Articles

Are we ready for a new C-Level Executive: The CBA?

Author(s):

Ralph Whittle

Enterprise Business Architect, Independent Consultant

During lunch at the September 2006 BPMInstitute and BrainStorm Group conference in Washington, DC, Tom Dwyer and Eugene Lee posed an interesting question to the conference attendees. Who will fill the position of Business Architect for the enterprise? Almost immediately, hands were raised and one respondent suggested that an experienced and seasoned Enterprise Architect (EA) practitioner should fill the role. Another suggested a well rounded business operations person with an MBA. Tom allowed some discussion but moved off the topic in the interest of time.

Teaching Your Partner to do the Business Rules Dance

Author(s):

Neal McWhorter

President, Strategic Value Partners

You can think of the Business Rules Movement as the catalyst that makes a bunch of other techniques and technologies finally gel. On the business side there’s been the movement towards formalized process modeling with the associated entity modeling typical of the IDEF 1.x style approach; and a focus on metrics-based process improvement particularly via TQM and Six Sigma. On the IT side there been the whole Business Process Management framework implementation with the associated Business Process Monitoring pieces to provide streams of real-time metrics.

Case Study: Key Learnings From CAM-I’s Process Based Management Case Study Series

Author(s):

Pat Dowdle

Process Strategist, Process Strategy Group

Patrick Dowdle is the Program Director of the ATI/CAM-I Process Based Management (PBM) Program, which is conducting leading edge research in Process Based Management, including the recently published CAM-I book, “Process Based Management: A Foundation Of Business Excellence.” He is also the President and a Process Architect with Process Advantage, which focuses on helping organizations improve customers services.

Pat Dowdle’s main message is about Process Based Management (PBM), which is different from BPM. PBM is about how businesses supply services and products to customers. The problem, according to Dowdle, is that most organizations do not understand or manage their processes, or they do so in isolation so they don’t really manage their products and services. Dowdle maintains that it isn’t enough to have a BPM initiative. If you don’t understand process-based management, your BPM effort will probably fail.

Business Process and Business Enterprise Architectural Modeling

Author(s):

Ken Orr

Founder & Chief Scientist, The Ken Orr Institute

If you don’t have the time to listen to this issue’s Featured Archive, this article serves as an executive summary of the presentation, “Business Process and Business Enterprise Architectural Modeling” given by Ken Orr, President and Founder of The Ken Orr Institute. Business Process and Enterprise Architecture are often approached from different directions. This presentation discusses integrating BP and EA initiatives using the Business Enterprise Architectural Modeling approach driven from the business strategy.

Ken Orr is the founder and chief scientist for The Ken Orr Institute, a business technology research organization. He is an internationally known and recognized expert on technology transfer, software engineering, information architecture, and data warehousing.

Will SOA Reduce the Need for Developers?

Author(s):

BPMInstitute.org

Business Relationship Manager - Product Lifecycle Management, Chevron Corporation

If you think SOAs will reduce the need for developers, you’re dead wrong.

There is a lot of talk about how SOA will significantly lower the need for developers; thus the savings of SOA. This will be accomplished through the promise of reuse that’s driving many toward the SOA light. However, I’m not sure we’ll see a reduction in development with the advent of SOA, but perhaps a redistribution of talent in the longer term. At the end of the day, the reason for leveraging SOA is agility. Reuse and development savings are a secondary benefit, if they happen at all.

BPM And SOA Are Not A Panacea

Author(s):

Raj Ramesh

Chief Story Teller, TopSigma

Integration Complexity

This business of running a business has become a lot more complicated and much of it can be attributed to the use of information technology. Technology has indeed fueled growth through automation and increased efficiency, but it has also added a management nightmare in the form of disparate systems that are unable to talk to each other. Now we have whole new specialties (like ITIL and COBIT) devoted to managing IT services, assets and infrastructures. How did we end up in this quagmire?

BPMS Watch: Fulfilling the Promise of Process Simulation

Author(s):

BPMInstitute.org

Business Relationship Manager - Product Lifecycle Management, Chevron Corporation

A central promise of BPMS is that process improvement can be projected and optimized in advance of implementation, using process modeling’s simulation capability. By including simulation analysis, process modeling tools can not only define the structure of the proposed to-be process but project its expected ROI. For that reason, nearly all BPMS offerings today include some form of simulation tool. But are these tools really fulfilling the promise? Not yet, in my view. Let’s look at what they do, and what’s still missing.

First, let’s deconstruct the promise.

From Specifications to Implementation: the Importance of Workflow Patterns

Author(s):

Tom DeBevoise

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

In the early stages of a BPM project a business might create a written specification and planning level diagram of the project target process. Yet there is much work that must happen to translate these into a functioning business process. The challenge to the process implementer is to see the shape of the business processes based on an oral or written description of the process. An able implementer should perform a lexical analysis of the business requirement to develop a technically accurate assessment. A process solution can break when there is a weak implementation of requirements.

The Time Lens

Author(s):

Daniel Madison

Principal, Value Creation Partners

Time is a critical dimension of customer satisfaction and cost reduction. Getting products and services to customers in a speedy fashion is a value-adding activity. By beating your competitors to market, you gain sales and market share.

As a cost-reduction strategy, time reduction can be very effective. Inspection, moving, setup, rework, and waiting all add costs. The amount of time in these areas can be staggering.