Business Process Trends

New Features in June

This month we welcome Alec Sharp to our world class team of BPTrends Columnists. Alec is a Senior Consultant at Clariteq Consulting Systems where he has been delivering consulting and education services to organizations world wide for 30 years. He is the author of the recently released 2nd edition of Workflow Modeling. Alec's Column provides his perspectives on business analysis and modeling as well as a broader range of topics included in Business Process Management. We are happy to have Alec on board.

Calendar of Events

Following is a list of upcoming conferences where BPTrends will be participating and presenting:

KPMG 5th IT Forum - June 23, 2009, Athens, Greece
International Society for Performance Improvement (ISPI) Fall Conference. September 24, 2009. St. Louis, MO
BPM Conference Europe. September 28-30, 2009. London, England
International Business Rules Forum. Nov 1-5, 2009. Las Vegas, NV

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BPTrends Monthly Email Advisors

	6/16 Customers and Business Processes Some theorists would like to separate customers from processes, imagining that processes are operations and that customers are outside the scope of process redesign. This is a dangerous idea that can seriously undermine the value of process improvement efforts. It is especially inappropriate in organizations that focus on providing services. Download PDF
	6/30 Business Process Problems Here's a quick overview of the kinds of problems that business process practitioners confront. A process redesign team ignores any one of these problem areas at its peril. Incomplete redesigns come back to haunt the team that thought they could solve a specific problem while ignoring other key problems. Download PDF

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BPTrends Spotlight

6/23 Balanced Scorecard
Kaplan and Norton's Balanced Scorecard, including its associated model that ties strategy to processes, is one of the major contributions that business school theorists have made to Business Process Management. In this Spotlight, we consider some of the many Articles we have published on Scorecards.
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Columns

Extreme Competition: Cloud Oriented Business Architecture
Are you still up in the air about Cloud Computing? If you are, then you are precisely the reader Peter Fingar seeks to address in this month's Column. Not known for being shy about embracing new technologies, Peter believes Cloud Computing to be the next step in the evolution of the Internet as a source of services, and he presents a convincing argument for his belief.
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MDA Journal: XBRL and Semantic Interoperability
Dave Frankel has written extensively in previous BPTrends MDA Journals about issues relating to semantic interoperability. This month, he addresses foreseeable problems with XBRL, the eXtensible Business Reporting Language being mandated by governments world wide for various kinds of compliance reporting. Sound complicated? Dave provides a clear and concise description of the language and the potential issues surrounding it.
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Down Under: Beyond Process Improvement, on to Process Transformation
Why are CEO's reluctant to apply BPM at the enterprise level when their organizations have experienced successful Process Improvement implementations? An enduring question and one that has fascinated and perplexed practitioners for years. In this month's Column, John Jeston and Johan Nelis offer their take on the matter.
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Business Rules Solutions: RuleSpeak® Sentence Forms
Of primary importance in effective business communication is capturing and expressing Business Rules. This month, Ron Ross presents a guide to writing Business Rules that will ensure that they are more easily understood and that practitioners who are working with large sets of Business Rules express the same ideas in the same way. You will want to download this useful Column for future reference.
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A Practitioner's Perspective: Boxes, Lines, Widgets and Words—Managing Detail and Perspective in Models
In his first Column for BPTrends, Alec Sharp wastes no time in taking up one of the major areas of misunderstanding and disagreement in business process—that of modeling. Alec demystifies various modeling approaches and asserts that one size does not fit all. The "right" approach varies with context and audience. Read his Column for sage advice on process modeling derived from his vast experience as a BPM practitioner.
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Articles

A Day in the Life of...
Mike Gammage of Nimbus Partners imagines a day in the life of the CEO of a pharmaceutical company whose commitment to continuous process improvement leads to successful results that benefit the entire enterprise. For a story with a happy ending, read Mike's imaginative Article.
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Gaining Ground in a Recession: Two Smart Ways to Save Big and Perform Better
Laura Mooney, Vice President of Corporate Communications at Metastorm, argues that there are better ways to survive the recession than cutting people, budgets and travel. Read Laura's Article for two solutions that could save jobs and add significantly to the bottom line.
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On the Maturity of Open Source BPM Systems
In this Article, Petia Wohed, Arthur H. M. ter Hofstede, Nick Russell, Birger Andersson, and Wil M. P. van der Aalst present the results of their examination of existing Open Source BPM systems. Their conclusions are illuminating for both Open Source developers as well as the user community. Read their Article for the details of their study.
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Book Review

Business Modeling: A Practical Guide to Realizing Business Value by David M. Bridgeland and Ron Zahavi
This new book on modeling takes a broad perspective informed by the modeling standards evolving at the OMG. Bridgeland and Zahavi have both been active in OMG modeling standards efforts and they provide an introduction to the OMG standards while providing practitioners with hints about how to use these standards in practice.
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