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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?
Becoming A Process-Focused Organization
Process management is comprised of end-to-end documentation, improvement (from radical to continuous), and management of organizational processes. Decisions are data-driven and based on customer satisfaction metrics, quality, timeliness, and cost. The responsibility of monitoring process performance and facilitating process changes belongs to a process advisor or manager. Administering processes is dramatically enabled by business process management technology.
Corporate Process Due-Diligence should include Business Agility
Business Agility is the ability to run profitably in changing economic conditions by producing high-quality, customer-focused goods and services. Theorists in business management and technology agree the key to achieving agility is in a focus on business processes.
For instance, In the February, 2007 issue of Harvard Business Review, “How Managers’ Everyday Decisions Create or Destroy Your Companies Strategy”, Bower and Gilbert describe intransigence of sales personnel at dealerships for a leading automotive manufacturer.
Seeing the World from a Process Point of View
Simon Hayward is chief of research for software and a Gartner fellow emeritus. With an interest in the relationship of business processes, software applications and software infrastructure, he oversees research in the software sector and develops integrative activities between research areas. He will deliver the featured analyst keynote address at the Business Process Management Conference in June in San Francisco.
Leveraging Data Models to Create a Unified Business Vocabulary for Service Oriented Architectures
Early SOA initiatives generally focused on defining business services first, and worrying about the data later. Today, we acknowledge that services and data must work in concert to produce coherent and well-aligned service architectures. The unifying elements in the architecture include a shared definition of business information structure, validity and vocabulary – in other words, the metadata.
Business Unit Focused Business Analyst or Technical Systems (IT) Focused Business Analyst: What are the differences?
Companies have long understood the need for project management; but project based business analysis has always been an open item for discussion and displacement. Businesses are beginning to see the value in having the expertise that a business analyst can bring to a project. However, these same organizations continue to struggle with determining the appropriate area of the company that will serve as the best fit for the business analyst (BA) role, in part due to a misunderstanding of the differences between a business unit focused business analyst (BFBA) and a technical sy
Leaping into the Next Generation of BPM
Molson Coors is the fifth largest global brewer with a combined annual volume of 60 million hectoliters and net sales of more than $6 billion. It leads market share in Canada and in the UK with growth profile in the US and emerging market opportunities in Brazil. Molson Coors employs 15,000 employees worldwide in 18 breweries serving 40 brands.
Coors turned to BPM in 2001 before the merger with Molson to develop a business architecture that would organize its business processes in a structured way.
Nimble Banking: Leveraging BPM, BR and SOA in Banking
Keeping customers, attracting new customers, rapidly delivering new products, providing consistent service through multiple channels (branch office, internet, ATM, telephone) and meeting regulatory requirements is a daunting pursuit of retail bankers. This demanding proposition requires the continual development of a portfolio differentiated financial services, which requires a significant investment in transforming IT.
Personalized Insurance: Leveraging BPM, BR and SOA in Insurance
Competitive pressures, poor investment returns, substantial claims payouts, demanding customers and independent agents, new regulatory challenges and complicated processes have led to increased complexity in insurance operations. Insurance professionals must be flexible and move quickly to respond to the conditions in their industry and achieve the three strategic objectives necessary to thrive: delivering new services, increasing customer loyalty and achieving a lower cost structure.
A Balanced Perspective
Many firms are just doing isolated one-time process improvements with little consideration to deploying the sustainable improvement and management of their large, cross-functional business processes. They don’t realize that the fundamental concepts underlying BPM are all about customer focus and value creation and that requires a different leadership mindset.
Process Discovery – The First Step of BPM
How do you pick the process that best addresses corporate objectives, current problems and feasibility concerns?
Every company considering an investment in Business Process Management (BPM) practices and technology asks this question. This is called process discovery. It is a crucial capability for your organization. Learn about the challenges of process discovery, what capabilities you need to develop and how Lombardi’s Blueprint can help you get started with BPM.
How Much Will Your SOA Cost?
I’m consulting now…at the project and strategy levels…and thus finding that a lot of real work needs to be done to get SOAs up-and-running. For most organizations, the first step of their SOA project is to figure out how much this SOA will cost. Thus, you can budget appropriately and obtain the funding.
It’s a good first step, but most organizations that want to build an SOA don’t have a clue how to approach the cost estimation process. In many cases, they grossly underestimate the cost of their SOA, hoping their bosses and accountants won’t notice later.
