Two Out of Three Ain't Bad - Business process management takes aim at the triad of business change
Darwin Magazine

What if, at the conclusion of a meeting between the senior executives of two companies, the new alliance they had just formed could be implemented within days after each side returned to their respective offices? What if the world's most common excuse — "The IT department says it will take 18 months to implement" — was no longer heard?

Agility has been on the agenda of companies for quite some time, but inflexible technology and the lack of an ability to manage business processes has hampered efforts to achieve it. Now, however, it's time to remember the venerable proverb: "Be careful what you wish for, because you just might get it." [link to article]

BPM’s Underpinning: The Pi Paradigm
ebizq.net

BPM is rapidly proving popular, since it gives businesspeople control over the processes that make their companies tick. And it doesn’t hurt a bit that BPM is a winner in the ROI arena, according to BPM experts and champions Howard Smith and Peter Fingar. At the very heart of BPM is “an obscure mathematical theory” called Pi Calculus, literally an award-winner. Here, Smith and Fingar explain what Pi Calculus is, and how it forms the foundation for the hot phenomenon known as BPM: [link to article]

BPM's Third Wave
BPTrends.com

The first wave of business-process management, outlined in Fredrick Taylor's theory of management in the 1920s, suggested that processes were implicit in work practices, tucked away in policy manuals. Process management was called "methods and procedures analysis."

The second wave, ushered in over the past decade, suggested that processes could be manually reengineered through a one-time activity. Changes were made, but essentially cast in concrete in software, such as the feature-rich but rigid ERP applications. Even with document-centered workflow added to financial-management systems, for example, these applications rarely gave business managers full control over the process life cycle.

The third wave of BPM enables companies and workers to create and optimize new business processes on the fly. Change is the primary design goal. Through agile business processes, value chains can be monitored and continuously improved. The third wave is not business-process reengineering, enterprise application integration, workflow management, or another packaged application-it's the synthesis and extension of all these technologies and techniques into a unified whole. The third wave of BPM becomes a new foundation upon which to build sustainable competitive advantage. [link to article] [download as PDF]

IBM and Microsoft Messing with Process Standards?
ebizq.net

Consider carpentry as a field of human activity. “Hammering,” “sawing,” “screwing,” and “measuring,” using “hammers,” “saws,” “nails,” “screws,” “screwdrivers,” “glue guns,” “levels,” “measuring tapes,” and “carpenter’s pencils”: these words form a vocabulary describing the operations that can be performed in this field, and the means for carrying them out. Now consider business processes as a field of human activity. Processes, process data, activities, messages, rules, computation, process branching, compensating activities, exceptions, sequences, joins, splits, operations, assignments, transformations, schedules, rules and time constraints: These similarly form part of a vocabulary describing the operations that can be performed in the field of BPM. [link to article]

Don't Bridge the Business IT Divide: Obliterate it!
EAIJournal

This article examines the often uneasy relationship between business and technology and concludes that a new wave of BPM solutions will make talk of a divide appear anachronistic. From now on, BPM is THE enterprise application, while traditional applications will merely play a supporting role. [link to article] [download PDF]

Coordination, coordination, coordination
Darwin Magazine

In his landmark book, Process Innovation, Thomas Davenport defined a process as follows: Simply a structured, measured set of activities designed to produce a specified output for a particular customer or market. It implies a strong emphasis upon how work is done within an enterprise, in contrast to a product focus's emphasis on what. A process is thus a specific ordering of work activities across time and place, with a beginning, an end, and clearly identified inputs and outputs: a structure for action. This definition, although helpful, hardly begins to explain the true nature of collaborative and transactional business processes. At the very least, the word "coordination" is missing. Our definition: A business process is the complete and dynamically coordinated set of collaborative and transactional activities that deliver value to customers. [link to article]

Business Process Management From Now On
ebizq.net

The evolution of IT to what ebizQ columnists Howard Smith and Peter Fingar herald as the era of business process management systems came in distinct, logical steps, each built on the shortcomings of its predecessor. Here, Smith and Fingar trace those steps and in so doing, show why they feel so strongly that this era was worth waiting for. [link to article]

The Third Wave: Where will all this lead?
Darwin Magazine

Change occurs at many levels within an organization. Some change takes place on a grand scale, some on a small scale. Some change is gradual, some radical. Employees come and go, teams morph and take on new roles, existing processes evolve, new processes are introduced and the company responds to the market by honing its products and services to expand its market share. Change is everywhere. [link to article]

Tearing Down 20th Century Stovepipes With 21st Century BPM
ebizq.net

A not-so-funny thing happens when business users try to complete tasks or projects: the very applications created to help them do their jobs, get in the way. That’s because applications are, by-and-large, recluses, isolated from other software. The result? Those same users have to come up with workarounds to circumvent the obstacles put up by the applications, which slows down everyone and thing. Even EAI And B2Bi don’t respond to changing conditions and business processes. The solution, according to Howard Smith and Peter Fingar in their latest column for ebizQ? BPM, which enables the technology to change as needs do, offering the ultimate in helpful flexibility and connectivity. [link to article]

Business Processes: From Reengineering to Management
Darwin Magazine

Over a decade ago, two articles, one published in the Sloan Management Review in June of 1990 by Thomas Davenport and another in the Harvard Business Review in July of 1990 by Michael Hammer, reported on the growing wave of process innovation and radical business process change. Back then, established companies were in uncertain economic times and feeling great pain. They were besieged by better, faster and cheaper competitors from emerging markets. Globalization had been set in motion and there was no turning back—change was brewing but few could envision a solution that did not involve abandoning the past. [link to article]

The Humble Yet Mighty Business Process
Darwin Magazine

This is a column about business processes and their management, the intricate, dynamic, ever-changing manifestations of the economic activity of companies. Today, companies are looking for secrets, skills and tools that will enable them to create and mesh together business processes that are so outstanding that customers will pay to use them, time and time again. [link to article]

BPM’s Third Wave: From Modeling to Management
ebizq.net

In a research note dated December 5, 1997, the Gartner Group identified "Nine Reasons Why IS Organizations Do Not Do BPM." At the time, "BPM" referred to business process modeling rather than business process management. All that has changed. Today, process modeling tool vendors are forming alliances with companies that supply platforms for Business Process Management. [link to article]

BPM’s Third Wave: Build To Adapt, Not Just To Last
ebizq.net

While the vision of business process management or BPM is not new, existing theories and systems have not been able to cope with the reality of business processes - until now. Analysts report that BPM may provide the greatest return on investment of any software category on the market today. BPM gives companies the ability to cut operational costs at a time when the economic downturn makes it increasingly difficult to boost revenues. [link to article]

The Next Fifty Years
Darwin Magazine

For the past fifty years, computers have been seen as "data machines." But the demands of the new business process management are taking IT in another direction.

Back in the 1950s there was the myth of the great thinking machine. Later, the myth of MIS, the management information system, rose up to replace it. The reality, however, is that to this day, computers are record-keeping machines, not management machines. They can take in, chew up and spit out trillions of bytes of data, but where is the management insight, the actionable information needed in context, in real time at all levels of automated and human decision-making? The methods, techniques and mindset of IT today remain fixated on data—on its capture, storage and retrieval.

However, business processes of all shapes and sizes are the focus of management attention today—management wants to overcome the great "business-IT divide" and gain control over business processes. [link to article, or download PDF].

A New Path To Business Process Management - Not Just A Fad
Optimize Magazine - Business Leadership

Don't mistake BPM for the next killer app or fashionable new business theory. It's a foundation upon which companies can depend as surely as they depend on database management. BPM is based in mathematics, including Pi-calculus, the mathematics of computation that underpins dynamic, mobile processes.

On today's battleground for economic growth, corporate sustainability, and process innovation, companies like General Electric, with its Digitization Initiative, are chasing the goal of 100% digitization of front-room—not just back-office—business processes. They're seeking hyper-efficiency and the agility needed to make course corrections in days and weeks, rather than months and years.

Companies that recognize the power of business-process management are arming themselves with capabilities for digitally deploying, managing, and representing processes on a scale previously unimaginable. They are discovering that traditional application development is no longer the prerequisite for process implementation since the BPMS can deploy new process designs in one step, directly and immediately—and include any other applications within the process design if required. [download PDF]

New BPM Book Promises to Obliterate the Business-IT Divide
Computer Sciences Corporation

A revolution in the way enterprises use information technology for competitive advantage is on the horizon, according to the new book Business Process Management: The Third Wave. Co-authored by CSC's European CTO Howard Smith and noted industry expert Peter Fingar, the book details breakthroughs in process management thinking that promise to deliver significant business benefits.

The book describes the past, present and future of Business Process Management (BPM) and states that today a fundamental shift in business infrastructure services is taking place - from stovepipe applications and associated "data processing," to dynamic connected processes and associated "process processing." What this means is that the lag time between management intent and execution will be greatly reduced, as well as enabling the creation and manipulation of a raft of new processes, never before explicitly supported by IT automation. [link to article]

Making Business Processes Manageable
WebServices Journal
What hat has surprised everyone in the last few years is how challenging it has been to actually do e-business. One of the reasons why this is so is that companies have found it difficult to manage their business processes, especially when they stretch across multiple systems, software applications, companies, and countries. That s about to change. [download PDF]

Integrated Value Chain, Here's What You Need to Know
Internet World
The Business Process Modeling Language (BPML) is the next frontier destined to give companies competitive advantage in managaing their value chain relationships. Large companies currently spend more than 30 percent of their IT budgets integrating their business applications under the banner of enterprise application integration (EAI), trying to get their internal act together for yet another step, business-to-business integration (B2Bi). Why are they going to all this effort and expense? They are tying together fragments of their stovepipe applications to create end-to-end, multi-company business processes those activities that bring ultimate value to customers. It is indeed the entire value chain, not a single company, that delivers the goods or services. Value chain management is now clearly recognized as the next frontier for gaining new productivity and competitive advantage. If end-to-end business processes are the focus of internal and cross-company integration, why not deal directly with the "business process" instead of "applications?" [download PDF]

Business Process Management Systems
Internet World
Business process innovation and improvement are now recognized as the paths to huge gains in productivity something companies are desperately seeking in the current down-turned economy. Unfortunately, our current software architectures and application development methods pose technical hurdles that block the execution of the Business Process Management (BPM) vision they simply were not designed to take companies beyond where they are today. Undaunted by current limitations, resourceful business and technology thinkers and doers have been busy charting a new path to productivity and pushing the technology envelope by placing business processes, their representation, and surrounding software architecture on center stage in the world of information technology. [download PDF]

The Next 50 Years: A Brief
Internet World
There is something worng with IT. something dreadfully wrong that goes all the way back to the beginning, to the advent of business computing in the 1950s. For the past 50 years, computers have been data machines providing systems-of-record that record the after-the-fact results of business activity. [download PDF]

The New MBA Curriculum
Internet World
While e-commerce and e-business monikers may have been M.B.A. marketing ploys, the real "e" is e-process. BPM, along with hands-on automated tools and live case studies, should be integrated into the core curriculum, including courses on operations management, managerial accounting, marketing and production management. [link to article]