Articles

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:

BPMS Watch: What if BPMN Were a Modeling Language?

Author(s):

BPMInstitute.org

Business Relationship Manager - Product Lifecycle Management, Chevron Corporation

Lacking support for fundamental concepts like human tasks and subprocesses, BPEL has become a favorite whipping boy of BPM vendors and consultants. But for all its faults, BPEL enjoys something that BPMN advocates can only dream about: an XML storage and interchange format that makes sense. It’s often said that BPEL is an XML language not a graphical notation, but the reality is that graphical BPEL design tools all use more or less the same notation, based on a simple mapping to native BPEL language constructs: Receive, Reply, Invoke, etc.

Is the Business Architecture Really Necessary?

Author(s):

Ralph Whittle

Enterprise Business Architect, Independent Consultant

While attendance, interest and participation in the BPMInstitute.org Business Architecture (BA) conferences are increasing, the attendees are asking a very fair and tough question: Is the Business Architecture really necessary? While seeking to understand and analyze the purpose of a Business Architecture, they are also asking about its necessity. Instead of just debating this issue, let’s try a couple of experiments and look at the results!

In the Agile Enterprise, Responsiveness Trumps Efficiency

Author(s):

BPMInstitute.org

Business Relationship Manager - Product Lifecycle Management, Chevron Corporation

The global economy is changing the rules in the game of business. For the last 200 years or so the most important consideration was efficiency; producing products for the lowest cost. But now we are all part of a global labor force and there are countries in Europe and North America that can no longer compete on efficiency alone because their labor costs (also known as our salaries) are so high compared to labor costs in countries like China, India, Russia, Poland, the Philippines, etc.

What is to be done? Will the economic boom for some countries be economic doom for others?

Case Study: BPM Drives Enterprise Agility

Author(s):

BPMInstitute.org

Business Relationship Manager - Product Lifecycle Management, Chevron Corporation

Hy Cite is a dual-facet organization that produces premium house wares, soccer equipment and apparel, and offers consumer financing services for direct-selling companies. Since implementing BPM, Hy Cite’s revenues and net earnings increased four fold, receivables and distributors increased three-fold, while total revenues tripled. The number of Full-time Employees (FTEs) increased 50% in management, 400% in programming/development, 100% in systems analysis, 200% in system administration, and 300% in information technology.

COMPASS Program Case Study

Author(s):

BPMInstitute.org

Business Relationship Manager - Product Lifecycle Management, Chevron Corporation

What is COMPASS?

COMPASS stands for “Creating Opportunities, Methods and Practices to Secure Safety.” It is a 5-year, $130 million process improvement and legacy system modernization program for the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA). FMCSA was established as a separate administration within the federal Department of Transportation in early 2000 pursuant to the Motor Carrier Safety Improvement Act of 1999.