Home / Resources
Resources
Discover a Wealth of BPM Knowledge and Expertise at BPMInstitute.org!
The Business Process Management Guide
The goal of this document is to help corporations of all sizes and across industries to identify areas where business process management (BPM) technology can offer the greatest return for their available resources today while providing a technology foundation to support future initiatives. Perfectly suited for organizations with limited IT resources and budget, this guide offers recommendations for advanced technology solutions that don’t require wholesale changes to legacy systems or a brand-new enterprise-wide strategic technology direction.
Case Study: Finding the Best Process for Documenting Business Processes: Counting Accountants at Sears
In 2004, Sears began a series of strategic projects to improve its operational effectiveness. One of the projects was to make process improvements at the Accounting Services Center. Dave Fleer, a Business Process Consultant for Sears, helped the Accounting Services Center improve its processes.
Risk Management – Business Process Management Steps Up to the Challenge
Why Risk Management is Top of Mind
Risk Management – this single objective is critical to the success of both commercial and government organizations. The need to proactively manage risk has increased in importance recently due to several factors – including high-profile business failures, government breakdowns in security and the rise in terrorism, and the increasing amounts of regulation being mandated by various governments.
Using Interviews to Document Business Processes
There are many approaches to documenting business processes. These include group and individual interviews, white boarding, reviewing existing documentation, and job shadowing.
Interviewing the people doing the job is an effective method to understanding how a business process is currently done. Whether you are documenting the current state or future state, successful interviews require planning, communication and a high-degree of people skills and intuition. Following are some ways to ensure that your interviews achieve the desired results.
Proven Steps to BPM Success
As more and more vendors enter the market and try to stake a claim to the BPM opportunity, a few leaders have emerged to create a new era of business process management – an era defined by solutions that combine flexibility with a full spectrum of process capabilities. An era defined by vendors partnering with thought-leading business and government organizations to look at processes in terms of their ability to drive organizational growth. The era of “breakaway BPM”.
In this Webinar, David Holliday, CTO for Advanced Management Technology, Inc.
Planning for Improved Performance
Most any organization will surely concede that it desires improved performance. More precisely, most organizations expect their performance to improve. However, very few organizations actually plan to enhance their performance. They simply expect it to happen as a normal course of business.
Business Process Management – What Are Your Standards?
After speaking at a Six Sigma conference I was asked what my definition of BPM is and what differentiates it from Six Sigma. The topic of my presentation was how to identify important change programs. I am not sure what exact wording I used but I must have first stated that I am not a Six Sigma expert, only a Six Sigma customer, but Six Sigma did not seem to use standards. The BPM definition must have included process measurement, modeling and change planning. Later in my hotel room I realized I never put to paper what my definition is of BPM.
Who, What and How of a Business Analyst?
Who?
Business Analysts identify the business needs of their clients and stakeholders to help determine solutions to business problems. They typically perform a liaison function to software developers by serving as business problem solvers. They play a vital role throughout the project life cycle by understanding and representing stakeholder needs, documenting and organizing the requirements for a system, and communicating requirements to an entire team.
The Principles of Service-Orientation: Service Contracts and Loose Coupling
In the previous article we established the service-orientation design paradigm as currently providing us with the following eight common principles:
•services share a formal contract
•services are loosely coupled
•services abstract underlying logic
•services are reusable
Incorporating Existing Systems into SOA
You have dedicated significant resources to creating a services oriented architecture (SOA), investing heavily in hardware, software and personnel. You have trained people, hired experts, engaged vendors and deployed small scale services under an SOA framework. You have moved beyond the crawling stage and are ready to advance to the next stage of SOA deployment. But there is an elephant in the room no one wants to mention – your existing systems.
The Principles of Service-Orientation: Introduction to Service-Orientation
This is the first article in an eight-part series dedicated to exploring the common principles of service-orientation. Acclaimed author Thomas Erl shares his insights into the service-orientation design paradigm by providing excerpts from his second SOA book “Service-Oriented Architecture: Concepts, Technology, and Design”, supplemented with additional commentary.
The adoption of SOA often comes with an expectation that many of the benefits commonly associated with service-oriented technology platforms will be realized simply through their successful implementation.
Mining Rules from Code: Reasonable or Lunacy?
Is your organization challenged with the need to take an existing legacy system and re-architect it into new technology? But, what happens if that legacy application has no current system documentation, no available application SMEs or business SMEs who you can interview to identify how the existing system works?
The solution is the vision of Business Rules, with emphasis on business rule mining. Business rules are the most essential, non procedural statements behind business policy and requirements.
Facilitating Process Design
Tammy Adams is a certified process facilitator specializing in Team Facilitation and Business Process Analysis. She guides teams in transforming their process knowledge and business requirements into viable project and system deliverables that incorporate quality principles consistent with quality methodologies such as TQM, Six Sigma, and Lean. She is co-author of, “Facilitating the Project Lifecycle: Skills and Tools to Accelerate Progress for Project Managers, Facilitators, and Six Sigma Project Teams.”
Non-Technical Issues Matter Too
Too many organizations think they can implement business process management (BPM) efforts with nothing more than a comprehensive set of tools and a good ROI story.
BPMS Watch: BPM’s Evolving Value Proposition
I’ve been speaking at BPM conferences for – well, too long, probably – but long enough to see the evolution of BPM’s essential value proposition, as expounded by consultants, industry analysts, and BPMS vendors. Consistent with Darwinian theory, this evolution has not followed a simple linear thread but has branched into multiple lines, some destined to die out and others – hopefully – to flourish. Today I would say there are three distinct branches, three different statements of what BPM is and is trying to do. Each has its own natural constituency and ardent advocates.
BPM’s “Missing Link”
There’s something wrong with BPM, something terribly wrong. Although the past five years have witnessed great progress in the theory and practice of business process management, if we go back to business-process basics, a fundamental problem with BPM becomes clear.
Business Analysis and SOA: The Benefits of Business Services
This is the first article in a six-part series dedicated to exploring how SOA and service-orientation relate to and affect business analysis processes and approaches.
Roundtrip Business Process Management with Metastorm BPM
There is only one certainty when a process is automated, and that is that the process will have to change. The need for change may be caused by organizational dynamics, the market environment, or by competitor actions. The key to effectively managing and proactively embracing process change is having complete visibility into all aspects of your business – including instant access to the information you need to make intelligent business decisions and process improvements.
The Virtues of Incrementalism
Because business process management provides a strong capability for business change, organizational and people issues are huge challenges. Adopting new technology places extensive demands on employees and their managers.
Teetering on the BPM Strategy Edge
Bischoff is an international expert on optimizing and automating business processes across silos and the extended enterprise. She also is recognized for her work in Web services, brand strategies, strategic planning, integration, and IT/organization alignment.
According to Bischoff, most organizations are in the “tactical” mode when it comes to BPM. In other words, they are still in the discovery phase when it comes to Business Process Management. Moving from the tactical model to strategic mode is the key to enterprise success and necessary when implementing BPM.
