The other day I met with a team from a biomedical company to discuss setting up a Business Process Center of Excellence.
So… How Are You Going To Do That?
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Process Management Center of Excellence: Three Different Managerial Models
1. INTRODUCTION
Organizations have been searching different ways to improve their process performance. In search of excellence, some changes can be done in their managerial patterns and practices. As stated in my previous article [9], organizations have sought concepts and guidelines towards structuring a process center of excellence – PCE [3][5]. However, there is a need for choose which managerial model will guide the PCE design and implementation. This article presents three different managerial models.
Bottom Up / Top Down
For those who think about design and innovation, a relatively exotic argument has been going on for a while. The issue is about how best to structure the overall innovation process. Do you look first for the grand concept and then derive details for a full system solution? Or do you first seek individual insights about proposed system functions, environments and users, and then integrate ideas to an overall grand concept? In essence, should the creative process be one of deduction or induction?
Believable ROI for SOA
The SOA bandwagon has been trundling on for about ten years now and, if you believe Gartner (and why not?) SOA has passed the Peak of Inflated Expectations, dived to the Trough of Disillusionment, and is currently climbing the Slope of Enlightenment, on its way to the Plateau of Productivity. Industry estimates are that the journey for most companies is at least another 3 – 5 years. There are a small number of published success stories for SOA, and I am sure a large of unpublished horror stories.
Starting the Journey towards Process Based Management
At each BrainStorm BPM Conference, there is constant discussion around how organizations can improve their processes and move to a process focus. This is not new. A focus on the process dimension of work and process-centered improvement approaches has been on most organization’s radar screens since the 1993 release of Reengineering the Corporation by Michael Hammer and James Champy.
BPMS Watch: IBM Takes BPA to the Cloud
“Cool” is not a word I would normally apply to IBM’s BPM software, but for the new BPM BlueWorks offering announced at Impact this week, the term is appropriate. IBM bills BPM BlueWorks as a BPM community in the cloud, and it is that, plus a lot more. Actually, I think its greatest immediate impact could be to transform the market for business process analysis (BPA) tools.
Don’t Panic, It May be Simpler than you Think! Business Processes and Business Rules need not be Complex
Introduction:
Is SOA Governance a Confused Mess or Competitive Weapon?
The concern about SOA governance has ratcheted up as enterprises are aggressively looking for ways to get more value out of their existing services and resources (which is a perennial promise of IT solutions). In perusing the increasing commentary on the topic, it seems to me that SOA governance – what it is, its goals, its success requirements, its solution requirements, etc – is highly dependent on the perspective of the people involved.
The Business Architecture Ecosystem & Metamodel
Business architecture ties together a diverse ecosystem that represents your enterprise from a wide variety of perspectives. These include strategies, tactics and goals; business units; semantics and rules; capabilities, value chains and processes; projects and initiatives; and customers and suppliers. These business “artifacts”, along with the relationships among these artifacts, are the essence of business architecture. The complexity of most organizations is such that the business ecosystem cannot be readily visualized by the individuals managing and working within that ecosystem. By representing business artifacts in the business architecture metamodel, the ability to visualize complex business ecosystems becomes a reality.
Improving Business Performance
Performance, whether on a stage of theatre or business, is all about “making it happen”. Whether a Shakespearean tragedy or strategic business initiative, the performance of the organizational unit is what produces results. The math is simple: One, someone writes the play (strategic plan). Two, everyone in the group rehearses their parts (departmental and individual performance plans). And three, the troupe orchestrates individual performances into a unified group performance (execution of tactical plans providing goods and services to customers).
