In today’s market place of continuous change, enterprise agility is the ubiquitous fuel for continuous competitive advantage. But agile enterprises demand not only agile infrastructures and systems, but agile processes as well. Clearly, service based architecture has emerged as an enterprise-wide architectural blueprint and agile development is shaping up as a formidable development methodology.

Business Architecture Survey Results
In December 2007 through January 2008, the BPM Institute surveyed the Business Architecture Bulletin list to gain insights into the nature of business architecture work. The survey’s goal was to identify who is performing business architecture work, ascertain related goals, determine the nature of the work being performed and identify service and tool preferences.

Capturing Ideas
For fun, I recently googled the aphorism, “Good ideas are a dime a dozen”. There were over 3,400 hits. This old cliche is on too many people’s minds! Most of the occurrences I looked at were fairly recent, from business or marketing articles, and most continued on with a “but …” line that suggested that what is really rare and valuable is the agency or person who can bring an idea to realization.
Clearly, there is recognition that getting a glimmer of an idea is not enough.

Taking the Process Map to the Next Level – The Visual Analysis Map
What if you could create a visual that showed your data gathering, problem solving and analytical thinking analysis all in one place? What if you could have a map which would enable you to talk to stakeholders and executives and get their input on problems, time delays, and key quality issues? That’s what the Visual Analysis Map can do for you and your team.
Bioteams: The Next Frontier of Business Process Management
Support for collaboration is the hot discussion in BPM circles these days, and for good reason. It’s the human-to-human interactions of teams that count when it comes to innovation and agility. The age of the monolithic, vertically integrated company is long gone. In the interconnected world of the 21st century, you and everyone you work with must be able to function in and through internal and multi-company teams, and must also grasp what the latest concept of “team” really means.

BPM can be a Life Saver in the Midst of Grey Wave
Like it or not, we are about to see an unprecedented brain drain when the baby boomer generation heads towards the retirement sidelines. This phenomenon
is known as the “Grey Wave.” Experts are saying that no amount of hiring and/or labor importation will be able to cope with the amount and pace of retirements. This means that large increases in productivity are not optional, but mandatory.

SOA Watch: When Considering Services…
Services are the building blocks of SOA, and like building blocks of a house or a building, the quality will define the value of the finished product. In this case, the SOA itself.

The Business Architecture Life Cycle
In the realm of Information Technology, a commonly-employed software development methodology is the Systems Development Life Cycle, usually abbreviated SDLC, which describes a systematic, if generalized approach to developing and deploying new software. While details can vary, the steps typically include analysis, design, implementation, testing, and maintenance.

BPMS Watch: BPM Hall of Fame
Is there a BPM Hall of Fame? I don’t think so, but there should be, to recognize the true pioneers and innovators in the field. BPM’s core ideas and technologies come from several divergent fields, and my list would include those who first introduced them – ideas about what a business process is, and what managing one really means. Thinking about who should be in a BPM Hall of Fame is a fun exercise, and you might it helpful in framing your own views.
BPM Supports a New Way of Working – The Dynamics of Swarming
What makes a flock of birds or a school of fish move as if they are a single entity? What makes them all suddenly rise, turn and accelerate at the same time? There is something else at work here than just a leader bird or a captain fish telling all the others what to do. This quick coordinated behavior from large groups of individuals is called swarming.