Welcome to the launch of the new BPTrends website and to Harmon’s Blog: Eye on BPM…
If you’ve been following BPTrends since we started in 2003, you may recall that I originally started out writing a Monthly Newsletter – a 16 page piece that covered one topic in considerable depth. Later on, around 2005, we replaced the longer Newsletter with 2 shorter, 3-5 page pieces we called Advisors I was accustomed to writing longer pieces, and it took me a while to adjust to the new format but the Advisors forced me to pick one topic and narrow my focus on just that topic. With the new website launch we decided it is time for me to begin blogging. I’m going to be writing a Column each month, Harmon on BPM, a 4-5 page piece on a single topic. And at the same time, I am going to start blogging. I will probably even throw in some tweets (@Harmon_BPTrends) to alert friends to my Blog.
Over the course of the past several years I have written Articles on a variety of other topics including book reviews, notes on conferences and meta-articles that discussed several other articles that others had written about a specific topic. I also played around with notes on technology breakthroughs and innovations that I believed would change the way people would design new business processes. I’m going to shift all that to my Blog. So, look forward to entries on nylon party dresses generated on a 3D printer and some notes on what people are talking about at the ASQ Lean Six Sigma Conference in Phoenix in February, the second BPMNext Conference at Asilomar, California in March, and the International Society for Performance Improvement (ISPI) Conference, which is in Indianapolis in April.
In preparation for the transition I’ve been reading a lot of tweets and blogs. I’m impressed with how many people attend events and type tweets and blog entries while they are sitting listening to a speaker. It provides readers with instant information, but it’s not something I think I’ll likely be doing. I am more inclined to attend a conference, take lots of notes, read and reread my notes a couple of times, do some additional research and then write something in which I try to pull together everything I learned about the topic, while placing it in some broader context. I suspect that I will continue to do that – writing less frequently and more comprehensively. On the other hand, I will be exploring blogging and trying new things. Perhaps I can combine the best of both approaches, with a more thoughtful Column each month, and some more spontaneous insights in between.
And, hopefully, the Blog will encourage a more dynamic interchange between us. This Blog is set up so that readers can respond with comments. We will still have our BPTrends Discussion site on LinkedIn for longer and more complicated exchanges of ideas but, simultaneously, I hope readers will feel free to respond to specific points I make on my Blog. And, I, of course, will try to respond to your comments.
Finally, to end this Blog entry on a personal note: I am in the process of turning the final manuscript of the 3rd Edition of my Business Process Change book into my publisher. The second edition was completed in 2007 and a lot has changed in the BPM market since then. BPTrends has developed a new and more sophisticated approach to developing a business process architecture, others have developed new approaches to modeling dynamic business processes (the OMG’s Case Management specification, for example) and BPMS tools have become more comprehensive and more useful. Leading BPMS tools have added case management and process mining capabilities, for example. I have been working on the new edition in the evenings for several months, but during the holidays I pulled out all the stops, wrapped it up and turned it over to the publisher for production. With luck the 3rd edition will be out in June of 2014, just in time for IRMUK’s annual BPM Europe Conference that BPTrends sponsors.
Much of the process characteristics are related to the medium of the day, so blogging, as well as looking at blogging, will certainly reflect business pathways ahead. As I learned, not from you, but definitely through you, the medium is the message! I look forward to your perceptions form within as well as without! Thanks!
Neal, I agree entirely. New business processes will increasingly be designed to include Blogs and Comments, and learning how the medium works is one key to designing good future business processes. It also reminds, me, however, of how people resist change and getting into areas they don’t understand as well as they did older approaches. But I guess that’s also part of the message.