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BPMS Watch: BPM and SOA: Are the Communities Starting to Merge?
Last fall in a column called “BPM and SOA: One Technology, Two Communities” I said that the big middleware vendors pushing the BPEL standard seemed to understand orchestration as a critical piece of the SOA story but had no clue what business process management is all about.
Backwards BPM – Start with the End
Introduction
If you are one of the do-it-yourself types and just completed your taxes, the IRS estimates that you probably spent about 44 hours preparing it. It’s no wonder that 80% of U.S. citizens believe that our tax code is too complex and has to be simplified. If you were in charge of fixing the tax mess, where would you start?
Achieving Decision Consistency Across the SOA-based Enterprise
A service-oriented architecture (SOA) provides businesses with the ability to rapidly deploy new applications and easily integrate with other component applications both inside and outside the organization. Yet while it provides a great deal of flexibility for business units and IT departments, an SOA also creates difficulty in managing the consistency of business decisions delivered through various applications.
Rules for the Masses
The wave of successful implementations, stories of agility and huge ROI, and the unparalleled need for rule-based systems has been well documented. The likelihood for this trend to continue was anticipated as far back as 2004 when Gartner suggested that “1 in 3 applications would employ some form of variable business rules by 2007.” Think about the prediction for a moment – 1 out of every 3 applications having variable business rules. That’s a staggering number.
8 Things Most People Misunderstand About SOAs
As I go from conference to conference speaking on the development of SOAs I’m always surprise to hear how much people don’t understand about this concept. Perhaps it is the marketing engines around the many vendors grabbing land in this space, or perhaps it’s how SOAs are explained in the main stream IT press. No matter how you got it wrong, it’s time to get it right.
Number One: Service-Oriented Architectures are a new concept.
Not really.
Process Management Approach Leads to Competitive Government
Five years ago, telecommunications companies operating in Florida faced a baffling array of taxes levied at the local level. Each municipality and local governmental entity had their own tax tables and methods of collection. “As the U.S.
Interview with Brett Champlin: Chicago Preview
I spoke with Brett Champlin recently and asked him about the upcoming BrainStorm Chicago Conference(s) and what is new for 2006.
Rules are from Mars and Processes are from Venus
Over the years, businesses have sought ways to make their systems more extensible and flexible. In support, two fundamentally different approaches emerged for software developers. The two approaches are now commonly identified as Business Process Management (BPM) and Business Rules (BR). BPM typically directed workflows, while BR guided decisions. Driven by a need for greater agility and enterprise-wide applicability, businesses have started to meld the two approaches.
Problems Implementing a Balanced Scorecard
There is really nothing wrong with the concept of Balanced Scorecard. The main problem is that it does not provide practical guidance for deployment, and some executives view it as a “quick fix” that can easily be installed in their organizations. Implementing a balanced metrics system is an evolutionary process, not a one-time task that can be quickly checked off as “completed”. If executives do not recognize this from the beginning and fail to commit to the long term, then the organization will realize disappointing results. However, some approaches (e.g. Rummler-Brache) allow for a rapid start to the metrics system evolution.
Here are some of the key issues I have seen over the past several years that can cause a Balanced Scorecard initiative to fail:
Poorly Defined Metrics
The Seven Deadly Sins of Process Management – A How-To Guide for Success
All the current industry studies point to the need for streamlined business process and improving and simplifying process is at the top of most CEO’s strategic and technical agenda. The reality is that making process work for your people is the key to competitive advantage and business survival. Yet most organizations’ process improvement initiatives fail or are paralyzed before they start for a variety of reasons – unclear definition, inconsistent or non-existent business requirements, lack of sponsorship. The result?
Bringing Analytics into Processes Using Business Rules
As more and more companies adopt Business Process Management Systems (BPMS) to automate key business processes, they are also seeing the value of enhancing this technology with Business Rules Management Systems (BRMS). When processes rely on complex business decisions, it makes more and more sense to use business rules to automate these decisions. Not only are business rules better for delivering clarity and agility in decision-making, the use of a BRMS allows rules to be shared across processes, across BPMSs and between a BPMS and other implementation platforms.
SOA Maturity Model: Compass on the SOA Journey
As we start planning our Service-Oriented Architectures, we are faced with a host of decisions such as: Where to start? How should the architecture be built? What gaps exist within the current architecture and which technologies should be used to complete these gaps? Who should be involved and what training should they undergo to be prepared? These are some of the questions that one may ask at the outset.
Organizations are all inundated with information about SOA and the steps required to create, design and implement their SOA.
The “Living Enterprise Architecture” Journey
This session will address a method for managing a “Living Enterprise Architecture” (EA) over many years, based on a dynamic model, with content that is adaptable and growing as the business grows. The presentation will explain the importance of evolving and adapting an EA as the company and business modeling requirements grow.
Process Powered E-Gov: Does Your Agency Grok Process
Peter Fingar is an Executive Partner in the digital strategy firm, the Greystone Group. He is one of the industry’s noted experts on business process management and a practitioner with over 30 years of hands-on experience at the intersection of business and technology.
Peter Fingar is an Executive Partner in the digital strategy firm, the Greystone Group. He is one of the industry’s noted experts on business process management and a practitioner with over 30 years of hands-on experience at the intersection of business and technology. He is coauthor of the books: “The Real-Time Enterprise: Competing on Time”, just-released, and “Business Process Management: The Third Wave.”
Fingar began his presentation by pointing out that government and business are essentially similar in that they both:
Top 10 Reasons to Start BPM
Business process are coming under intense analysis and the need to understand process cycle times and process activities has many organizations embracing BPM Suites to deliver agile processes and drive cost savings across the enterprise. In fact, according to a recent CIO Insight study, BPM was ranked #1 by IT executives as the new technology that will make the most significant contribution to carrying out their company’s business strategy.
BPMS Report Series Overview: Understanding and Evaluating BPMS
The BPMS Report series is objective research, and provides information in depth, not just a simple checklist. The information is not based on a vendor-filled questionnaire, but gathered from product documentation, detailed technical briefings, and in some cases hands-on evaluation. It drills down beneath what is available from the vendor website and white papers to provide BPMS buyers a clear sense of what each product does well, and what it takes to do it.
BPMInstitute.org in conjunction with Bruce Silver Associates is pleased to offer The BPMS Report series, available for free to BPMInstitute.org members. These reports, written by Dr Bruce Silver, a leading independent BPM analyst, provide detailed evaluations of today’s leading Business Process Management Suites. Each 30-40 page report covers a single product in depth, loaded with diagrams and screenshots.
Process Documentation: What is End to End Anyway?
Documenting business processes has become an important initiative for many Organizations. The advantages of identifying, understanding and evaluating key business processes to determine their effectiveness in meeting business objectives has been recognized for some time. There are many methodologies and tools available today to aid in capturing information about how a business performs its day-to-day activities in order to achieve desired efficiencies and cost reductions. A common approach integral to most methodologies is to develop an end-to-end process flow.
Superpartners Increases Market Share Through SOA
Need to improve your business processes?
Superpartners leveraged SOA to improve their business process flexibility and enable more efficient integration of new customer records, thereby strengthening its market-leading position within Australia’s superannuation administration market.
Read the Gartner Case Study on how they did it.
Creating the “To Be” Process
One way of building To Be processes is to start with the ideal. The ideal stretches the organization to achieve results and execute far beyond the norm.
A powerful example of working from the ideal can be witnessed at Toyota. This company has a vision of an organization, process, machine, or person that:
Is defect free,
Can be delivered one request at a time,
Can be supplied on demand in the version that is required,
Can be delivered immediately,
Can be produced without wasting any materials, labor, energy, or other resources, and
Seeking the Upper Levels of the Rule Maturity Model
The KPI Rule Maturity Model (KPI RMM or RMM) has been a valuable management tool for organizations due to its simplicity and practicality. It provides a straight-forward, customizable business rule roadmap for organizations, charting success with a business rules...
