Tuesday, January 29, 2002

All organizations have competition on some level, so they need to follow sound business principles to maintain their base of customers or constituents. As part of this, they incorporate technology to increase efficiency and competitiveness, but they must balance the benefits of technology with accompanying restrictions. For nearly two decades, business and public service organizations have responded to market and constituency demands by embracing a number of efficiency-enhancing tools designed to improve processes and the products delivered by those processes. Each has exhibited shortcomings and inflexibilities that limited their usefulness.
Business process management (BPM) technology is a new approach to efficiency and competitiveness. BPM is designed to extend the capabilities of past business process solutions and overcome their shortcomings for process automation. In this document, BPM is defined and distinguished from its technological predecessors. There also are guidelines on typical BPM features and classifications, as well as technical details on implementations.

The Case for Business Process Management: Driving Efficiencies and Mission Advancement [source ebizq.net author Metastorm]
Despite its track record, reengineering is making its way back into managerial conversations, as Hammer's The Agenda and the re-release of Hammer and Champy's Reengineering the Corporation (HarperBusiness, 2001) attest. The primary reason for the renewed interest is that the current downturn may turn out to be "much steeper than people think," says Thiagarajan, director of investment research at Mellon in San Francisco. But this time around, "cost-cutting alone may not be enough. Wall Street has set growth targets, implicitly or explicitly, that companies must hit to sustain their current stock price." To do that, companies must also find new markets, new sources of revenue. Can the new version of reengineering offer any help here? Today's reengineering—let's call it collaborative reengineering to distinguish it from the early 1990s version—combines the austere method of process reengineering with the pliable, collaborative medium of the Internet in ways that weren't technologically possible a decade ago.

The Return of Reengineering for Recessionary Times [source HBS working knowledge]

Monday, January 28, 2002

What is business process management? Antony Adshead of Computer Weekly reports on a roundtable discussion which brought together those in the know. Imagine a future where there is no divide between IT and the business, where changes to the processes of the business are simultaneously mirrored in the enterprise software. The business process management movement (BPM) wants to realise this vision by developing a structure for application development that is as agile as the data that applications handle.

Roundtable: Think alike [source Computer Weekly]

Tuesday, January 22, 2002

BPM emphasizes the management aspect of automating processes to achieve maximum ongoing flexibility with minimum development cost and time. To do this, BPM products must implement the entire business process as much as possible within the product, using minimum custom code. This requires that BPM products have separate runtime engines; require validation, testing and monitoring tools; and create new applications. Process-centric EAI that implements and manages business processes through new applications with associated business rules is an evolving, advanced form of enterprise integration.

Business Process Management and EAI [source ebizq.net]
This latest release in Delphi Group's Insight Research series explores two rapidly emerging technologies: Web services and Business Process Management (BPM). Both promise to impact profoundly the way that organizations use the Internet to conduct business internally and with partners, suppliers, and customers.
The report identifies the key trends in the adoption of these technologies, including their effect on business strategy. This research will help you understand the opportunities and challenges that early adopters have faced when deploying Web services and the future plans of those who are formulating their strategies for and evaluating this set of related technologies. Similarly, the report chronicles the experiences, expectations, and plans for BPM of companies of all sizes from a wide variety of industries.

Delphi Group report on Business Process Management

Wednesday, January 16, 2002

Action Technologies, Inc. has announced the release of Metro 5.2. Metro is an e-process application platform that rapidly automates and continuously improves the business processes that drive e-commerce initiatives. Metro enables impeccable customer interactions that cross enterprise boundaries. Unlike workflow systems or enterprise applications that control static routine processes, Metro provides a closed-loop, customer-centric, business interaction model that supports dynamic, adaptive processes that enable the acquisition, servicing, and satisfaction for customers online. Metro 5.2 improves system performance and scalability and increases reliability and security.

Action Technologies, Inc. Releases Metro 5.2, E-Process Application Platform

Thursday, January 10, 2002

Staffware strengthens its position in BPM market with launch of Staffware Process Suite. The Staffware Process Suite, launched at the International Staffware Conference, is heralding a new suite of fully integrated Business Process Management products, developed over the last 18 months to meet the demands of all high volume mission-critical business process requirements of any organization.

Staffware Process Suite announced
Moving quickly after its merger with C-bridge, the new Excelon Corp. has released a new software suite, called Universal Platform, which is designed to help developers define, automate and measure business processes and then create composite applications to take best advantage of those processes.
The platform consists of Excelon’s Business Process Manager, a workflow engine based on ebXML to support collaborations within an organization or with its outside partners, and the Extensible Information Server (XIS), which allows high-performance, recoverable business services to be deployed across the Internet

New Excelon, New Platform - creates way to manage processes, create custom composite apps [source sdimes.com]
HAMMER: Process management is critical. Processes are the Clark Kent of business ideas. They’re mild and unassuming but extraordinarily powerful. End-to-end processes—not products, not departments, not divisions—should be the primary axis around which a business is organized. Processes must be managed, improved, and occasionally re-engineered. This applies not just to transactional work like filling orders, but also to sales and product development, which traditionally have been chaotic and improvisational. At too many companies, when sales and product development do succeed, it’s largely through unsustainable, heroic efforts from individuals.

A new set of process-based measurement systems must be developed so we can understand what’s happening in real time with our businesses and focus on making improvements. The financial measures that companies use now only tell us what happened a quarter ago and don’t indicate anything about why things happened or what to do about it.

(re)made in the u.s.a. [source ContextMag.com]

Thursday, January 03, 2002

December 4, 2001 (San Diego)-- BPM ’01 Summit - Q-Link Technologies, Inc., the leading business process management software firm, and Novarra, Inc., the innovator of instant wireless software, today announced an alliance agreement to extend the power of real-time business process management (BPM) beyond the desktop to the new breed of wireless handheld devices. The combined Q-Link and Novarra solution extends any process, to any person, anywhere in real-time. For the first time, key employees in the enterprise will be able to participate in automated processes even while away from the office.

Q-Link and Novarra alliance delivers Business Process Management to the mobile workforce