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White Papers & Technical Briefs

White Papers are in depth essays that explore a specific topic of interest to business process change managers, such as an emerging trend, a particular methodology or a standards initiative. Technical Briefs are shorter papers. All White Papers and Technical Briefs are written by individuals with specific expertise in, or knowledge of, the topic of the essay. All White Papers and Technical Briefs are listed here in the order they were initially posted to this site, beginning with the most recent posting.
  • Case Management: Combining Knowledge with Process
    Michael White - July 07, 2009
    Michael White of Singularity examines case management as it relates to the way knowledge workers do their jobs and the difficulties entailed in automating knowledge intensive processes. Read this thorough-going analysis to learn how a BPM approach can overcome those difficulties.
  • EFQM
    Celia Wolf - July 03, 2007
    In this Technical Brief, Celia Wolf provides a brief description of the European Foundation for Quality Management and its EFQM Excellence Model, widely used for audits and benchmarking in Europe.
  • Errors in the SAP Reference Model
    Jan Mendling - June 06, 2006
    This paper is a summary of research on the correctness and completeness of the SAP Reference Model that has been undertaken by Jan Mendling, Wil Van der Aalst, Boudewijn van Dongen, and Eric Verbeek. The researchers identified errors in 5.6% of the 600 processes in the model.
  • BPM Process Patterns
    Dan Atwood - May 02, 2006
    This Whitepaper provides a great introduction to both BPMN and the idea of process patterns. Dan Atwood is Director of Education for BEA Systems. Before that he was a Fuego Project Manager and led the Business Integration Journal’s 2004 BPM project of the year. In this paper, he defines 15 core BPM process modeling patterns and comments on when the patterns typically occur in BPMS projects.
  • BPM and SOA: A Strategic Alliance
    Gopala Krishna Behara - May 02, 2006
    Dr. Gopala Krishna Behara of Wipro Technologies provides a discussion of the relationship between SOA and BPM and suggests why, together, they provide such a great combination for enterprise computing.
  • Stakeholder Analysis: The Key to Balanced Performance Measures
    Robert Curtice - April 03, 2006
    Robert Curtice is the Vice President of Performance Improvement Associates and has spent several years helping companies establish Balanced Performance Measures that can be systematically tied to process measures. In this paper, he describes why it is important and how it can be done.
  • The Business of SOA: Evolving An Agile Enterprise With Service Oriented Architecture
    Jerry Huchzemeier - March 07, 2006
    Jerry Huchzermeier, a founding partner and CTO of Proforma, has spent the past several months talking with clients to determine just how they will use SOA and what features a business process tool will need to support corporate development in the years ahead. In this important White Paper, he discusses the role he believes SOA will play and the features modeling products will need to support SOA development.
  • Getting Past the First BPMS Project
    Derek Miers - March 07, 2006
    As BPMS takes off within the organization, the challenge becomes one of delivering on the promise across a broad front. Derek Miers describes a general methodology for approaching BPMS projects. This White Paper presents a wide variety of best practice tips and pitfalls to avoid, highlighting the experiences of several major enterprises pursuing business transformation via BPMS.
  • Human Performance Technology
    Donald Tosti - February 07, 2006
    Donald Tosti is one of the leading consultants in Human Performance Technology and the past-president of the International Society for Performance Improvement. In this White Paper he provides an overview of the HPT approach which focuses on improving processes by improving the performance of the people who implement the process.
  • Management, The Process
    Michael Lodato - February 07, 2006
    In this Whitepaper, Michael Lodato focuses on what managers have to do to assure that business processes run efficiently, day-in and day-out. This excellent paper reminds us that analyzing and designing the management of a process is often as important as figuring out how the process works.
  • From CIO to CPO via BPM
    Howard Smith - January 03, 2006
    Last month, we published a Technical Note by Howard Smith pointing to this new BPM Whitepaper he has written for CSC. This month, we are posting the paper itself to make it a permanent part of the BPTrends BPM archive. Many readers probably first learned of BPM systems when they read the CSC Whitepaper, The Emergence of Business Process Management, which Howard Smith co-authored in January of 2002. This new paper provides the latest insights of one of the most important thinkers on the BPM scene.
  • The Move to Web Service Ecosystems
    Alistair Barros - December 06, 2005
    In this thoughtful paper, Alistair Barros, of SAP Research, and Marlon Dumas, of Queensland University of Technology, Australia, consider the evolution of Web Service Ecosystems and how such environments will support business process management systems.
  • BPM Works
    Howard Smith - December 06, 2005
    Howard Smith provides a brief introduction to his recently published CSC White Paper: From CIO to CPO via BPM: The Next Generation of Enterprise Automation.
  • How Boeing A&T Manages Business Process
    Pamela Garretson - November 01, 2005
    Attendees at the last two DCI BPM conferences have had an opportunity to hear Pam Garretson describe how Boeing’s Airlift & Tanker group manages business processes. Many regard this Baldrige Award winning group as having one of the very best business process management systems in the world. It integrates process management, process modeling, performance metrics, monitoring and intervention programs into a single system that deals with process problems across the organization. This White Paper provides a detailed look at how Boeing A&T manages business processes.
  • Human Capital Management Planning
    Gopala Krishna Behara - November 01, 2005
    In this broad survey, Gopala Krishna Behara of Wipro Technologies considers the basic concepts of Human Capital Management and shows how these concepts can be applied by business process consultants to effect savings and resource optimization.
  • The Mists of Six Sigma
    Alan Ramias - October 04, 2005
    Alan Ramias worked at MTEC, which later became Motorola University, during the Eighties when Six Sigma was born and evolved. In this article he sorts through the various myths surrounding Six Sigma and provides an insightful look at the real origins of Six Sigma.
  • Service-Oriented Design: Part IV: Business Process Design
    Thomas Erl - October 04, 2005
    Thomas Erl has just published a major book titled Service-Oriented Architecture: Concepts, Technology, and Design (Prentice-Hall, 2005. 760pp. $44.99). This is a book for IT analysts and designers who need a technical understanding of SOA. Chapter 16, which we reproduce here, provides an introduction to BPEL basics, to WS-Coordination, and a step-by-step introduction to service-oriented business process design.
  • The Fusion of Process and Knowledge Management
    September 06, 2005
    In this interesting paper, Russell Records, the Technical Director of CSC Consulting in Texas, considers the possible links between Process Management and Knowledge Management. He makes a great case for carefully aligning KM systems with business processes and considers how some tools might support such an effort.
  • Workflow and Business Rules: a Common Approach
    September 06, 2005
    Heinz Lienhard and Urs-Martin Kunzi, of Switzerland’s ivyTeam-SORECOGroup, consider how Business Rules should be combined with workflow. Rules can be developed independently, but the authors argue that it is much more productive to combine the two approaches using the latest software tools.
  • The Six Sigma Market
    Celia Wolf - September 06, 2005
    In this short piece, Celia Wolf and Paul Harmon offer an overview of the technologies being used by practitioners in the current Lean Six Sigma market, and then do some calculations and conclude that today’s Six Sigma consultancies are earning around $200 million a year, and growing steadily.
  • Workshop Proceedings: The Process modelling Group, Eindhoven, June 2005
    September 06, 2005
    In July we published a short report on the meeting of Petri Net and Pi Calculus gurus that took place June 6-8 in Eindhoven, in the Netherlands. Here is the complete report. Obviously these were rather technical discussions, and not for everyone. If you are going to be building BPM software systems, however, and have an interest in the technical foundations of Pi Calculus or Petri Nets, you will probably find them interesting.
  • BPM: Driving Business Performance
    Derek Miers - July 05, 2005
    This White Paper by Derek Miers, Consultant, lead author of the BPTrends BPM Suites Report, and Co-Chair of BPMI, provides an overview of the issues that are driving businesses to embrace Business Process Management.
  • Modeling Human Interactions: Part II
    Keith Harrison-Broninski - July 05, 2005
    Keith Harrison-Broninski has recently published a new book, Human Interactions, (Meghan-Kiffer Press, 2005) This is the second of a two part article we are publishing based on a chapter from his book describing Keith’s approach.
  • Modeling Human Interactions: Part I
    Keith Harrison-Broninski - June 07, 2005
    Keith Harrison-Broninski has recently published a new book, Human Interactions, (Meghan-Kiffer Press, 2005) This is the first of a two part article we are publishing from one of his chapters to give readers the flavor of Keith’s approach.
  • The Evolution of Business Process Management as a Professional Discipline
    Sandra Lusk - June 07, 2005
    The Association for Business Process Professionals (ABPMP) is a group of individuals who are working to define professional standards for practitioners. In this article three ABPMP members, Sandra Lusk, Staci Paley, and Andrew Spanyi, describe the ABPMP’s goals and describe, in more detail, their recent efforts to define standards for professional education.
  • Our Event Horizon -- The Boundary of Our Organization
    Brian Dickinson - May 03, 2005
    Some BPM systems provide managers with information by tracking and reporting on the events that occur within a process. Thus, if you want to design a process that can be well regulated it pays to think about the events in a process. In this article, drawn from his book, Creating Customer Focused Organizations, Brian Dickinson provides an in-depth discussion of events.
  • A Report From the Petri and Pi Working Group
    Wil van der Aalst - May 03, 2005
    Wil van der Aalst, one of the leaders of a group that will meet in June to discuss the theoretical foundations for BPM systems, describes the groups’ objectives.
  • Using BPMN to Model a BPEL Process
    Stephen White - March 01, 2005
    Stephen White, IBM’s BPM architect and the Chair of the BPMI’s BPMN task force, walks readers through a step-by-step example of exactly how a BPMN model can be used to generate BPEL code.
  • Enhancing BPM with Simulation Optimization
    Jay April - January 04, 2005
    Jay April, Marco Better and James P. Kelly of OptTek provide a detailed discussion of how Optimization can be used to significantly increase the power of simulation. These techniques provide business process analysts with powerful tools that can be used to determine the effectiveness of a redesigned process.
  • Ultimus + BizTalk Server 2004
    Rashid Khan - January 04, 2005
    This White Paper by Ultimus explains how Ultimus integrates its popular BPM Suite with Microsoft’s BizTalk Server 2004. This provides a nice, practical look at how BizTalk Server can be used to support a BPM Suite.
  • BPM and Standardization
    Antoine Lonjon - December 07, 2004
    BPM standardization has been a hot issue throughout the course of 2004. In this White Paper, Antoine Lonjon, the Chief Architect of Mega International, who has played a major role in many standards efforts, reviews where the various BPM standards are today.
  • Simulation on Demand: Using SIMPROCESS in an SOA Environment
    Joe DeFee - November 02, 2004
    Lots of companies use simulation in the course of developing or revising a new business process. In this paper, Joe DeFee shows how simulations, initially created to test a new process, can be saved and made available, via browsers, to managers responsible for the day to day use of the process, enabling them to examine the likely effects of future changes or the implications of trends.
  • Implementing the Semantic Business Development Control Center
    Dieter Jenz - November 02, 2004
    This month Dieter Jenz provides another installment in his series of articles on the problems of defining corporate ontologies. This article focuses on the creation of a Business Process Management Ontology and a Control Center that Jenz has developed that is designed to be compatible with BPMN and the OMG’s upcoming Ontology standard.
  • Leveraging Business Process Management and Six Sigma in Process Improvement Initiatives
    Forrest Breyfogle - October 05, 2004
    In this article, Forrest Breyfogle, the President of Smarter Solutions, a well-known Six Sigma consultancy, describes how they used Lombardi Software’s BPM suite to enhance the value of a Six Sigma project. We expect that lots of other Six Sigma groups will be using BPM suites in similar efforts and will find the description of this project useful.
  • ITIL
    Celia Wolf - October 05, 2004
    Celia Wolf has been looking at a number of business process frameworks. In this short technical brief, she describes how a UK standard, the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) is rapidly becoming an international, de facto standard for companies that want to define and improve IT Service Management processes.
  • Business Information System Design Based on Business Patterns and Frameworks
    Oscar Barros - September 07, 2004
    Software patterns have proven a very effective way to organize knowledge among software developers. In this paper, Dr. Oscar Barros of the University of Chile, describes how process patterns and frameworks can be used to encapsulate and communicate high level business process knowledge in IT development efforts.
  • Introduction to BPMN
    Stephen White - July 06, 2004
    Steve White, the Chair of the BPMI’s BPMN Task Force, provides readers with an introduction to the new business process notation that BPMI has recently developed. In our opinion, this is the best introduction, to date, to this new notation, and every reader who is interested in learning about BPMN will want to read this overview.
  • A Conceptual Framework for Business Performance
    Michael Anthony - June 01, 2004
    A Conceptual Framework for Business Performance Michael Anthony of International Performance Group, Ltd. has written a thought-provoking paper discussing how one maps the performance space, dividing it into an area where processes are well understood and under management’s control, and another area were processes are ambiguous or unknown. He then proceeds to discuss strategies for extending what is known.
  • The Challenge of Process Discovery
    Laury Verner - May 01, 2004
    Laury Verner has spent the past several years working with companies that are trying to define processes. In this white paper he identifies the major challenges to process discovery and suggests the best practices that he relies on in his engagements.
  • re/Organizing a Department in 9 Steps
    Danny Langdon - May 01, 2004
    Danny Langdon and Kathleen Whiteside, the principles of Performance International, a company that specializes in helping companies solve human and organizational performance problems, describe a systematic approach to reorganizing a department. Serious process redesigns usually involve changing organizations and jobs. Langdon and Whiteside offer some good advice about how to go about it.(
  • TMF White Paper on NGOSS and MDA
    John Strassner - April 06, 2004
    The TeleManagement Forum has been working on a business process framework, eTOM, and an associated enterprise framework, NGOSS. In this paper, John Strassner, Joel Fleck, Jenny Huang, Cliff Faurer and Tony Richardson describe the similarities between the TMF’s NGOSS program and the OMG’s MDA initiative.
  • Pattern Based Analysis of BPEL4WS
    Petia Wohed - April 06, 2004
    In February, we published a paper by Stephen White in which he compared UML and BPMN by showing how each would handle a series of standard workflow patterns. This paper, by Petia Wohed, Wil M.P.van der Aalst, Marlon Dumas and Arthur H.M. ter Hofstede reports on research at Queensland University of Technology that compares BPEL4WS to the same standard workflow patterns.
  • BPMN and Business Process Management
    Martin Owen - March 02, 2004
    Martin Owen and Jog Raj, software architects at Popkin Software who recently added BPMN to System Architect, provide a systematic introduction to BPMN and discuss how it can be used.
  • Process Modeling Notations and Workflow Patterns
    Stephen White - March 02, 2004
    Stephen White, the chair of the BPMI’s Business Process Management Notation (BPMN) task force and IBM WebSphere BPM Architect, presents a paper that describes each of the 21 workflow patterns that Wil van der Alst and associates have identified. He models each, first in BPMN and then using UML Activity Diagrams, showing the strengths and weaknesses of each.
  • Business Activity Monitoring and Simulation
    Joseph DeFee - February 03, 2004
    Joseph DeFee, an SVP of CACI. has teamed up with Paul Harmon to provide a detailed study of what’s involved in BAM and how simulation systems can be developed to provide in-depth support for managers who are trying to control complex business processes in real time.
  • The Split Personality of BPM
    Derek Miers - February 03, 2004
    Derek Miers offers a wide-ranging exploration of the link between business strategy, process architectures, and BPM technology. This paper suggests how BPM systems can be integrated with other approaches and techniques to provide both procedural control and agility.
  • Enterprise Architecture Modernization Using the Adaptive Enterprise Framework
    Mark Nelson - January 06, 2004
    Mark Nelson, the managing partner of The Mercator Group, has written a wide-ranging, thoughtful study of how companies approach enterprise architecture improvement that includes consideration of the rule of process modeling, the Adaptive Enterprise Framework, and the OMG's Model Driven Architecture.
  • BPEL for Programmers and Architects
    Paul Brown - January 06, 2004
    Paul Brown and Maciej Szefler of FiveSight Technologies recently created a presentation that provides a nice introduction to the basics of BPEL. Unlike most slide presentations that can't be understood without the accompanying talk, these slides largely stand on their own.
  • Ontology-Based Business Process Management: The Vision Statement
    Dieter Jenz - December 02, 2003
    Dieter Jenz has written a series of papers describing the state of the art in developing and using ontologies to help formalize the description of business processes. In this paper he summarizes he approach and provides his vision for ontology-based BPM.
  • Modeling & Simulation in Business Management
    Mike Barnett - November 04, 2003
    This white paper was prepared by Mike Barnett, the Director of Consulting for Gensym Corporation. It provides readers with a technical introduction to the problems of using simulation to analyze and improve business process designs.
  • Unisys Business Blueprints
    Paul Harmon - November 04, 2003
    In this white paper, Paul Harmon looks at how Unisys is using the OMG's Model Driven Architecture approach to offer companies a significantly improved approach to both best-of-breed applications and BPO.
  • Sarbanes-Oxley Express
    October 07, 2003
    This white paper, prepared by Proforma, provides an overview of the Sarbanes-Oxley challenge, and describes a ProVision-based approach that is working for some Proforma clients.
  • The TeleManagement Forum's NGOSS Framework
    Celia Wolf - September 02, 2003
    Celia Wolf provides a brief description of how the TeleManagement Forum is extending its eTOM and NGOSS telecom buisness process models and where they hope to go next.
  • The Zachman Framework and the OMG's Model Driven Architecture
    Dave Frankel, et al - September 02, 2003
    A team of experts who are working on the development of the OMG's new Model Driven Architecture (MDA) consider how the MDA maps to the Zachman Framework, a popular approach to modeling enterprise architectures.
  • BPM and MDA: Competitors, Alternatives or Complementary
    Howard Smith - July 01, 2003
    Howard Smith, CTO of CSC Europe, co-chair of BPMI.org, and co-author, with Peter Finger, of Business Process Management: The Third Wave, has written a thoughtful response to Dave Frankel's white paper, BPM and MDA: The Rise of Model-Driven Enterprise Systems, posted to BPTrends in June. Anyone interested in the future of MDA or business process XML languages is going to want to follow this exchange.
  • Business Process Ontologies: Speeding up BP Implementation
    Dieter Jenz - July 01, 2003
    Dieter Jenz describes how some companies are creating systematic vocabularies to describe the elements of their businesses. These specialized ontologies provide a basis for new efforts in communication and for the formalization of business rule systems.
  • Performance Modeling & Human Asset Enabler Analysis
    Guy Wallace - July 01, 2003
    Guy Wallace, a consultant and the current president of ISPI, has spent his career helping companies improve employee performance. In this paper, he describes an approach to identifying problems with processes and determining the human assets needed to solve the problems.
  • SCOR 6.0
    Celia Wolf - July 01, 2003
    Celia Wolf provides a brief description of how the latest release of the Supply Chain Council's SCOR model, SCOR 6.0, has been extended to support a retail delivery process.
  • BPM and MDA: The Rise of Model-Driven Enterprise Systems
    David Frankel - June 01, 2003
    David Frankel is a member of the OMG’s Architecture Board and one of the leading gurus behind the OMG’s new Model Driven Architecture initiative. In this thoughtful paper, he considers how MDA and Business Process Management (i.e. XML business process languages) will need to be integrated to have the impact their developers seek for them. Together, Frankel argues, these two new modeling technologies can integrate enterprise systems development and create a variety of new business opportunities.
  • Technical Brief: Conducting a Business Process Audit
    Celia Wolf - June 01, 2003
    Celia Wolf provides a brief description of the Business Process Performance Audit, a tool that can help organizations understand where they stand today and to chart a course for significant improvements in the future.
  • Technical Brief: The Evolution of the Balanced Scorecard
    Paul Harmon - May 04, 2003
    Paul Harmon provides a brief description of Robert Kaplan and David P. Norton's Balanced Scorecard concept and discusses how their approach to performance measurement has evolved over the past few years.
  • Technical Brief: The Market for Packaged Applications
    Celia Wolf - April 05, 2003
    Celia Wolf describes the Packaged Applications market, provides some definitions that emphasize how they can be used for business process automation, and estimates the overall size of the market.
  • Technical Brief: Current Projects of the WfMC and BPMI
    Mike Gilger - April 05, 2003
    Mike Gilger, the CTO of Identitech, Inc. and the chair of the joint working group of the WfMC and BPMI organizations, provides a short summary of the three joint standards efforts currently being undertaken by the two organizations.
  • A Study of Strategic Change, Process Alignment, and Notation: FNGC Tap Process - Part 1
    Michael Anthony - March 04, 2003
    Michael Anthony, the President and CEO of International Performance Group, Ltd., provides a step-by-step explanation of how he would approach modeling a fictitious natural gas company's Pipeline Tap Process. This is a very detailed study of the practical problems involved in defining a model, the business rules necessary to establish business process requirements, and the use of business process notation. The paper is split so it will be easier to download. Part 1 is the body of the paper. Part 2 includes appendices of notation.
  • A Study of Strategic Change, Process Alignment, and Notation: FNGC Tap Process Part 2
    Michael Anthony - March 04, 2003
    Michael Anthony, the President and CEO of International Performance Group, Ltd., provides a step-by-step explanation of how he would approach modeling a fictitious natural gas company's Pipeline Tap Process. This is a very detailed study of the practical problems involved in defining a model, the business rules necessary to establish business process requirements, and the use of business process notation. The paper is split so it will be easier to download. Part 1 is the body of the paper. Part 2 includes appendices of notation
  • Integrating Business Process Models with UML System Models
    Eugene McSheffrey - March 04, 2003
    This White Paper, by Popkin Senior Consultant, Eugene McSheffrey, describes how one can move from business process models to UML models, and shows how Popkin's System Architect facilitates the move.
  • Technical Brief: Business Process Management: Past, Present, Future
    Wil M. P. van der Aalst - February 04, 2003
    Professor Wil M. P. van der Aalst, co-author of the recent book: Workflow Management: Models, Methods and Systems (MIT Press, 2002) and an advocate of workflow patterns, describes the challenges workflow vendors and developers face as they seek to create next generation workflow systems.
  • Technical Brief: An Air Travel Security Planning Map
    Carol Panza - January 06, 2003
    Carol Panza explains how organizational mapping can help managers understand all of the processes involved in a given strategy. In this case she shows how she worked with airline managers to figure out which processes might be affected by new security requirements.
  • Developing an Enterprise Architecture
    Paul Harmon - January 04, 2003
    This White Paper discusses the growing use of an enterprise architecture in the management of organizations. It puts a special emphasis on how a business process architecture fits with other possible IT architectures.
  • What is Human Performance Technology
    ISPI - January 01, 2003
    This short White Paper provides an overview of human performance technology. HPT is a systematic approach for analyzing employee problems and designing solutions. It has been developed by the International Society for Performance Improvement (ISPI) and this paper describes the ISPI approach.
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