connected
SOA Institute is aligned with the BPM Institute and with the Business Architecture conference. This is more than just a convenient coincidence. It’s a recognition that an organization needs to address all of these skills and approaches to truly align business and IT in an agile and flexible manner.
And, it takes more than just addressing these issues. They must be addressed in a coordinated and integrated fashion where one aspect feeds into the next aspect of the system development process. In other words, defining business processes alone will not affect alignment.
SoftwareAG/webMethods BPMS 7.0/7.1
Founded in 1996, webMethods was an early pioneer in the development of web services middleware for business integration, particularly for B2B commerce. More recently, the company evolved toward SOA infrastructure and BAM, and in the past year launched a comprehensive BPM Suite. Today BPM, SOA, Integration, and BAM form the key pillars of the webMethods platform, called Fabric 7.0. webMethods has over 900 employees and operates in 45 locations around the world, including development centers in US and India. In June 2007, the company was acquired by SoftwareAG of Darmstadt, Germany, creating the world’s largest independent provider of business infrastructure software. Following the transaction, SoftwareAG indicated that the webMethods BPMS will be sold and supported as the combined company’s sole BPM offering.
TIBCO iProcess Suite 10.6
TIBCO, a world leader in business integration tools and infrastructure software, entered the BPMS arena in 2004 with the acquisition of Staffware, a pioneer in human workflow automation. Since then, the company has integrated its BPM offering, called TIBCO iProcess, with its SOA platform (BusinessWorks and ActiveMatrix), in an initiative it calls BPM+, promising the ability to handle both human-centric and integration-centric processes in a single platform. Today, TIBCO claims BPM accounts for roughly one quarter of its total revenue of $517M (2006).
Global 360 and Insight360
Global 360, founded in 2000, is the result the merger of several experienced workflow, content management, and process modeling tool vendors. Headquartered in Dallas TX, the company has a large installed base of 2000 customers and FY06 revenue over $100 Million, built upon its heritage in the content and workflow markets. Global 360’s principal efforts today focus on BPM and what the company calls “process intelligence,” a form of BAM or operational business intelligence placed in a business process context. The process intelligence offering, called Insight360, is offered both standalone and as part of the BPM suite.
BEA AquaLogic BPM 6.0
Founded in 1995, BEA Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ: BEAS) is a world leader in enterprise infrastructure and middleware software. While BEA is best known for its BEA WebLogic® J2EE platform, its BPM strategy is actually based on the newer AquaLogic family of products. BEA AquaLogic® BPM (ALBPM), based on the acquisition of BPM pureplay Fuego in 2006, is part of the company’s Business Interaction Division, which also includes BEA’s Social Computing products (AquaLogic Ensemble, AquaLogic Pages and AquaLogic Pathways) together with AquaLogic Interaction, a family of portal and collaboration software based on the earlier acquisition of Plumtree Software. In 2006, BEA claims 100% quarter-to-quarter growth in BPM revenue, and BPM is now the fastest-growing segment of the company’s product portfolio.
Appian Enterprise 5.6
Appian Corporation, headquartered in Vienna VA, is a fast-rising star in the pure-play BPMS universe. Founded in 1999, the company is entirely self-funded and claims to have been profitable throughout its life. Today, Appian boasts 120 customers and 216 employees, and was recently named to the Inc 500 list of fastest-growing private companies. Appian Enterprise, the company’s flagship offering, takes a broader view of BPM than most of its competitors. The company describes process as only one dimension of BPM, the others being analytics and knowledge management. Certainly, performance management (what Appian calls analytics) is a standard component of all BPM suites, but with roots at BI vendor Microstrategy, Appian’s founders have made it a focal point of the product’s technical architecture. Knowledge management, Appian’s catch-all term for collaboration, content management, and portal technology, is also included as part of the suite.
Optimize the Business Outcome of SOA
Gartner states that SOA requires new processes around governance, development and operation. Creating these new processes is clearly a risky endeavor. This whitepaper summarizes the business benefits of adopting SOA, the obstacles that must be overcome and HP’s approach to SOA. HP addresses the unique challenges of SOA across lifecycle, from planning to inception to deployment. HP combines an integrated solution for SOA governance, quality and management combined with services that take you from planning and management to successful deployment and management.
The Business Value of SOA and Composite Applications
A discussion of the business value of SOA and composite applications is actually two discussions. First, what is the business value of composite applications?
A discussion of the business value of SOA and composite applications is actually two discussions. First, what is the business value of composite applications? More specifically, how do composite applications help you streamline business processes, reduce operational costs, increase customer service responsiveness and better support the creation and delivery of new products and services?
Oh, the Tangled Web We Weave
Business Rule Management Systems (BRMS) coupled with commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) applications are prevalent today. Together and separately, they provide rapid and satisfactory solutions to particular problems in specific business areas. In fact, the most common use of BRMS today is for self-contained point solutions in a functional area of a business.
BPMS Watch: Understanding and Evaluating BPM Suites
BPM provides more than just a new way of measuring and understanding your business. It also delivers a new technology platform that is critical to realizing the innovation, efficiency, compliance, and agility that BPM promises. That platform, called a BPM Suite (BPMS), supports the complete process implementation lifecycle, from modeling to implementation design, execution, and business activity monitoring, with feedback to modeling for continuous performance improvement.
BPMS offerings have matured greatly in the past year or two. Today most provide a unified design
The Future of Services Engineering
The services sector of business is different than the industrial manufacturing models that have been the primary references for the last century or so. Treating services businesses as if they were just a version of a manufacturer - just substituting the word “service”...
Rhode Island Reengineers State Government
Here are some news headlines that the governor of any state would like to trumpet: The state has slashed its wireless telephone costs by 25 percent. A new purchasing process has saved the state $62,000 in the acquisition of public-safety and police vehicles....
Connection-Based Architecture: Connecting Information Technology with Business Architecture
BrainStorm’s latest Business Architecture conference in Chicago has come and gone, and while mid-April snowstorms like the one that struck the conference are fortunately few and far between, unfortunately a constant chorus that was heard from presenter after presenter was not; to wit: business architecture is facing a crippling communications problem.
Discussion on Business Rules and Legacy Systems
Recently, Don Estes and I were working on responding to a government solicitation for the replacement of a fairly large, 30 + year old legacy system. The request for proposal (RFP) was quite well done including a comprehensive list of requirements. The majority of these requirements were expressed as business process and data models with almost 1,000 supplementary text based requirements included. In addition, the RFP referenced the need to manage thousands of business rules – but the actual rules were not provided. Our design for the new system clearly required t
The Globalization of Innovation
The BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) represent the fastest growing markets in the world. But consumers there are the “unserved” today as they simply don’t have the income to afford Western goods and service. So, who will serve them and tap this huge market? While others keep their focus on U.S. and other affluent Western markets, innovators from the BRIC countries themselves are flying under the radar, not just to imitate, but to innovate to reach the billions of unserved and underserved.
Case Study: Technology at the Speed of Business – A Common-Sense Approach to Leveraging Technology in a Business Setting
Janet LePage is a founding member of the TELUS Quickwins Team, which manages technological change for this $8 Billion Data, IP and wireless service provider. She has also worked for IBM and Business Objects where she held progressively senior IT positions.
LePage has been dealing with large-scale change at TELUS for the past several years. In order to manage this growth, TELUS had to redefine how to work with the introduction of new technology.
Business Process Management – Time for Change
In my previous article, “The Design phase”, I discussed the concept of designing the change from the current way the process operates to the improved way with very few constraints. Does this mean that you can do without rigorous deployment planning? No, but you need to separate the discussions: First focus on what needs to be done. What type of changes need to be made, what type of skills do I need on my projects to make those changes, and what changes are dependent on each other: understand the possibilities.
The Process Advisor’s Role
In most organizations no one oversees the performance and improvement of cross-departmental processes. Management books often assign the title “process owner” to this role. However, “owner” implies authority, which is usually missing in organizations that include this position. “Process advisor” or “process consultant” are more accurate, in that they reflect this reality. Usually, authority pertains to resources, staffing, and prioritizing projects.
The process advisor or consultant’s role is to monitor the performance of a process and continually improve it.
