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BPMS Watch: BPM Embraces Collaboration
BPM benefits such as enhanced operational efficiency and compliance derive largely from the way it breaks down routine office work into specific tasks performed in a prescribed order according to explicit rules. The process design assigns each task to some role or group, while administrators manage the mapping of individuals to those roles and groups at runtime. This allows the BPMS process engine to route tasks to users in the prescribed sequence and notify appropriate managers and supervisors when those tasks are overdue.
The Pivotal Role of the Business Analyst in a Service-Oriented World
As more organizations incorporate Web Services into their strategic plans, the value of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) continues to grow. The Business Analyst will play a pivotal role in an organization’s success when they transition to SOA projects – a move that can drive significant business advantage. But, the Business Analyst role is one that must be expanded through new SOA skills to ensure that companies realize the results and ROI they expect.
Business vs. IT
This paper focuses on solving the dissociation between business processes and business requirements. While a projects must have good analysis, pragmatic risk assessment, a sound business case and reliable measurement tools if it is to have any hope of succeeding, business processes and business requirements are inextricably linked to a company’s vision and the project itself. Closely coupling business processes and the business requirements of a new application are not only desirable, they are inherently critical. Business software applications are tools to aid business processes.
Myths of Methodology
This paper is about why software development methodologies don’t work and why they sometimes do, including a few ideas about how to turn around your own methodology efforts. Often, methodologies don’t work because managers and IT professionals hold onto beliefs, practices and organizational paradigms that no longer fit the modern software development organization and the processes that help support it.
SOA Demonstrates Broad Momentum
Service-oriented architecture (SOA) is gaining broad momentum throughout business applications that support all aspects of business operations, according to The Yankee Group 2005 U.S. Enterprise SOA Survey (see Figure 1). The survey of 306 IT executives...
Next-Generation BPM: Picture Complex and Self-Repairing Processes in an SOA World
Today’s BPM users are asking for a seamless, expanded definition of BPM, now commonly referred to as BPMS, or BPM suites. Ironically, it is within this vision of horizontal expansion that something even more dramatic is taking place. Business Activity Monitoring has predictably given way to Business Event Management, which, teamed with BPM in an SOA world enables complex processing and process self-repair.
Implementing Process Change in State Government
DMV – Three letters that can strike fear in any man or woman’s heart, a term that all too often brings images of long lines and broken processes and red tape. State Departments of Motor Vehicles typically face many challenges: with lower budgets, staff reductions and increasing numbers of drivers and vehicles being registered. They face the challenge of continuing to provide quality services to the public while meeting increasingly challenging mandates from federal, state and local governments.
Applied Creativity and Value Discipline: The Innovation Cycle – Part 1
Part 1: Why innovation is such a challenge in a corporate setting
Are we ready for a new C-Level Executive: The CBA?
During lunch at the September 2006 BPMInstitute and BrainStorm Group conference in Washington, DC, Tom Dwyer and Eugene Lee posed an interesting question to the conference attendees. Who will fill the position of Business Architect for the enterprise? Almost immediately, hands were raised and one respondent suggested that an experienced and seasoned Enterprise Architect (EA) practitioner should fill the role. Another suggested a well rounded business operations person with an MBA. Tom allowed some discussion but moved off the topic in the interest of time.
What Innovation Is
Howard Smith, Co-author of the landmark book, “Business Process Management: The Third Wave” has penned a definitive white paper on how companies develop operating systems for innovation. This is one paper anyone interested in business innovation cannot miss.
Teaching Your Partner to do the Business Rules Dance
You can think of the Business Rules Movement as the catalyst that makes a bunch of other techniques and technologies finally gel. On the business side there’s been the movement towards formalized process modeling with the associated entity modeling typical of the IDEF 1.x style approach; and a focus on metrics-based process improvement particularly via TQM and Six Sigma. On the IT side there been the whole Business Process Management framework implementation with the associated Business Process Monitoring pieces to provide streams of real-time metrics.
Case Study: Key Learnings From CAM-I’s Process Based Management Case Study Series
Patrick Dowdle is the Program Director of the ATI/CAM-I Process Based Management (PBM) Program, which is conducting leading edge research in Process Based Management, including the recently published CAM-I book, “Process Based Management: A Foundation Of Business Excellence.” He is also the President and a Process Architect with Process Advantage, which focuses on helping organizations improve customers services.
Pat Dowdle’s main message is about Process Based Management (PBM), which is different from BPM. PBM is about how businesses supply services and products to customers. The problem, according to Dowdle, is that most organizations do not understand or manage their processes, or they do so in isolation so they don’t really manage their products and services. Dowdle maintains that it isn’t enough to have a BPM initiative. If you don’t understand process-based management, your BPM effort will probably fail.
Goal-oriented BPM
Goal-oriented BPM is an approach that makes the development and identification of business processes a more intuitive and natural activity. It uses familiar organizational concepts such as goals, and the steps taken to achieve those goals (sub-goals), provides granular visibility into goal progression, and allows processes to intelligently change course as events unfold. When managed and deployed appropriately, goal-oriented BPM delivers significant benefits, including:
A Whiff of Revolution in the Air
Several of the contributing authors to the exciting new book “The Business Rule Revolution” meet to discuss their view on the state of the revolution. Each provides an overview of their contribution to this anthology of real-world experiences.
Barbara von Halle: Barbara is the primary author of the seminal text “The Business Rules Approach” that serves as the foundation for Business Rule Practices today.
Real World SOA: SOA for Supply-Chain and Logistics
VIP Auto, Inc. has been using Avorcor’s SOA4SCL (SOA for Supply-Chain and Logistics) to modernize their existing warehouse and distribution capabilities and to prepare their organization for integration with a new host system.
Business Process and Business Enterprise Architectural Modeling
If you don’t have the time to listen to this issue’s Featured Archive, this article serves as an executive summary of the presentation, “Business Process and Business Enterprise Architectural Modeling” given by Ken Orr, President and Founder of The Ken Orr Institute. Business Process and Enterprise Architecture are often approached from different directions. This presentation discusses integrating BP and EA initiatives using the Business Enterprise Architectural Modeling approach driven from the business strategy.
Ken Orr is the founder and chief scientist for The Ken Orr Institute, a business technology research organization. He is an internationally known and recognized expert on technology transfer, software engineering, information architecture, and data warehousing.
Will SOA Reduce the Need for Developers?
If you think SOAs will reduce the need for developers, you’re dead wrong.
There is a lot of talk about how SOA will significantly lower the need for developers; thus the savings of SOA. This will be accomplished through the promise of reuse that’s driving many toward the SOA light. However, I’m not sure we’ll see a reduction in development with the advent of SOA, but perhaps a redistribution of talent in the longer term. At the end of the day, the reason for leveraging SOA is agility. Reuse and development savings are a secondary benefit, if they happen at all.
BPM And SOA Are Not A Panacea
Integration Complexity
This business of running a business has become a lot more complicated and much of it can be attributed to the use of information technology. Technology has indeed fueled growth through automation and increased efficiency, but it has also added a management nightmare in the form of disparate systems that are unable to talk to each other. Now we have whole new specialties (like ITIL and COBIT) devoted to managing IT services, assets and infrastructures. How did we end up in this quagmire?
BPMS Watch: Fulfilling the Promise of Process Simulation
A central promise of BPMS is that process improvement can be projected and optimized in advance of implementation, using process modeling’s simulation capability. By including simulation analysis, process modeling tools can not only define the structure of the proposed to-be process but project its expected ROI. For that reason, nearly all BPMS offerings today include some form of simulation tool. But are these tools really fulfilling the promise? Not yet, in my view. Let’s look at what they do, and what’s still missing.
First, let’s deconstruct the promise.
From Specifications to Implementation: the Importance of Workflow Patterns
In the early stages of a BPM project a business might create a written specification and planning level diagram of the project target process. Yet there is much work that must happen to translate these into a functioning business process. The challenge to the process implementer is to see the shape of the business processes based on an oral or written description of the process. An able implementer should perform a lexical analysis of the business requirement to develop a technically accurate assessment. A process solution can break when there is a weak implementation of requirements.
