Colosa Joins Red Hat Exchange

According to this article at TMC Net, Colosa has joined the Red Hat Exchange, the open source software and partner network.

Adding to the Red Hat Exchange, Colossa will contribute its expertise in helping to automate workflow and improving business processes. Its software, Process Maker, is already used by some government entities. This software specializes in automating intensive document processes that require approval. Some work areas appropriate for this type of software are finance, HR and operations. This system is web based, so it allows multiple worksites and is able to share workflow.

The Challenges of Being in the Middle

In a recent article at EWeek, Pedro Pereira takes a look at the challenges that solutions providers face due to being in the middle of the information flow process, many providing the business process management software we use today. As a result of the constantly changing business aspect, these providers have become business solutions providers. It’s their responsibility to align the business with technology, which as proven not to be easy.

When developing their products, not only do they have to fulfill the needs of the customer, but they also have to work with the vendors and distributors who put their products out in the market. The distributors are trying to sell the product, so they’re constantly vying for attention. The end user is using the products at home and as a result they bring their new expectations of the software at work.

But as the article points out, since the solutions providers are in the middle of the chain, they have the opportunity to see to both ends of the chain, making it easier to provide solutions to both ends.

Business Processes Change

In the shifting economy affecting the state of today’s state of business, many companies are finding ways to effectively reduce costs. In this article by Rajan Chandras, he discusses how many companies are currently neglecting the state of their business processes in order to focus on saving money. Companies know that they can’t pass the rising costs along to their customers, because their customers are also feeling squeezed from other places.

Chandras points out that by looking away from purchasing business process software that will increase the fluidity of their business in the future, companies are losing money. If companies took time to analyze their business process, they would in effect find ways to improve their current processes. Business process software can improve this, so why are so many companies hesitant to find the right business process software for them?

Is Business Process Outsourcing the way for your company?

More and more these days, business process outsourcing is becoming an important process of the business process management function. Some of the most common items: human resource management, document and data management, and customer relationship management. Americans have been seen to navigate towards companies in the east, such as China, India, Russia, and Malaysia.

So how to do you make the decision to do this? There are several important factors that are mentioned by this article at Life-PR:

1) Companies should have a clear idea of what they want to outsource

2) They should choose the correct business process outsourcer

3) A company should be fully prepared for delegating several functions to the outsourcer

Deloitte and Cisco join forces to Build Better BPM Network

In a news release this morning, Deloitte and Cisco announced plans to work together in order to create a better business process. They are working towards the collaborate goal to add Cisco’s network platform with Deloitte’s system which combines processes and consulting capabilities.

The agreement wishes to:

Collaboration on service development, education, training, sales and delivery. Deloitte and Cisco will initially focus their efforts on the development and delivery of services aimed at risk, compliance and performance management challenges.

The future of Business Process Management: BPM 2.0

Processes and applications working together in concert across the organization and leveraging compliant best practices with the help of SOA and workflow is a big step forward, but there is more to the story of running a competitive business today.

In a new post at Jim Sinur’s blog, he discusses the important processes. Sinur believes that the five points below will transform the way we see BPM today for the better:

• Processes Need to be Indeterminate

The processes must find a way to be more flexible and dynamic.

• Processes Need to Support Best Practice Discovery

BPM processes must not be stuck in one rut, and the must be able to figure out how the process is working. It should observe the patterns and figure out how the process can be adapted to the program.

• Processes Need to be Widely Inclusive

The processes can’t be limited to inside the organization. The program must know how to be cross functional.

• Processes Need to be Intelligent

The program would be able to identify anything going on in the programs, and then notify the users of the changes

• Processes Need to be Goal Driven

The process management could have several different outcomes that need to happen. The programs would then identify these, and determine the best plan of action to take in order to get the different processes to the one spot.

The Ruler of BPM Software

In a recent post at the BPM In Action blog, Dennis Byron spends time pondering who is the market leader in the business process management software market. According to a study recently released by Forrester, it’s IBM.

Why? According to Byron, BPM is a value proposition, and users buy tools to aide them according to the value proposition they are given. IBM is still growing in leaps and bounds because of the people maintaining and updating the IBM BPM software they already have. Other software on its way up in the BPM world: Fujitsu, Remedy and Sterling.

Adobe plays surprising role in BPM

In a recent post by Bruce Silver at the BPMS Blog, he observes the low-key role that Adobe is playing in the BPM software space. We all know Adobe for other reasons, such as Flash and Acrobat PDF readers. But they’ve also been working in the BPM Space. Why have they gone largely unnoticed? They approach BPM in a different way, and view normal BPM processes as commodities. They instead focus on positioning with User Engagement and provide the users with an effective user interface.

So what had Adobe added for this go round? They focus on content management. And a few other things: this is an OEM version of Alfresco’s open source ECM offering, tightly integrated with the LiveCycle development environment. They also provide auto content classification, retention management, and team collaboration.

Value Innovation meets BPM

Value innovation is important to recognize in any company. Value innovation happens when you recognize your current business processes and improve them. In this article at BPM Enterprise, they show this via McDonald’s recent business emphasis in coffee. They saw that by improving what they had, they could become a real competitor with Starbucks, and have after improving the value of their own product.

It’s important to recognize what can be improved in your current business processes. Processes that can be changed are business rules engines, workflow solutions, online credit reports, and online databases that can allow for value innovations to be added to the business processes. The business world is constantly changing and evolving, and it’s important that business recognize this. What processes in your company can be innovated to better suit your needs?

SOA is a Top Priority in 2008

According to this recent article in BPM Enterprise a survey conducted by the Link Group shows that businesses around the world are slowly moving from the adoption phase of SOA strategy to the actual deployment of SOA services and technologies. 300 clients were surveyed, and 50% of that sampling group is currently deploying SOA, and another 27% are planning on it in the near future.

SOA helps businesses realign its business goals, reduces costs, and drives more efficiency within the organization. It’s good to see that CEOs are finally seeing the value that SOA brings to business process management.

The City of Norfolk adopts BPM

It’s important in any business to know the processes, and ensure that all paperwork gets done. The City of Norfolk, Virginia was faced with dwindeling budgets, tons of forms, and humans to take care of them. At this point, Hap Cluff, the IT director for the city of Norfolk, decided he needed to find a way to automate these processes. He turned to BPM to help solve his problems. Watch his interview below:

New Source for BPM

The Aris blog, one of my favorite sources for BPM, has launched a YouTube Channel, with the desire to keep their readers up to date on what is going on with BPM. You can check out the new channel here, and watch the first video below:

BPM: How it works

In a recent article at BPM Enterprise, Michael Beckley sat down to discuss what he believes BPM is and how it works. His definition:

"Business process management is a method and technology for automating and analyzing how people and systems interact. It's a new way to provide visibility into how people and technology need to be coordinated."

And what are the benefits/goals of BPM? You can see all of your data in your business processes. It’s also easier to coordinate data so the business is more effectively run when using this data. BPM puts users in charge of the data system, and they are no longer at the mercy of unorganized data. Not only does it help users analyze processes across departments, but it also the technology and resources that help power effective BPM.

Savvion’s New Business Process Solution could be a Hit

The latest article in eBizQ highlights Savvion’s latest launch of its human-centric process solution through its leading BPM platform. What makes this application special is that it will support process automation from beginning to start enabling collaboration between IT professions, business users, developers, architects, and the rest of employees within the organization.

Kevin Schmidt, director of SOA product management at Sun Microsystems mentions:

"We saw in Savvion BusinessManager a strong product that helps customers build human workflow into composite applications, along with its intuitive process modeling and simulation tools, giving business users a more active role in conceptualizing, defining and refining SOA-enabled processes and applications."

Designing an application around the way people actually work is a change for BPM solutions, one that will allow for greater flexibility and control of business processes in the enterprise.

BPM: Beneficial for operating across borders

Often times, many companies have issues keeping up with their paperwork when growing by double digits. When a process hasn’t been created which keeps papers, documents, and bills streamlining into a smooth process for all parts of a company. If this isn’t worked out, there can be many errors, and lost papers, along the paper trail to the financial office. An example of this was recently profiled in Express Computer.

Kuoni Travel Group saw double digit growing and realized that they had to come up with a better way to manage the financial means. They turned to Newgens, a BPM solution provider that allowed them to help them organize their system. Newgen worked with Price Waterhouse Cooper in order to implement this new BPM process across all divisions of Kuoni Travel Group. The main areas that were helped by this new BPM process were Accounts Payable, Accounts Receivable and many internal-approval processes.

Here were the benefits they saw coming from this BPM process:

• By centralizing and detaching the finance function, the solution helped Kuoni to focus on its core business.
• Process transparency and efficiency came about thanks to automated task assignment, tighter monitoring and control due to higher process visibility, and easy tracking by recording the transaction trail.
• Reduced paperwork, and therefore, easier storage, routing and archival of documents became possible.
• Better sharing and collaboration of data to facilitate quick and informed decision making has been enabled.
• Reduced manpower costs resulting due to automation of tasks.
• Freeing expensive office space, which is being used to provide employees recreational facilities and for other administrative functions.
• Better risk management and compliance capabilities.

A Starting Point When Searching For BPM Applications

Implementation of BPM systems and products can be a long hard decision, so which one is the right one for your organization to select? Luckily, this article on CIO lists the following leaders in BPM suites and development platforms:

Pegasystems

The SmartBPM Suite is a highly integrated product with many features to support agility, accelerate the modeling of process workflow and deploy applications across a variety of thin-client and rich-client user interfaces.

Savvion

BusinessManager 7.0 is one of the most mature BPM suites, able to handle high-volume workflows requiring tight coordination of people and systems. Boasts process-modeling and repository tools that are accessible to business users.

Lombardi

Provides an environment for incremental, business-driven process improvement. Lombardi Teamworks 6 earns high marks from both business and IT. BEA Systems | Its AquaLogic BPM Suite lets business users collaborate with IT during all phases of the business process life cycle. However, integration with other BEA middleware products is a work in progress.

Tibco

Business Studio 2.0 is an Eclipse-based, unified design environment that supports business process analysts and developers and is compliant with key standards. Provides a highly graphical process simulation tool. Integration with other Tibco middleware needs work.

Metastorm |

As the leading BPM vendor on the Microsoft platform, it has broadened its suite with a string of acquisitions. Built-in rule processing technology is "somewhat simplistic," although the suite supports external rules engines like Fair Isaac's Blaze Advisor or Microsoft's BizTalk Server Business Rules Engine.

Appian

Appian Enterprise provides a thin-client architecture for design time and run time, which also allows the company to offer a software-as-a-service version of the system known as Appian Anywhere. Another strength is a complimentary business intelligence product, Analytics Everywhere, for analysis of process data.

IBM

IBM brings a broad array of technologies, consulting resources and partners to bear on accelerating user adoption of BPM as a management discipline. IBM's BPM strategy encompasses many products from divisions including WebSphere, Lotus, Tivoli, FileNet and Rational, so that customers are presented with a menu of choices rather than a single suite.

Global 360

Best known for its Process360 BPMS for the Microsoft platform, although it also offers process management components (including some for the Java server market) for those enterprises that don't want to purchase a full suite.

Software AG

Its webMethods BPMS appeals to business users that need to continuously modify and improve business processes via a model-driven approach, while also addressing IT requirements such as process life-cycle governance.

Others

Gartner ranked Oracle and Adobe as challengers with a less complete vision of BPM, and identified SunGard as a visionary that needs to improve its ability to execute. Since the report was published, Oracle has completed the acquisition of BEA and broadened its BPM portfolio.

With these tools, execution within your company’s business process management system will surely improve.

EA and BPM: Is EA needed for BPM?

In a recent post at the ARIS BPM blog, Olaf Geyer addresses the question of whether EA is needed for BPM.

EA is structured information about an organization that is used to support the decision making process on strategic, operational and tactical levels, these things all include BPM. EA allows you to decide to better run your organizations processes, and give you the framework to structure this over time.

There are many EA frameworks, some of which include Togaf, Dodaf, and Aris. All of these give the tools and ideas to companies of how to structure their organizations.

In essence, EA manages BPM, allowing for the governance, creation, maintenance, and analysis of all architecture information needed for the project.