The culture of an organization is a collection of habits, and habits have a powerful effect in business performance. Driving long-term business benefit and success with Business Process Management (BPM) often times requires companies to develop new and maintain existing habits.
As the BPM market has matured, it’s time to declare the era of specialized “fit-for-purpose” BPM Suites officially over. Not long ago buyers had to choose between one set of offerings for human-centric processes and a different set for integration-centric processes. Some offerings focused on business empowerment and others appealed to developers. Some BPMSs were firmly layered on SOA while others ignored SOA completely. Those days are gone. BPM buyers today don’t want to proliferate more BPMS islands across the enterprise. They want it all – BPM without boundaries – a single BPMS platform good for both human-centric and integration-centric processes, offering both business empowerment and rich developer tools, model-driven but on a powerful SOA foundation. And they want it to be based on open standards. Such things are expected in mainstream technology.A key enabler of these elevated buyer expectations is BPMN 2.0, the new process definition language standard from OMG.
Contributed by:John Moe, Principal Consultant,
J Moe Associates
By: John Moe, Head of Business Integration, TORI Global
One of the realities of SOA is that even in the most enthusiastic organisations not all services can or will be delivered by discrete services written in .NET or Java. For historical or pragmatic reasons, some of the functionality is likely to be delivered by business applications. These may be legacy systems that have been bought or developed pre-SOA. In many cases new applications have been brought in post-SOA, much to the architects' dismay.
BPM solutions have traditionally focused on improving business processes. The ability to predict how future activities in a process will be impacted by changes introduced in earlier stages is a dimension that BPM products have not addressed – until now. Adding the element of “time” to processes enables users to derive even greater value and control.
Contributed by:Lou DiToro, President,
Perfect Pages
Lou DiToro, Perfect Pages
Software firms like to tout their solutions as game changers. Few are. Most make only a modest impact on an organization’s business. Some don’t make any. The introduction of Smart BPM? 6 last March left many wondering about the impact this version of Pegasystems’ flagship product would have on the BPM industry. That’s hard to say right now, since the solution is relatively new.
Contributed by:Sumeet Vij, Assistant Vice President/ Chief Engineer,
Alion Science and Technology
By: Sumeet Vij, AIS Chief SOA Engineer at SAIC
Despite the widespread hype and reams of articles in technical and business journals alike, one question that still causes consternation amongst customers and practitioners alike is, “What is Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)”? If compiled, the answers to this question would fill copious volumes, but a consensus on an answer would be elusive. The reason the answer to this question doesn’t fit into the mold of a precise technical definition is due to the fact that SOA is mostly a business concept, hence it has to be defined in a business context.
Read this paper for expert insights on Business Process Management (BPM) from Toby Redshaw, the Group CIO that is leading a successful BPM program at Aviva plc, the world's fifth-largest insurance group. The remarks contained here were made during Toby's keynote presentation at the Lombardi Driven 2009 User Conference.
Contributed by:John Moe, Principal Consultant,
J Moe Associates
By: John Moe, Head of Business Integration, TORI Global
With the current hard times continuing to challenge IT budgets, I fear that all the good effort that is going into SOA currently could be squandered by ill-conceived or rushed outsourcing of the wrong services and wrong responsibilities at the wrong time to the few remaining IT service companies.
It is worth pointing out that the analyst community have consistently promoted SOA and outsourcing as being good bedfellows. There are two main models here:
Contributed by:Larry Goldberg, Managing Partner,
Knowledge Partners International LLP
By: Mark Monteleone, President, Monteleone Consulting, LLC
The purpose of this article is to provide project managers and business analysts an example of a hybrid system development life cycle (i.e., combination of agile and waterfall). Much discussion has transpired on the virtues of agile and waterfall approaches. Successes and failures can be claimed on both sides. Depending on the conditions of the project, advantages of one approach can be cited over the other. So enters the Hybrid SDLC that considers both approaches for all or portions of the project.
Contributed by:Shelley Sweet, Faculty Member, BPMInstitute.org and President,
i4 Process
By: Shelley Sweet, President, I4 Process Consulting
BPM is unique in offering so much promise while being so generally ignored. Even among companies that actively pursue some level of process improvement, only a few have a process based management structure. At least one reason for our tepid impact is our failure to model an enterprise-wide perspective in the initial launch of process improvement efforts. Gartner Inc. reports that in North America IT leads 42% of the BPM efforts and the Business leads 58% of the efforts.