Last BPM Think Tank post, I’ll summarize the notes on the roundtables that I didn’t attend, based on the 3-5 minute summary that each facilitator presented.
Rules and Process (Paul Vincent):
- Defined types of rules
- Handling business decisions within processes
- How to separate and model rules from process at design time
BPM and Microsoft Technologies (Burley Kawasaki):
- My commentary on the notes from this session: seemed to be an ad for Microsoft technologies rather than much to do with BPM. Not sure why the Think Tank agreed to hold such a vendor-specific roundtable.
ERP and BPM (Dave Frankel):
- Goal to break down silos in ERP to enable BPM
- Orchestration of reusable services is not sufficient for processes; need event-driven layered process delegation
- Need a common data exchange model for ERP system, and an accepted scope for that common model
Goals of BPM Standards (Bruce Silver):
- Standards reduce risk but never seem to quite get there in terms of portability of process models and interoperability
- What’s required for portability? The following were suggested, although not everyone agrees on the last two:
- Identical business meaning
- Identical graphical view
- Identical at execution point
- How standards gets created: a small group of people who are passionate about it and have employers who pay their salary (and usually expenses) to get involved
Metrics:
- Types of metrics: time, quality, cost, value
- Measures tend to be lagging but would be more effective if they were leading/real-time
BPM in the Federal Government (George Thomas):
- [I assume that this means the US Federal Government…]
- Much of the BPM work is to operationalize activity-based costing, and requires integrated BI
- Horizontal interoperability required across government departments
- Need to institutionalize knowledge before the boomers retire
- Problems with immaturity of current tools and standards
- BPM is today’s version of a monolithic application, and needs to decouple model from execution
- Struggles with ongoing legacy modernization
Competencies/Skills for BPM:
- Mapping target population (business, IT, process experts that span business-IT) to organizational results; use this to create training program
- Top management needs to believe in a process-centric organization: must understand how jobs are accomplished, how IT Is used to achieve goals, and enough knowledge to understand IT decisions
- Line management must become metric-driven and knowledgeable about the processes in which they participate, and collaborate across functional silos
- Performers must be expert at process execution and be workflow-savvy
BPM and Business Frameworks:
- Like some other groups, spent half of their time defining BPM
- Lots of noise in the industry about BPM and frameworks
- Need to understand how to engage the business