Articles

The Compliance Journey – Balancing Risk and Controls with Business Improvement

Author(s):

BPMInstitute.org

Business Relationship Manager - Product Lifecycle Management, Chevron Corporation

Vince Sumpter has over 20 years of experience in Performance Management, data warehousing, and related areas and sees a synergy between process management, performance management, and controls transformation. The new regulatory environment demands compliance, but most of the present efforts are manual and specific only to the rules with little regard to how the changes could improve the business. Sumpter sees process, performance, and controls all coming together to give new value to the enterprise.

Sumpter says there is a lot of buzz now about Sarbanes Oxley (S-O).

BPMS Watch: Standardizing Management of Process Performance

Author(s):

BPMInstitute.org

Business Relationship Manager - Product Lifecycle Management, Chevron Corporation

I recently attended an event where experienced BPM vendors, analysts, academics, and user organizations came to discuss what needs to come next in terms of technical standards, software capabilities, and overall business value from business process technology. The event was hosted by OMG, the standards organization behind the Business Process Modeling Notation standard used for process modeling and, increasingly, for business-driven process design.

Doing Business Architecture

Author(s):

Ken Orr

Founder & Chief Scientist, The Ken Orr Institute

It is hard for your organization to have an agile organization these days if your IT systems and infrastructure aren’t. Enterprise Architecture and specifically Business Architecture is aimed at helping organizations become truly agile.

A couple of years ago I wrote an article entitled “The 3 faces of Enterprise Architecture”.

BPM is Art as Well as Science

Author(s):

BPMInstitute.org

Business Relationship Manager - Product Lifecycle Management, Chevron Corporation

The release of the Academy Award nominations last January might seem to have little to do with business process management. But it does. In many ways, movies are the quintessential process industry.

Changing Perceptions – How EII Missed the Boat on SOA

Author(s):

BPMInstitute.org

Business Relationship Manager - Product Lifecycle Management, Chevron Corporation

In the technology world, there is a lot to be said about perception, and how perception defines your reality. You can perceive a market one way, only to change your point of view slightly and realize that the real target market for a class of technologies is quite different from where those technologies are actually being sold. Unfortunately, that change of perception often occurs too late to make a difference. A perfect example of this phenomenon is Enterprise Information Integration, or EII. EII is a specific segment of the data integration market that was gaining some re

Is RETE Necessary for Business Rules – Why you should care

Author(s):

Tom DeBevoise

Co-Author of The Microguide to Process Modeling in BPMN 2.0, www.tomdebevoise.com

Many BRMS vendors, especially the leaders Fair Isaac and ILOG, consider their implementation of the RETE algorithm a critical part of their product offering. Yet you might not understand what RETE is and why it can be either useful or unnecessary, depending on the rules problem domain. So what is RETE?

The RETE algorithm was developed to improve evaluation performance with large knowledge or fact sets. For example, a diagnostic expert system might describe many signs and symptoms for the diagnosis of a condition. Because of the diagnosis, an action may be taken.

Analysis: Isn’t that for smart people?

Author(s):

BPMInstitute.org

Business Relationship Manager - Product Lifecycle Management, Chevron Corporation

“Analysis is the difficult part of a business improvement project”. “Analysts are really smart people that are hyper intelligent” and “analysis can not be trained”. Those are some of the preconceptions project teams have to fear the analysis work that needs to be done on a process improvement project.

None of these are true. First of all many people confuse analysis with all those complex statistical tools that, for example, six sigma makes you believe you should apply.

Are All Rules Business Rules?

Author(s):

Neal McWhorter

President, Strategic Value Partners

The Business Rules movement has begun the transition from being a niche approach to entering the mainstream of organizations’ project techniques. Where once organizations saw only business processes and requirements, they now also see business rules. In fact, it’s tempting to see everything as business rules. In the midst of the movement’s first encounter with fame and fortune, it’s a good time to ask what the real value proposition is for business rules and whether everything that is potentially a rule should be treated as a business rule.

Is Your Business Process Model Earning Its Keep?

Author(s):

BPMInstitute.org

Business Relationship Manager - Product Lifecycle Management, Chevron Corporation

Sandra Lusk has over 20 years experience in systems design and development working with utility, transportation, logistics, insurance and banking organizations in the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Wales. She is also a certified Project Management Professional (PMP) and is currently President of the Association for Business Process Management Professionals for the Portland Chapter.

Lusk says a process model is a vehicle for understanding how things work.

SOA’s New Rules

Author(s):

BPMInstitute.org

Business Relationship Manager - Product Lifecycle Management, Chevron Corporation

Remember the “eight second” rule. Back when Internet transactions were new, consumers attempting to purchase goods and services online were stymied by poor website performance. Service outages and brownouts occurred seemingly at random with no connection to the high availability of the underlying systems. Business managers lived in fear of service outages becoming news stories and crashing high-flying stock prices.

The issue was lack of visibility. Management systems only monitored specific parts of the infrastructure making up the tiered web applications.