Articles

The Other BPM: Being Productive in Meetings

Author(s):

Tammy Adams

Managing Partner, Chaosity, LLC

Have you ever been involved in a process improvement or redesign effort that didn’t require a meeting? Neither have I. Meetings are a necessary mechanism for exchanging information, confirming progress, creatively developing deliverables or solutions, making decisions, and growing as a team. In fact, a recent survey of corporate, government, defense, education and non-profit sectors show that we spend anywhere from 25% to 50% of our time in meetings (depending on our role and responsibilities).

The Strategic Promise of SOA

Author(s):

Tom Dwyer

Editorial Director and current Faculty Member, BPMInstitute.org

How are the business and IT environments changing to meet the challenges of today’s fast-paced global business landscape? They are both striving to become more agile. IT is being focused more on increasing profits, revenues and efficiency than just reducing costs. The business is examining ways to improve customer satisfaction and competitive advantage by collaborating throughout the value chain to deliver more innovative and competitive products and services.

Case Study: Flexible Analytics and Intelligent Monitoring In the ETL Process

Author(s):

BPMInstitute.org

Business Relationship Manager - Product Lifecycle Management, Chevron Corporation

Jay Yusko is a Consulting Engineer in Application Architectures for Information Resources. He has an MS in Artificial Intelligence from DePaul University and a Ph.D. in Artificial Intelligence from IIT. His research has been in the area of Ontologies and Ontology Inference Engines. Jay developed rule-based systems at Bell Laboratories, Navistar and United Airlines.

The Manager’s Role in Performance Support

Author(s):

BPMInstitute.org

Business Relationship Manager - Product Lifecycle Management, Chevron Corporation

In her book, Electronic Performance Support Systems, Gloria Gery popularized the notion of designing technology to assist workers in performing tasks, writing about the growing use and importance of electronic job aids such as online tutorials, directories, help menus, technical support and the like for users of laptop and desktop computers.

How Strategic is SOA at Your Company?

Author(s):

Tom Dwyer

Editorial Director and current Faculty Member, BPMInstitute.org

In an ideal world, companies would run their businesses as if their application portfolio were a single application. This application would take orders, generate shipping notices, and manage accounts receivable. It would also run manufacturing processes, automatically replenish materials as necessary, and exist as a Web-based front-end for customer interaction.

Ignoring Enterprise Governance & Paying the Price

Author(s):

William Ulrich

President, TSG, Inc.

Mention enterprise governance to executives and they typically respond with blank stares or indignant looks. One common response is to hand people the organization (“org”) chart, a set of boxes showing who reports to whom. Another response is to state that governance is a board level or senior management concern and we have no business broaching the topic. Org charts, sloganeering and political posturing are tangential to real enterprise governance because they have little to do with the intricate complexities, relationships, redundancies and cross-functional workings of an enterprise.

Six Sigma – For All of Us

Author(s):

Marvin Wurtzel

Faculty Member, BPMInstitute.org and Principal Consultant, Marvin M. Wurtzel & Associates, Inc.

The popularity of Six Sigma continues to increase within large corporations as a means of improving quality and reducing costs. As most readers will know by now, Six Sigma has been adopted by leading corporations such as GE, Sun Microsystems, Allied Signal, Bank of America, Motorola, etc.

In the current business environment, IT organizations have been less passionate in adopting Six Sigma methods. Many organizations feel that they can’t afford the luxury of a Six Sigma Program. There is a feeling that it intended for the product or service areas of the business.

Case Study: The Rules of Automated Underwriting: Blazing a New Trail for the Auto Club Group

Author(s):

BPMInstitute.org

Business Relationship Manager - Product Lifecycle Management, Chevron Corporation

Michael Koscielny has been using business rules technologies and strategic practices to transform and integrate the complex insurance underwriting process at Auto Club Group, formerly AAA Michigan. Koscielny has been utilizing business rules management software in the insurance industry for more than 20 years.

The sales and service initiative of the Auto Club Group identified the need for an automatic underwriting solution for new business functionality.

BPM Requires the Right BPMS

Author(s):

BPMInstitute.org

Business Relationship Manager - Product Lifecycle Management, Chevron Corporation

To many people, BPM is essentially a management discipline that replaces traditional organizational performance metrics around functional stovepipes with new ones based on cross-functional process thinking.

Driving Business Strategy with Business Rules

Author(s):

Larry Goldberg

Managing Partner, Knowledge Partners International LLP

Parker Hannifin Corporation (NYSE:PH) is one of the great corporations of America. Founded in 1924 (after Arthur Parker’s first start-up in 1918 foundered due to a truck accident destroying all its inventory), it has remained an independent manufacturer of motion and control equipment. In other words, PH is an industrial company, in an age where Internet, IT and services businesses are supposed to have rendered such enterprises as dinosaurs frozen in the ice age on the US economic scene. PH must not have been properly notified of their impending doom. Consider the statistics since 2001: