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.

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?

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.

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.

In the past, large IT projects would deploy new applications or upgrades and be considered failures not because the technology failed but because the impact to the business wasn’t fully understood or even considered as a criteria for the success of the project. Similarly, many process improvement initiatives would meet the same fate because they focused on the execution of business tasks and, if technology was considered at all, it was identified for a potential and separate future IT project. Unfortunately by the time the project was approved and the funds allocated the original

It would be easy to come away from a BPM conference thinking the primary objective of business process management is improving human work – making it faster and more productive, less error-prone, more compliant, more flexible and adaptive to changing business needs, and more measurable in support of performance targets. And for many business processes, those are indeed BPM’s goals, both as a management discipline and as a software technology.