Tag Archives: BPM

Governance, Risk & Compliance Webinar

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I have a small part in a webinar being presented tomorrow on Governance, Risk, and Compliance, and particularly how Open Pages has built a GRC solution on the Fujitsu Interstage BPM patform.  OpenPages is the leading provider of integrated risk management solutions for global companies.  Most of the webinar time will go to John Hagerty, Vice President of Research, Gartner who will talk about the need and benefit of risk management.   Here is the link:

Gaining Complete Visibility Across GRC Initiatives with BPM

It is All Taylor’s Fault

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The Industrial Revolution brought about mass production of parts and products. The concept behind mass production is: break the job into a series of well defined components (interchangeable parts), and set up to produce those parts in large quantities to get economy of scale. Millions of identical parts can bring the price down of a completed product. The cost of setting up a factory is high, but is recouped through small savings multiplied by many instances.

Fredrick Winslow Taylor applied these mass production ideas to work and called it “Scientific Management“. Continue reading →

4 Process Trends & 1 Gap

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So much buzz about a new emerging category of process technology.  Analysts and vendors alike are talking about it, using a variety of different names: Case Management, Unstructured Processes, Human Coordination Technology, Human Interaction Management, Smart Case Management, Dynamic Process, etc.  I helped lead a Thought Leader Summit meeting on this topic in November Continue reading →

Process Improvement: Informed & Lean

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I could call this post “Removing the Risk from Lean Process Improvement” because it starts with the assumption that you want to improve your processes using Lean principles, but you want guidance on how to apply those principles most effectively.

Soooo much discussion of Lean last week at the Forrester Forum and the Gartner BPM Summit.  Who can argue against Lean?  It is after all a focus on providing more value with less waste.  Lean is a focus on eliminating waste, the original sevens wastes identified by Toyota, as well as elimination of anything that does not provide value to the customer.  We all want to get rid of waste and inefficiency.

How do you identify the waste in your business process? This is harder than you might think.  Continue reading →

What is Case Management?

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So much discussion recently about Case Management, but do we really know what we mean?  Let me collect here some definitions, and then offer my own.  (You will find many of these ideas expanded in full in “When Thinking Matters in the Workplace“)

The Case Management Society of America, a health care oriented professional group, defines case management as: Continue reading →

Large-Scale Federated Processes

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A presentation that I gave at the Stevens BPM day covered the subject of Large Scale Federated Processes. What is a federated process?

It is a distributed process that spans many servers. Distributed process support might be designed and implemented in a very centralized way: for example a single process application with parts of the application deployed to different machines. This allows the process to be much larger that it might be if limited to a single server, but that really is not the point of federation.

A federated process is a distributed process where the different parts of the process are controlled by different people. Continue reading →

Rise of the Process Wiki

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A few weeks ago I became aware of Process Wiki  (http://wiki.process.io/) when the founder of the wiki left a comment on one of my blog posts.  I was curious.  Without surprise, the wiki site contains a good collection of example business processes.  You can join to be a member, and collaborate either by contributing more process examples, or by commenting on the existing ones.   Processes can be uploaded & downloaded as XPDL files, and the site has a converter to visualize the processes as BPMN diagrams.  Most sites have GIF files embedded in the page, but this is the first I have seen that you simply upload the XPDL file and it provides the visualization directly in the page. Continue reading →

The 80% Solution

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In a panel session this week at the eBizQ virtual conference (see here and here) I was asked “What common mistake do people make that causes unnecessary delay in BPM projects?”  The answer: Many projects have a goal to implement too much at once.  Some projects attempt to turn a manual process into a completely automated “straight-through” processes where there is no human interaction at all. Continue reading →

Process Language, Agility, and Fitness

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When designing a business process, you need to design for change, because business is always changing and agility depends upon the ability to change.  Once you understand that change is a constant part of business, you know that the business process you design today is not going to remain static.

If you are going to design for change, it is important to pick the right language.  If you pick the wrong language, then change will be very difficult.  We say that a language is a good language Continue reading →

Three Years, 90 posts, a New Name

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I decided to change the title of this blog, and I figured it worth a small note to explain why.

I started the blog three years ago as an experiment.  I had a few things to say, but no idea if I would take the time to put them down, and even less of an idea whether anyone would care.  Upon reflection, I am satisfied with that step.  The blog has been more rewarding than I expected. Continue reading →