BPM Projects Guide

Below is a very straightforward slide show from slideshare that iterates “10 tips for a great Business Process Management Project. There are many great points, and while some may seem obvious, they help serve as a reminder and is a nice reiteration. Below is a summary of the 10 tips.

1. Pick a project that will make a difference
2. Obtain Senior Management Buy-In
3. Get the team structure right
4. Plan for the real world
5. Avoid ‘paralysis by analysis’
6. Use an iterative delivery approach
7. Control expectations and scope
8. Plan for interfaces, integration and reports
9. Measure what’s been achieved
10. Evangelize your success

Here is a copy of the slideshare presentation.

10 Tips For A Great Business Process Management project

view presentation

Top 10 Open Source Rules Engines

This recent post on the Business Review Online blog discusses how even though business process management systems have managed to become mainstream, business rules companies have remained a very niche area. Business Rules Companies are extremely important because they enable companies to reduce their reliance on hard-coded application logic. But with so many choices in open source rules engines, how do you know which one is best for your company? Here’s a list of top 10 best open source rules engines provided by Business Review Online. Enjoy!

1. Drools

2. Hammurapi Rules

3. JEOPS

4. JRuleEngine

5a. Mandarax

5b. Take

6. Open Lexicon

7. Prova

8. SweetRules

9. TermWare

10. Zilonis

The challenge of implementing BPM

In a recent article at BP Trends, Frits Bussemaker takes a moment to look at some of the thought processes that maybe holding back the full and successful implementation of BPM. He begins the article by pointing out that BPM is very much a change management discipline.

He continues by making observations that could potentially be road blocks in your implementation to BPM. First, he observes that for the most part, the word process has a negative connotation, and those outside the BPM world see it that way. They associate BPM with a long process and unnecessary actions.

A second issue he observed was that many business managers have no desire to streamline an organization, even if they understand what BPM can do. They often see it as a threat to what they’re doing and how many people they’re managing.

Bussemaker concludes the article by stating that organizations currently transitioning into centralized process organization, they need to “Think Ahead, Stay Small!”. He goes ahead to state that staying small is not about size, the but mentality to which organizing business processes is handled. A company must staying flexible or agile, recognizing the need to connect and collaborate, staying focused on the core business, staying lean and mean, and being personal and intimate.

IBM Proposed Acquisition of ILOG

IBM and ILOG have signed an agreement today, whereby IBM will acquire ILOG for approximately EUR 215 million or $340 million in U.S. currency. The goal of this acquisition is for IBM to advance their BPM and SOA technologies with ILOGs Business Rules Management Systems software which will:

“enable IBM to help clients deliver critical business information in real-time, allowing them to make better business decisions faster.”

As also mentioned in this article from Fox Businesses:

“When completed, the acquisition of ILOG will strengthen IBM's BPM and SOA position by providing customers a full set of rule management tools for complete information and application lifecycle management across a comprehensive platform including IBM's leading WebSphere application development and management platform.”

This acquisition still has some hurdles to navigate since there are several prerequisites pending. The public tender offers still have to be reviewed to determine if they violate U.S. or EU antitrust laws, and are also contingent on a 66.67% share capital and voting rights minimum. In France, the offer is awaiting approval from the AMF and French Ministry of Economy.

IBM Launches New Financial Management Business Process Tool

CNNMoney.com reports that IBM has released an analytical financial tool that will allows companies to better analyze and manage the performance of a company’s financial function.

This tool will help to solve the problem area of accurately identifying where redundancies occur within the finance organization. A 2008 IBM Global CFO Study shows that 1/3 of CFOs stated that they are ineffective at effectively measuring business performance.

William Fuessler, Global Financial Management Leader, IBM Global Business Services mentions:

"CFOs need quick access to the truth, they need process and data commonality through enterprise standards to achieve higher levels of efficacy. The delay in understanding the true state of the business can mean the difference between profitability and lost growth potential. The Finance Transformation Workbench tool is yet another example of IBM's high-value services proposition which automates labor-based process and uses our Intellectual Property (IP) to create repeatable software-like assets."

IBM’s tool is fully customizable to an organization’s needs, since it provides an integrated view of various business models which include: Finance Function component business models, business process Taxonomies, (such as the American Productivity and Quality Council Process Classification Framework) and organization structure maps.

Reliance Capital Adopts BPM

In recent news, detailed here at CXO Today, we find out that Reliance Capital will implement BPM across their enterprise, spanning all their divisions including mutual fund, life insurance, general insurance, Reliance Money, and consumer finance. They will use Business Manager 7.0 to implement this new company wide business initiative. Also included in their new pursuit of BPM will be their BPM Center of Excellence, which will find a way to identify and rank importance projects into solutions across the businesses subsidiaries.

Novak Provides $10 Million in Funding for Appian

Appian, a global provider of BPM, announced that they are receiving $10 million in funding from Novak Biddle Venture Partners as announced in their press release. Jack Biddle, partner at Novak and an Appian board member, had this to say:

"With analysts predicting a significant growth pattern for the industry over the next several years, Appian is well positioned to emerge as the leading pure play BPM provider. Their ability to bootstrap the business to this point is a strong indication that Appian's product offering and market strategy - implemented by an experienced management team - are meeting organizations' complex and diverse needs."

Industry insiders, as pointed out in this blog post are excited by this news. The feeling is that this will help increase the use of the SaaS model since according to company executives, Appian is increasingly becoming more “SaaS-oriented”. As the post mentions:

Appian is one of very few BPMS leaders actively pursuing the SaaS model, and they believe they are ahead of competitors in both the “vision” and the technology.

Also, we're getting ready to launch a new blog that looks at the broader issues of Business Process Management, update your RSS feed now as we get it ready for our official launch: http://evolvebpm.blogspot.com/

PML Methodology in SAP

Vanessa Huschke recently talked to Marcus Dorfmeyer, the Project manager of Knowledge Management Competency Center (KMCC) organization about Process Management Lifecycle and detailed the interview here at the SAP Community Network. Here’s a quick recap of definitions for PML that the SAP Community Network provides if you need a quick refresher.

In this interview, Marcus discusses the benefits of PML methodology, how it helps accomplish his project, and some of its uses in SAP. Be sure to read the interview over, as I’m sure it’ll provide some valuable insight for your organization’s business process management system.

Austin Energy Uses BPM to Improve Services

At Austin Energy, they were having problems achieving a level of service where they could attend properly to all of their service calls filtering in. Intelligent Enterprise took a look at their story here. So, with no BMP suite, they made improvements to their service oriented architecture company-wide in order to improve services. They started out by defining what the requirements of the software had to be and the benefits they wished to receive from the software.

Since they were unable to efficiently answer all phone calls, they streamlined the five different tools they used while communicating with customers over the phone. This alone provided a huge drop in the average call time. Customer service went from servicing 4,000 calls a day to 20,000 calls a day.

Software AG Report

Software Ag, published a report on Best Practices for SOA Governance User Survey. The reason for creating a report was to determine which ways organizations are approaching the process of implementing SOA governance. The study is especially relevant with SOA beginning to have an increased role in BPM. Some of the findings that were revealed in the report include:

- Interest in SOA was widespread as only one industry out of 14 reported that more than 15% of its respondents had “no plans to adopt SOA”.

- Top drivers for SOA adoption were a desire to improve business agility, simplify integration, and support business process management (BPM) initiatives.

- SOA has yet to expand far beyond the firewall as only a small minority (19.5%) report having exposed more than a quarter of their existing services externally.

- There was a strong correlation between SOA maturity and governance adoption with more than 80% of enterprises having a fully-implemented SOA in place calling their governance practices “mature” or “adequate” versus 33% overall.

While these findings are formulated across several large enterprises, what is your opinion on SOA governance in you respective organization?

BPM Vendors Use of Internal Products

Appian, recently posted a report regarding some of their cost savings techniques. Specifically they mentioned that they estimate a cost savings of $500,000 a year attributed to use of their own products by eliminating licensing and support costs. Also mentioned is how by using their own products they feel they are able to provide better service to clients by discovering new uses for their products. As stated in the report:

Many other of our BPM applications are cross-functional, demonstrating the new possibilities our technology offers. For example

- Our Human Resources department uses Appian to manage many of their day-to-day administrative responsibilities and process integrations with other departments, such as handling departmental transfers, promotions and reassignments. Our Recruiting team uses Appian for managing the complete lifecycle of recruiting from prospect intake through interview through offer. Appropriate handoffs are then automatically made to HR, where Appian makes on-boarding fast and easy by providing all benefits and employee handbook information in the context of their associated processes, with status-tracking.

While some may feel that it is obvious that BPM vendors should use their own products, this blog post on Column 2 poses an interesting question to BPM vendors by asking them to release reports on use of their own company’s internal products. What is your opinion on the subject of BPM vendors maximizing use of the products they offer?

Building BPM Success: How to Manage the BPM Lifecycle

As part of this blog, we bring you up-to-date information on the latest trends and processes of BPM. In the past we’ve hosted several webinars on BPM management, and this is where we will be posting any future webinars. In case you didn’t get a chance to view Building BPM Success: How to Manage the BPM Lifecycle, here’s your chance to view it for free!

This webinar was presented by John Rymer, Principal analyst at Forrester, and Malcolm Ross, Director of Product Management at Appian Corporation. This webinar session will taught clients on proper techniques in evaluating their current process ecosystem and selecting the right processes for an initial BPM project. John and Malcolm also reviewed organizational changes and best practice methodologies for process improvement.

I’m sure you will find this session very informative. Click here to view it.

Business Process Outsourcing

Recently, we looked at what the important factors are when choosing to outsource business processes.

To further expand on the topic, I thought I would share this video with you. Here, UHY discusses outsourcing parts of the business process management process. They discuss why it is important to know your current business process and then take those and use outsourcing in a why that it can benefit your company. Another way is to find a process that is not essential to the finished version of the product, such as those performed in the accounting department.

Is BPM Automation Possible?

On Saturday Avinash Malik, an enterprise architect from Microsoft, wrote an article explaining his view on automated BPM, and how despite the “hype”, it can never be truly automated. His theory states that about 15 to 20 years ago, organizations started developing BPM, and working this new concept into their budgets. This led IT developers to develop unique languages, namely BPMN or BPEL, in order to create software His opinion is that people think that with these developments it would be possible to save costs and not keep any IT developers on staff. The problem with this thinking, as he states in the article is that,

“We can automate a small number of situations where coherent activities, in sequence, are performed entirely by computer. Certainly, we want these situations to increase. But the overall impact on the cost and quality of IT-developed software is minimal. And if we are not addressing the cost and quality of IT software... why even discuss BPM automation?”

Other experts have already added their opinions to the fray as can be seen by this post from Bruce Silver, who has a different opinion. Another post that discussed Malik’s opinion can be found here. What are your thoughts on the pros and cons of BPM automation?

Hyland Software acquires Liberty Information Management Systems

Announced Monday, Hyland Software has attained Liberty Information Systems. The transaction was private. Hyland Software is a fast growing independent software vendor, and specializes in enterprise content management. Hyland Software’s current product, OneBase® Enterprise Content Management, is known as a standout product for meeting the transactional content management needs of both small and large enterprises by industry analysts.

Steve Lehrer, formerly Chief Solutions Officer at Liberty IMS, had this to say about the transaction:

Liberty IMS and Hyland Software share the same values. Both companies have remained focused on developing solutions driven by customer requirements and not industry hype. Bringing our two companies together will provide our customers and partners with an even broader set of capabilities with which to drive down costs and decrease inefficiencies while improving their business processes.

Source: Street Insider

Enterprise Information Management

In a recent blog post by Billy Cripe at Oracle, he discusses the importance of harnessing all the information that has the potential to get lost in the organization. In the future, Cripe states, it will be vital businesses to adopt an effective form content management.

Cripe believes that the wealth and importance of information often falls through the cracks, and information management will be the way to capture and use that data in the best possible way. With the ocean of information, humans swimming through often miss many of the important items because they note what they think is relevant to them.

It will be important for companies now, to be able to use an enterprise information management system that has the ability to capture all of these key tools: programmatic indexing, entity extraction, topical mapping, social inputs, sentiment and semantic awareness. Utilizing these tools will propel companies with their knowledge of information to the next level of business tools.

Mexican Telecommunications provider centers processes around BPM

At BEA, they give a great example of how BPM can power a business from the inside out. Tkonecta, a relatively new telecommunications provider in Mexico, set out with a goal to keep their staffing low while obtaining 15,000 new customers monthly with a guratnee of servicing them each within five days.

Tkonecta used BEA AquaLogic Business Process Management to center their efforts so all teams could communicate and provide service quickly to customers. By using the BPM features, they were able to automate and optimize high volume processes, down costs and improve the customer experience.

They used the services available to design the perfect BPM process for the situations they needed. The BPM was used to drive the processes, and since the program was being built from scratch, they could find the kinks before they became problems. They built programs that stream lined sales, operations and inventory, engineering, finance and customer service. They are also able to pull reports on their progress weekly.

The result in Tkonecta centering their business around BPM was meeting their service goals: service in less than five days and 15,000 customers a month with fewer than 500 people working for the company.

Green Hat and 1st Thought to Offer New Product

Green Hat in conjunction with 1^st Thought, a UK based firm, is offering a new automation product that is a testing platform for SOA and BPM. According to the news article found in Integration Developer News, the two companies are making it available only for TIBCO’s iProcess. Peter Cole, Green Hat President and CTO, made this statement regarding this product launch:

“Some of the world’s largest organizations are using BPM in conjunction with SOA to deliver maximum business value. Until recently, automation of BPM testing has always been a stumbling block,”

Nigel Winship, CEO of 1^st Thought, also had this to say:

“The ability that GH Tester now provides to drive the testing of a process end to end is genuinely ground breaking and we believe affords huge scope to drive down delivery costs for BPM projects.”

BPM Processes Not Always the best for Knowledge Workers

Most business process management tools are used in situations where a process occurs repeatedly over a long time. In a recent article written by Keith Harrison-Broninski at BP Trends, he takes time to look at how business processes need to cater to knowledge workers and their not-repeatable processes.

He begins the article by stating three problems currently shaping a new face in collaborative knowledge work:

1. Market globalization is forcing commercial companies to “compete smarter.”
2. Reduction in labor demand is forcing knowledge workers to “work smarter.”
3. Worldwide recession is forcing organizations to “cut costs smarter.”

Knowledge work is harder to adapt to a business process than many things. It can’t be planned in the future. Harrison-Broninski points out that it’s easier to adapt business process software with human centric processes more so than human-driven processes. So there is a drive to adapt software to the needs of the knowledge worker.

The factors listed above are responsible in pushing software to become better for a BPM software for human processes. With companies having to streamline the process because of the recession and therefore fewer workers, it’s crucial that software is adapted to aid their processes. This software must help with collaborative, adaptive and innovative software. These three things can only be addressed after it’s been determined by the knowledge workers what their responsibilities, goals, and commitments are.

Before the software can be effective, Harrison-Broninski has addressed the process for the flow of knowledge before it gets put into the system. His theory is called HIM (Human Interaction Management). The steps are: research, evaluate, analyze, constrain and task. With research, it’s critical to talk to those who know the information first hand, and turn it into personal knowledge. While in the evaluation stage, it is important to step back and review what you’ve learned. Know the information you’ve learned in and out. During the analyze process, it’s important to decide how to approach the problem. While in the constrain phase, separate the work in to intervals, and decide what order they need to be completed. And the final phase, task, involves disturbing the work.

KPN Chooses the Cordys BPM Suite

According to this news release on Realwire, a leader in telecommunications, KPN, has chosen to link Cordys Business Process Management Suite to help process online customer requests. The Cordys suite will be the link between activating and invoicing new services like internet, telecom, and multimedia which was released in the beginning of 2008.

The business process platform will enable KPN to cater to customer’s need faster and more effectively, now that customers can order services online. Reduction of costs is an added bonus to this automated system that KPN will put into place.

Jan Muchez, CIO of KPN mentions:

“Because of the intense time pressure we faced we were looking for a supplier who could not only provide a flexible application, but also has extensive knowledge of the subject matter so as to contribute to this strategic project.”