Articles

The Four Dimensions of the Business Architecture

Author(s):

Ralph Whittle

Enterprise Business Architect, Independent Consultant

The early beginnings of Business Architecture (BA) development used a business/function process model of the enterprise. This type of model illustrates the typical functional groupings of a business. These groups are further placed into two categories: Primary, which directly relate to the business of the Enterprise, (e.g. Customer Care), and Supporting, which enable the primary functionality, (e.g. Finance). Each functional group contains several unique business processes (e.g. in Finance, there are corporate accounting and asset management).

Using Staff Frustration to Improve a Process

Author(s):

Daniel Madison

Principal, Value Creation Partners

The frustration lens diagnoses the process from the perspective of those who work in it. The purpose is to learn what frustrations people experience when doing their work. You can ask people about these as you create the as-is-flowchart, or you can complete the chart first and ask later. Use the first method if the process is relatively short and there aren’t many frustrations.

The Business Architecture Center of Excellence

Author(s):

William Ulrich

President, TSG, Inc.

Business architecture enables an enterprise to turn business strategy into operational reality through the visualization and resolution of cross-functional inefficiencies and ineffectiveness. Consider the following scenario found in a US federal government agency....

Model to Execution: Guidelines for Converting a Use Case into BPMN

Author(s):

Tom DeBevoise

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

Organizations improving performance and aligning or reengineering processes endeavor to define their core business processes. They often use ‘happy days’ use case scenarios, or they create workflow diagrams in Visio. A ‘happy-day path’ only considers flows that occur when no exceptions are encountered. So, someday the team needs to visit ‘unhappy’ branches. Converting the use case or work-flow into the formal needs of a business process model can be challenging. So I offer these simple guidelines.

The Role of Business Architecture in the Coming Meltdown of Web 2.0

Author(s):

BPMInstitute.org

Business Relationship Manager - Product Lifecycle Management, Chevron Corporation

The amount of information on the World Wide Web is enormous beyond belief.

SOA And Mashups – What to use when

Author(s):

Raj Ramesh

Chief Story Teller, TopSigma

Say I am a business manager at an insurance company and my job is to recruit insurance agents. These agents in turn meet the insurance needs of their customers and build their own customer base. If an agent does well, the company does well. With a finite amount of recruiting dollars available, I need to be able to make the best decisions on where to focus my recruiting efforts.

BPMS Watch: Process Model Portability: Does Anyone Care?

Author(s):

BPMInstitute.org

Business Relationship Manager - Product Lifecycle Management, Chevron Corporation

Among the numerous virtues of BPMN, foremost is vendor independence, giving process modelers many tools to choose from, all describing processes using the same shapes and semantics. That’s huge, since without low-cost (or even free) tools you’ll never establish a culture of process broadly throughout the business. Occasionally, however, a student in my BPMN training will ask the embarrassing question, “So that means I can take the models I create in this class and import them into the BPMN tool we use in our company…

Integrating Testing and Training with the Process Life Cycle

Author(s):

BPMInstitute.org

Business Relationship Manager - Product Lifecycle Management, Chevron Corporation

Earlier this year I wrote an article outlining the critical relationship between the Process Life Cycle and the Project Life Cycle. This relationship, when treated as a partnership of equals, can improve the success of both the technical and the process improvement interests. In addition to the Project Life Cycle, there are two other important relationships that should be considered when developing or enhancing a business process.

SOA Watch: SOA and Adapters

Author(s):

BPMInstitute.org

Business Relationship Manager - Product Lifecycle Management, Chevron Corporation

Once upon a time, whenever we connected application A to application B, or applications A and B to an integration server, we had to interact with those applications using some sort of interface that (hopefully) the applications provided.

What is a Process?

Author(s):

BPMInstitute.org

Business Relationship Manager - Product Lifecycle Management, Chevron Corporation

For years my partners and I at the Performance Design Lab have defined a business process as “a sequence of steps or tasks that produce a valued output”, or words to that effect. Every definition of process I have seen in the books and articles written by others use pretty much the same verbiage. Nothing wrong with the definition – it does describe what a process consists of – but it does nothing to indicate some of the key principles of process design, nor does it do more than hint at why processes are so important (i.e., “valued output”).

So we have come to modify our definition