ARIS BPM Blog

This week I was at SAPPHIRE Europe in Berlin and again I have to admit that this is a very impressing event with its about 9000 people being a part of this European SAP community. This years' theme of SAPPHIRE was "Business Beyond Boundaries" and Henning Kagermann started his Keynote with a very nice video intro with soccer artists that show a joint and artistic soccer play at a lot of different places all over the world.

My previous post about the future of BPMN created quite some noise in the community. It seems there are many people out there having some great ideas how to move forward BPMN. One clear issue to be tackled in BPMN 2.0 is the missing exchange format. Some readers suggest using XPDL for this purpose. Let's take a look at it and see if this is a good idea.

Today: Knowing HOW is half the story! Many factors like laws & regulations, changed customer requirements, information technology trends, market changes can slow down companies, or even risk their economic success. Improving Business Process enables them to stay ahead. However, since the world is still turning around, it´s not a one-time improvement project, but a continuous approach: “BPM as a Discipline”.

In order to provide today’s operationally savvy executive with the command-and-control cockpit that is needed to run an effective organization, I propose that we must first consider the three basic components that are the foundation of any organization: people, processes and technology.

I just came from the presentation from Mr. Witschi from Swisscom. In a 3 hours sessions (including a coffee break) he showed why and how Swisscom switched its order processing controlling/management to ARIS Process Performance Manager. The impressing thing was that he used the live Swisscom system to show how they were able to reduce the average processing time for order process (e.g. DSL order and installation) from 5.3 working days to 1 working day. If you don’t believe this number, click on read more.

I was fortunate to receive an invitation to ARIS ProcessDay in Split, Croatia. Let me start this way. It’s the perfect location to do an event. Not only were the surroundings (mountains/ ocean/ sun) extraordinary, but also the presentations. I especially enjoyed the presentation from Rob Davis. He is a Principal BPM Consultant at British Telecom. Rob basically started BPM at British Telecom. Especially during the privatization of this organization with some 150,000 employees, the management of business processes was crucial.

I am currently at the 11th Business Information Systems (BIS) conference in Innsbruck, Austria. Innsbruck is a small town in the middle of the European Alps surrounded by massive mountains of more than 2.500m. It is a nice scenery for such a conference.

What is now my best practise approach to implement the rule discovery process in an organisation? In this post I give a short introduction. Depending on the rule sources I define a rule discovery roadmap. Rule sources are classical persons (domain experts), documents and program source code.

Today: Old Organization + New Technology = Expensive Old Organization As we all know, in the late 20th century, more and more Managing Directors were following Michael Hammer´s advice to rigorously change their companies´ processes in reducing non-value adding work to zero, instead of using IT to automate it..

The Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) grew popular among business analysts in recent years. BPMN is a public standard maintained by OMG. Today, we see a lot of BPMN support like specific BPMN trainings. Even though adoption of BPMN in industry is fast, there are still some important things missing like a tool independent exchange format. Therefore, work on BPMN 2 already started more than one year ago.

Do I need Enterprise Architecture to do BPM? I’d say yes. If you do BPM – whether it is the business view of process management or the more technical view – you most likely document or design your processes. How do you do that? You create models or diagrams depicting a process that is composed of process steps or activities, roles and organizations, events, information, systems or services, and much more. If you are serious about BPM you are or should be doing this in a structured and managed approach.

It is important to understand, results of the business rules optimization process are input into the discovery process in the first phase of a business rule project. In a second phase the optimization results are input into the business rule modelling process. Business rules governance is a higher-level process and influences all other process inside the Lifecycle.

The second day at the Business Integration Forum in Wiesbaden came up with some interesting discussions and presentations. I was also able to join a presentation by Google at the Web 2.0 Congress which took place at the same conference center. In many discussions during the conference the problems in implementing an SOA where pointed out. It seems that most of the SOA stakeholders are struggling with the same issues. Here just some of it:

This year, I’m organizing ARIS UserDay Europe for the third time. You could be excused for thinking it’s getting boring—but there’s no danger of that, not for me or for the attendees. With so much new and exciting stuff this year, the event will offer plenty of interest.

Today Business Integration Forum in Wiesbaden started with a keynote from Dr. Martin. An interesting chapter of his presentation was the result of the ‘SOA Check 2008’ survey. 60 companies in Germany where asked about the maturity and structure of their SOA strategies. Here just some findings, which were interesting to me.