Articles

Author(s):

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.

Asking and Answering the Right Questions About Certification

Author(s):

BPMInstitute.org

Business Relationship Manager - Product Lifecycle Management, Chevron Corporation

“Most certification today is pure ‘credentialism.’ It must begin to reflect our demand for excellence, not our appreciation of parchment.”

-William John Bennet

As president of ABPMP, I am often asked for my opinion about “certification” programs.

Case Study: Service Based Process Architecture

Author(s):

BPMInstitute.org

Business Relationship Manager - Product Lifecycle Management, Chevron Corporation

Linda Gurgone is the Lead Business Process Architect in Motorola’s Enterprise Architecture team.

The Role of SOA in Business / IT Architecture Alignment

Author(s):

William Ulrich

President, TSG, Inc.

Organizations have two universes in constant flux; business architectures and IT architectures. Now a third factor has entered the mix – services oriented architecture (SOA). As organizations seek to align business and IT architectures, SOA can play a key role in streamlining this process. This article discusses how SOA helps align business and IT architectures to deliver more effective, more efficient responses to ongoing business demands – on a transitional basis and over the long-term.

The Ins and Outs of Business Rules

Author(s):

BPMInstitute.org

Business Relationship Manager - Product Lifecycle Management, Chevron Corporation

In the previous article, Who, What and How of a Business analyst, we examined the role and responsibilities of an IT Business Analyst. In this article, we shall focus on the basic concepts of business rules. In the upcoming articles, we shall investigate what business rules mean to a Business Analyst and how they lead to the transformation into a Business Rules Analyst. A lot of research has been pursued by eminent experts in the field. In this article, we shall learn the basic principles of business rules.

BPMS Watch: BPM and SOA: Are the Communities Starting to Merge?

Author(s):

BPMInstitute.org

Business Relationship Manager - Product Lifecycle Management, Chevron Corporation

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

Author(s):

Raj Ramesh

Chief Story Teller, TopSigma

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?

Rules for the Masses

Author(s):

Brian Stucky

Managing Director, Business Decision Management, Allegiance Advisory Group

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.