ARIS BPM Blog

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.

Information obtained from analyzing and evaluating live business processes provides an important leading indicator for a company’s performance and value creation activities. Collecting KPIs on a data-driven basis without linking them to processes does not boost business performance, however. Process-oriented performance management tools are required that seamlessly support day-to-day business management at the strategic, tactical, and operational level.

The upcoming ARIS Business Performance Edition release will also ship a new version of ARIS SOA Architect. The product was extended heavily compared to the previous version. The old version included many features to design and implement executable business processes. The most important feature of the old version is the automated EPC to BPEL transformation generating an executable process out of a business process. Those features are of course preserved and extended in the new version, but there is much more to discover!

Long-term business success is all about the ability to respond quickly to changing market conditions. In a growing market, it is important to respond by investing in innovative new products, sales channels, and marketing strategies. Organizations operating in a tough economic environment, on the other hand, need to focus on optimizing costs, timescales, and product resources in order to boost efficiency.