It's been an interesting journey in BPM space for me, starting with BPMS for application development to utilizing BPM as a mean to manage and control business process and IT investment.
"BPM aligning Enterprise IT systems with business" seems to be a silver bullet for IT, but an appropriate approach to BPM can actually yield the said alignment.
Continue reading "Can BPM align Enterprise IT systems with business?" »
Continue reading "Can BPM take over the application development paradigm?" »
Part 1 of 3
Introduction
Industry analysts have repeatedly pointed out that technology is a beguiling proposition and businesses invest expecting to save money or increase revenue, but rarely realize either benefit.
The rapid investment over the first half of the nervous nineties have placed the CIOs under enormous pressure to become “Value Creators” and produce or increase profit from existing company property rather than investing further. This may be connecting the enterprise's data in new ways to give new insights and improve decisions. However, there is an added mandate to be thrifty and manage internal costs to free dollars to create innovation and value. With highly compressed decision cycles and the need for faster recovery of IT investment, consultants are increasingly being asked for recommendations with ROI cycles in months rather than years.
It is in such uncertain times, that the Enterprise mashup has presented itself as one of the promising technologies for the next decade. Let us take a look at what the mashup is and why do analysts think it will be the growth engine for Enterprise 2.0.
Continue reading "Enterprise Mashups – Recovering value from SOA Investments (Part 1 of 3)" »
Unstructured vs. Unmanaged? That sounds like playing with words. Let us give it a shot even if it seems so. It came to my mind because while reading various comments on the blogs of unstructured process, I felt that there is lot of mix up. On one side, there is characteristics of the process (or qualification of the nature of the process, if you will) which is recognized in my title of the bloglet by the term “unstructured process”. On the other side is the way that process is being managed which is signified by the second part of the title….
So we can see it like a classical 2x2 matrix between process type and state of the management of the process. We will end up with 4 classes:
Continue reading "Unstructured processes - it doesn't need to be 'unmanaged'" »
“why to adopt business value focus seriously and how to go about it”
As I see, BPM is all about business and hence it needs to be grounded on what’s most valuable to the business – ‘Business Value’. For the rest, neither the business people want to understand really nor they care about (BPMN, SOA, XML and the endless list that all of us know) it. That’s fair I suppose. How many times people really care what technology the digital camera or mobile phones work upon when they buy it? How many times do we bother about the technical wizardry of microwave ovens when we buy it and use it? So we all need to listen to the message. No point in wasting time in selling technology nuts and bolts to business. We need to take the business realization to them. I will be surprised if that is a news to anyone.
Continue reading "Building Future with Business Value based BPM - part 3 of 6" »
"Why BPM is critical to build the future of the Business"
This blog series is on building the future with BPM so we must realize with clarity why we believe BPM is going to be critical for the business in future. This realization is important because this is what will drive your investments, strategies and core values adopted for the BPM program. Here I’m not talking about basic need or fundamental business case for BPM, I’m sure most of you understand that very well. Instead what I want to share are some of my observations and perspective of the global trends that mean a lot for BPM going forward.
Continue reading "Building Future with Business Value based BPM - part 2 of 6" »
As discussed in Part 1 the key motivations behind delivering Integration Platform as a private cloud are
Considering Integration platform forms the enterprise backbone, the motivation presented above becomes the key input for architecting & engineering Integration Platform for deriving better ROI using a private cloud based hosting model
Continue reading "Delivering Integration Platform as Private cloud - Part 2" »
Finally BPM has found some spicy angle to its existence in form of what is being called as managing ‘unstructured or ad hoc processes’. That’s a good sign that progressive discovery of new concepts/ideas related to real-life stuff is still happening.
Various sources on the net estimate that 60-70% of the business processes in an enterprise are unstructured or ad hoc unfortunately. Can’t really say how much true that is because no reliable study or research is available to make conclusive view on it. But at least there is fairly reliably observation that reasonable part of the business process today apparently is what we call unstructured. Hang on with me, I will come to elaborate on what an unstructured process is if you have not been initiated into this new fancy stuff so far. Do we really consider the segmentation of structured and unstructured processes in the BPM strategy today? Largely not and that’s because they way BPM programs are run, there is hardly any visibility in most of the organizations about all the business processes in totality. So default assumption is that processes are all well structured. That may be the reason when some time unstructured processes are picked up for BPM implementation that see great challenges meeting the requirement. Irrespective of who is finally blamed for the failure, just think about it…it something new, something different, something we really didn’t pay much attention to...
2010 is already here, for some reason I feel this time it has come very quietly, yet to sink in that there is something new in the new year…anyways, wish all the readers a very brighter, happier and safer year ahead….
In the series of business value focused blogs, I’m starting a new one for BPM since that is possibly very close to business and business value (in principle at least). I also felt that despite it being so close to business value capability, most of the BPM programs unfortunately are not so much business value driven today. I do not mind if BPM implementations are driven by technology capability deployment, even for those cases, it must have a clear view of what business value it is going to deliver. So with that emphasis, I’m picking up this chain of 6 bloglets. For me blog is really a thinking process, its thinking aloud, it’s lab to present the seeds and test their viability in an open platform. So feel free to drop in your side of story that will collectively help all of us to evolve together.
In the first bloglet of this series, I would like to just focus upon getting arms around what really BPM is. It may be basic stuff for some but I think creating that baseline is important before value creation is spoken for BPM.
Continue reading "Building Future with Business Value based BPM - part 1 of 6" »
Cloud computing today has become the buzz word in the IT industry and being seen as the big thing to address IT's ROI pain. However being involved with Integration, SOA and BPM for years I am constantly trying to see the value of Cloud in Integration or SOA or BPM space for the customers who already have invested heavily on a stack integration, SOA and BPM platform or on different individual platform to address all these areas.
Continue reading "Delivering Integration Platform as Private cloud - Part 1" »
"If you consider the end to end business process as seen by the business process owner, 60-70% of the process is currently encapsulated in ERP or certain be-spoke applications which are performing well, so how can I continue to utilize these investments and also adopt Business Process Management".
While analyzing this statement few areas came up for further discussion, which made everybody think about the end to end process implementation.Continue reading "Importance of Business State Machine in BPM adoption" »
Lately I have had multiple conversations and discussions on the topic of product selection. In such conversations, again and again I have seen the emphasis on why a product should be used for a given intent because that is what the product vendors have built the product for. Interestingly in one such conversation that I recall, the chief architect wanted to use a product that was meant for complex event processing to actually implement a process management capability. At the same time, there are products actually that do the process flow management that could be used. However, given the requirement of the software capability, both the products can do what is needed to be done. So now question is, in such situation, how appropriate or inappropriate is to use a software (if that meets your requirements) that is not intended to do what you want it to do from product vendor’s perspective.
Straight forward answer just could have been “Don’t misuse the product capability, stick to what the products are designed for”….but is it really that way? How do we approach this situation and make a decision that is not going to lend itself to disaster? That’s when the “repurposing” ideas started taking shape in my mind. In simple terms, repurposing is defining new purpose/usage of the object. In our case, we are talking about inventing/discovering new ‘utility’ of the software. Now, such new utility becomes innovation or misuse will possibly depend on number of factors that we will shortly come to.
Continue reading "Smartly "repurposing" the technology - Innovation or misuse?" »
Continue reading "Externalization based design strategies - another angle for SOA principles?" »
After my recent blog "The telecom ecosystem is changing....Can BPM help?", I have been pondering over the 'What' and 'How' of my next blog (which is this very blog you are reading). Today, there are many events (change factors) taking place in the telecom industry. I believe, it is prudent to have a basic understanding of all the events, to appreciate the 'new' telecom industry and role of BPM-EAI products.
Continue reading "Telecommunications industry has come a long way…..Basics…..part 1" »
Continue reading "Business value innovation in B2B space - Part 5" »
