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How Strategic is SOA at Your Company?
In an ideal world, companies would run their businesses as if their application portfolio were a single application. This application would take orders, generate shipping notices, and manage accounts receivable. It would also run manufacturing processes, automatically replenish materials as necessary, and exist as a Web-based front-end for customer interaction.
Ignoring Enterprise Governance & Paying the Price
Mention enterprise governance to executives and they typically respond with blank stares or indignant looks. One common response is to hand people the organization (“org”) chart, a set of boxes showing who reports to whom. Another response is to state that governance is a board level or senior management concern and we have no business broaching the topic. Org charts, sloganeering and political posturing are tangential to real enterprise governance because they have little to do with the intricate complexities, relationships, redundancies and cross-functional workings of an enterprise.
Six Sigma – For All of Us
The popularity of Six Sigma continues to increase within large corporations as a means of improving quality and reducing costs. As most readers will know by now, Six Sigma has been adopted by leading corporations such as GE, Sun Microsystems, Allied Signal, Bank of America, Motorola, etc.
In the current business environment, IT organizations have been less passionate in adopting Six Sigma methods. Many organizations feel that they can’t afford the luxury of a Six Sigma Program. There is a feeling that it intended for the product or service areas of the business.
Case Study: The Rules of Automated Underwriting: Blazing a New Trail for the Auto Club Group
Michael Koscielny has been using business rules technologies and strategic practices to transform and integrate the complex insurance underwriting process at Auto Club Group, formerly AAA Michigan. Koscielny has been utilizing business rules management software in the insurance industry for more than 20 years.
The sales and service initiative of the Auto Club Group identified the need for an automatic underwriting solution for new business functionality.
BPM Requires the Right BPMS
To many people, BPM is essentially a management discipline that replaces traditional organizational performance metrics around functional stovepipes with new ones based on cross-functional process thinking.
Driving Business Strategy with Business Rules
Parker Hannifin Corporation (NYSE:PH) is one of the great corporations of America. Founded in 1924 (after Arthur Parker’s first start-up in 1918 foundered due to a truck accident destroying all its inventory), it has remained an independent manufacturer of motion and control equipment. In other words, PH is an industrial company, in an age where Internet, IT and services businesses are supposed to have rendered such enterprises as dinosaurs frozen in the ice age on the US economic scene. PH must not have been properly notified of their impending doom. Consider the statistics since 2001:
A New Foundation For The Shifting Sands Of The Communications Industry: Business Process Management
This Solution Brief highlights the issues facing both communications equipment providers and telecommunications carriers as they strive to deal with a changing competitive landscape of hybrid players, legacy systems and customer churn. Case studies from the biggest and best telecommunications companies show you how IT and Business have used BPM (Business Process Management) disciplines and technologies to streamline mission-critical processes and gain competitive advantage.
BPMS Watch: What if BPMN Were a Modeling Language?
Lacking support for fundamental concepts like human tasks and subprocesses, BPEL has become a favorite whipping boy of BPM vendors and consultants. But for all its faults, BPEL enjoys something that BPMN advocates can only dream about: an XML storage and interchange format that makes sense. It’s often said that BPEL is an XML language not a graphical notation, but the reality is that graphical BPEL design tools all use more or less the same notation, based on a simple mapping to native BPEL language constructs: Receive, Reply, Invoke, etc.
Is the Business Architecture Really Necessary?
While attendance, interest and participation in the BPMInstitute.org Business Architecture (BA) conferences are increasing, the attendees are asking a very fair and tough question: Is the Business Architecture really necessary? While seeking to understand and analyze the purpose of a Business Architecture, they are also asking about its necessity. Instead of just debating this issue, let’s try a couple of experiments and look at the results!
In the Agile Enterprise, Responsiveness Trumps Efficiency
The global economy is changing the rules in the game of business. For the last 200 years or so the most important consideration was efficiency; producing products for the lowest cost. But now we are all part of a global labor force and there are countries in Europe and North America that can no longer compete on efficiency alone because their labor costs (also known as our salaries) are so high compared to labor costs in countries like China, India, Russia, Poland, the Philippines, etc.
What is to be done? Will the economic boom for some countries be economic doom for others?
Case Study: BPM Drives Enterprise Agility
Hy Cite is a dual-facet organization that produces premium house wares, soccer equipment and apparel, and offers consumer financing services for direct-selling companies. Since implementing BPM, Hy Cite’s revenues and net earnings increased four fold, receivables and distributors increased three-fold, while total revenues tripled. The number of Full-time Employees (FTEs) increased 50% in management, 400% in programming/development, 100% in systems analysis, 200% in system administration, and 300% in information technology.
COMPASS Program Case Study
What is COMPASS?
COMPASS stands for “Creating Opportunities, Methods and Practices to Secure Safety.” It is a 5-year, $130 million process improvement and legacy system modernization program for the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA). FMCSA was established as a separate administration within the federal Department of Transportation in early 2000 pursuant to the Motor Carrier Safety Improvement Act of 1999.
The Process Life Cycle and Project Life Cycle Partnership
In the past, large IT projects would deploy new applications or upgrades and be considered failures not because the technology failed but because the impact to the business wasn’t fully understood or even considered as a criteria for the success of the project. Similarly, many process improvement initiatives would meet the same fate because they focused on the execution of business tasks and, if technology was considered at all, it was identified for a potential and separate future IT project. Unfortunately by the time the project was approved and the funds allocated the original
The Shifting Sands of the Communications Industry: How Carriers and Equipment Providers Use BPM to Stay Grounded and Win
Today’s telecommunications industry is virtually unrecognizable from the one of ten, five, even one year ago! The convergence of voice, data, content, and mobile services has created a communications mega-industry, where traditional telecom providers are vying against non-traditional competitors for market—and mindshare.
It’s a zero-sum game and the winner gets the customers and market share.
Today’s telecommunications industry is virtually unrecognizable from the one of ten, five, even one year ago! The convergence of voice, data, content, and mobile services has created a communications mega-industry, where traditional telecom providers are vying against non-traditional competitors for market—and mindshare.
The Importance of Undoing the As-Is State
Some years ago, a prominent computer chip maker declared that only those computers containing its chips inside were allowed on the premises. This policy was instituted one afternoon after a senior vice president strolled through his executive offices, noticed that virtually every desktop machine was a brand containing chips from “the other guy”, and so he threw an executive-style fit, which generated a drastic and costly “correction.”
Case Study: Business-Aligned Decision Framework Approach Provides a “Disruptive” Enabler for Dramatic Improvements in Business Process Management
Gary DeGregorio has worked in business and engineering process, methods, and tool-applied research for over 22 years. His work focuses on requirements and decision management, decision-based processes, innovation and collaboration frameworks, and knowledge/information architectures, as well as strategic methods and tools for roadmapping. DeGregorio is an Associate of the Motorola Science Advisory Board (SABA), one of the highest awards for technical achievement within Motorola.
The Productivity Paradigm-Shift: Enabling Business Efficiency through Collaborative BPM
Today, most BPM tools see human task as an end point – making an accept, reject, or delegate decision. The system is oblivious to what that person needs to arrive at a decision – who he needs to talks to, the documents he needs to reviews, the people he must email. In order to capture the totality of the process lifecycle, BPM must enable collaboration – not just in in aligning business and IT goals and deliverables during the development cycle, but with functions that capture and promote end-user productivity.
BPMS Watch: In Praise of Integration-Centric BPMS
It would be easy to come away from a BPM conference thinking the primary objective of business process management is improving human work – making it faster and more productive, less error-prone, more compliant, more flexible and adaptive to changing business needs, and more measurable in support of performance targets. And for many business processes, those are indeed BPM’s goals, both as a management discipline and as a software technology.
BPM, SOA, and EA are Converging
Many strategic initiatives today are focused on enterprise architecture (EA) development, business process management (BPM) and service-oriented architecture (SOA) development.
Do Things Really Change?
Is anything really new?
The fashion world, television and the IT landscape all have something in common. It often seems like we are seeing reruns: centralize versus decentralize; market proliferation versus market consolidation, privacy versus security, and standards versus innovations. Now, every time you turn around you hear about SOA. Does SOA really matter, or is it just another hard to explain three letter acronym?
First, I believe it does really matter, and that it is different.
Is anything really new?
