If you’ve worked in the corporate world for any length of time, you’ve probably experienced a merger or acquisition somewhere along the way. Personally, I’ve gone through five in 15 years (which may have been a contributing factor to starting my own business). Each time I’ve been bothered by the overlooked opportunities and communication snafu’s that have resulted in poor morale and decreased productivity. But does that really matter? After all, the company isn’t permanently damaged – gradually morale improves and the productivity gets back on track.

It’s conventional wisdom in business that 80% of the problems are caused by 20% of the work – the “exceptions.” In BPM, therefore, you’d think that exception handling would be a critical focus of process modeling and analysis. In most cases you’d be wrong.

Certainly the designers of the Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) standard at BPMI (now part of OMG) had exception handling in mind from the start. BPMN introduces to process modeling the notion of intermediate events.

The word “innovation” is approaching the status of buzzword, which is unfortunate because the concepts it covers – those that drive it – are both significant and elusive. We can ill afford to let them slip out of consciousness simply because the term that indexes them falls out of fashion. While it is still viable, then, a few words about some of the more important of these innovation concepts.

The original Capability Maturity Model (CMM) was developed by the Software Engineering Institute (SEI)¹ and provides a robust discipline to help developers achieve maturity in their software development processes. There are a number of factors that influence the maturity of the software development processes within an enterprise. These include the strategic plans of the enterprise, the enterprise’s own organization and culture, as well as the technologies that are adopted within the enterprise IT architecture.