The top Column 2 posts of 2019

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about my post that has had the most visits over all time, a 2007 post on policies, procedures, processes and rules.

Here’s what was the most popular in 2020:

  1. That same 2007 post, Policies, procedures, processes and rules. Obviously, this theme strikes deep with a broad range of people, and a recent comment on that post was from someone who had used it as a source in developing definitions for the PMI’s Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK).
  2. An even older post from 2005, Adaptive approaches. This is about application development and deployment methodologies, and would now be called “Agile”. I also talk about my usual method of “get something simpler into production sooner”, which would now be called “minimum viable product”. The only thing that has really changed here is terminology.
  3. The first product-related post, my 2012 post Introduction to AWD 10. I was at the user conference for DST Systems, now part of SS&C Technologies, and wrote about what I saw at a session where they presented the new product version.
  4. Another terminology post, this one from 2017: What’s in a name? BPM and DPA. This was prompted by Forrester’s move to relabel business process management (BPM) systems as Digital Process Automation (DPA), and the ongoing confusion in terminology. This problem continues today, with Gartner sticking to the term iBPMS (Intelligent BPM Suite) but shifting it to mean low-code application development platform.
  5. The first that was originally published in 2019, Snowed in at the OpenText Analyst Summit 2019. In the midst of a massive snowstorm (I arrived on one of the last flights before the airport shut down), I attended OpenText’s analyst meetup in Boston, and this post was on the main keynote featuring CEO Mark Barrenechea’s vision for their future product direction.
  6. From the 2019 bpmNEXT conference, bpmNEXT 2019 demos: microservices, robots and intentional processes with Bonitasoft, Signavio and Flowable. My conference live-blogging is usually popular with those who can’t make it to the conference themselves, but this post was likely read more than most because it covered the Flowable chatbot + CMMN demo that went on to win the “Best in Show” award.
  7. Another throwback to 2005, Shallow vs. Deep Knowledge. I was writing in response to a post from EDS that said that they believe that someone working on a business application based on vendor components really had to see the vendor’s source code to do this right. I disagreed.
  8. A post on service-oriented architecture standards from 2009, The Open Group’s Service Integration Maturity Model and SOA Governance Framework. This was the result of a briefing that I had with them in advance of the standards’ release; to be honest, I’ve never used these frameworks and have no idea how broadly they were adopted.
  9. A post from this year’s academic BPM conference in Vienna, Day 1 @BPMConf opening keynote: Kalle Lyytinen on the role of BPM in design and business model innovation. The keynote discussed the concept of digital intensity, namely, the degree to which digitalization is required to perform a task, and how technology is changing the way that we do things on a micro level.
  10. Another post from the academic BPM conference, Workshop at @BPMConf on BPM in the era of Digital Innovation and Transformation. This workshop day preceded the keynote mentioned above, and covered a number of talks on digital transformation. This is the only one of the top 10 posts for 2019 that covers a presentation that I made, since I was invited to give a short talk at the end of the workshop.

I blogged quite a bit less in 2019 (in fact, my blogging has been a bit slow the past couple of years) although I had a lot of activity around conferences and a few product briefings. I’ve been fairly active on Twitter, and I’m looking at ways to bring together some of the links that I post there onto the blog for more discussion.

Looking forward to 2020!

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