ARIS BPM Blog

I work for a very musical company! This is largely due to the influence of Professor Scheer, a real jazz addict. Anyone who has attended ARIS ProcessWorld has probably seen him play live. Jazz is often a part of his keynote address. He even has dedicated lectures focusing on the relationship between Jazz improvisation and management. If you are interested you can gain an inside view in an article by Prof. Scheer (3,8 MB pdf).

I am reporting from the Gartner Enterprise Architecture Summit in London themed "Emergent Architecture - New Game, New Rules". This Enterprise Architecture (EA) Summit does not only give an update on the latest trends in EA, but it is supposed to challenge the participants to change some of their most basic premises and operating models.

The first two stops of the Process Intelligence Roadshow were held in Chicago and New York. I saw some very interesting presentations and had some intense discussions about the combination of BPM and BI. Click on read more if you are interested in my personal highlights:

"Best practices" has become an over-utilised label for a variety of so-called reference models. However, a closer look shows that most of these models document rather typical than highly innovative scenarios. It is time to re-consider the typical design of reference models and while compromising completeness to aim for truly "exciting practices".

I am at the Gartner Event Processing Summit in Stamford, USA.

For those of you not directly involved with OMG, it might be interesting to know that since some days a first public submission for BPMN 2 is available on OMG's homepage. This is of course not yet the final specification, but at least the overall picture gets clearer now. You will notice many open issues while browsing the document.

What processes have to change when the oil price increases by 20%? How do we react to an upcoming hurricane in Louisiana? What impact does the strike of one of our main suppliers have on our process landscape? While process modelling is increasingly popular, most organisations design their business processes in complete isolation of such changes in their environment.

From September through December 2008, the Process Intelligence Roadshow will be on world tour with exciting customer presentations and live product demonstrations, plus a few surprising digressions from the main topic. The focus of all presentations is on combining Business Process Management and Business Intelligence to create Process Intelligence.

Would you like to get the big picture on how ARIS and SAP can be combined for an optimized BPM approach? This episode will provide you with an excellent overview of the tool architecture and use within an SAP and ARIS-based BPM environment presented by a subject-matter expert from SAP, Thomas Volmering...

The second day of the business process management conference in Milan was started by the keynote talk of Prof. Rosemann from Queensland University. Prof.

Today, the international business process management conference in Milan, Italy started. It is one of the most important events in the world focusing on new scientific work in this area.

The blog posts form my colleague Sebastian ( and here) and the comments to it suggest that this is an interesting topic. There are many right answers to the same question.

In my previous post I provided an overview of business to IT transformations. I pointed out that most tools actually do not provide a transformation, but instead push technical details to the business level and misuse a business process modelling language like BPMN as a visual representation for BPEL.

There are many products available on the market promising to automatically transform business process models (like BPMN or EPC) into executable ones (like BPEL or XPDL). Such transformations should help to bridge the gap between business and IT. But are those transformations really helping? Let’s have a closer look!

I stumbled on this post on the SOX (Sarbanes-Oxley) life blog about implementing controls and Segregation of Duty (SoD). Although the post is quite old (19.05.2007), I felt it contained important points that I wanted to report on. First of all the post gives another argumentation for the need for controls (for me, the need for policies can be justified in a similar way). The authors reports on experience with controls and SoD.