ARIS BPM Blog

Today is a very exciting day, because today member 1.000 registered at the ARIS Community! We were confident that there is a public interest in a community for ARIS and BPM geeks, but we are absolutely overwhelmed by the incredible uptake so far.

Bridging BPM and SOA is a hot topic these days. But really good examples from organizations that have succeeded in getting business and IT efficiently aligned are still rare.

At least this is the opinion of David Norton, Research Director for Gartner. During the “ARIS Process World On Tour” stop in Munich, I had the opportunity to join David’s presentation ”Benefits of BPM in a crisis ”. The presentation started with a review of research conducted by Gartner. According to the results, business leaders' priorities are quite clear: Cutting operating costs and increasing revenue.

At the beginning of this year Anne Thomas Manes wrote in her blog "SOA has become a bad word. It must be removed from our vocabulary".

Take it or leave it, but often EA is referred as a lengthy initiative with very unclear and practically not very applicable results. Like a set of references architectures, which in practice turn to be 80% different from architectures of actually deployed solutions or a set of principles of building new data centers, which are too high-level and theoretical, so any solution built do comply with them.

In these economic times, most enterprises focus on their core competencies and understand that there is a close relationship between financial success, the efficiency of business operations and the satisfaction of their customers. True to the motto “What can’t be measured, can’t be optimized”, the ability to monitor and analyze organizational performance becomes more and more important. Companies begin to realize that collecting indicators without the link to processes is not enough to identify bottlenecks and to derive measures of optimization.

Many SAP project managers are struggling with the question whether they should integrate BPM within their SAP projects. For them the ROI of BPM for their project is not obvious. The Enterprise BPM framework, as introduced in my previous blogs, provides an overview of the utilization of BPM within SAP projects. The decision whether BPM should be incorporated within the SAP projects should also be taken by the stakeholders who are responsible for the TCO of the SAP environment. Typical SAP projects apply business process models for:

The latest Webcast has been arranged for the second half of the year. Check it out here .

Yesterday, IDS Scheer announced the 2009 Business Process Excellence Award Winners in the wonderful location Lenbach in Munich. The BPE Awards are presented in several categories to customers with outstanding projects, a high degree of innovation and resulting in improved business performance. It was a very nice evening with a special dinner, good drinks and live music. I met very interesting people there and enjoyed the ceremony very much.

1. What did you do last night?

Today, ARIS ProcessWorld on Tour started with the stop in Munich. The first keynote was given by IDS Scheer's CEO Peter Gerard. Afterwards, Dr. Wolfram Jost gave his keynote about ARIS innovations.

It is the new functionality of ARIS for SAP to speed up your SAP projects and enable alignment of business process requirements and SOA! Read this blog from Josèphe Blondaut from IDS Scheer AG and Stephan Schluchter from SAP AG, introducing the new integration.

The performance of any organization depends on the activities it executes. The sequence in which we execute these activities is called a business process. However, despite this importance, it is surprising that very few organizations have made processes a first class citizen.

I've started today with a really thrilling keynote from Hasso Plattner about ''The power of Speed''. He showed fast as lightning analytic applications and build visions around the new agility once a CEO gets all information in real time. This would increase the quality of decisions tremendously.

Kicking off the day with Léo's keynote was a good idea: A brand new messaging was brought to the audience: The Clear Enterprise. Clarity is key to success in these times. This also includes sustainability. How can companies reduce their carbon footprint? SAP's wants to reduce it's carbon footprint at 70% till the year 2020. A Sustainability Solution Map should empower the customers to do the same.