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Greetings,
BPM news
has been kind of light since the last newsletter. But if 2003 is any
indicator of the growth of the BPM marketplace- 2004 should be great! Ultimus
worldwide revenues increased 65% in 2003! Businesses and analysts are just
starting to grasp the potential of this technology.
l try to keep you up-to-date on things going on at Ultimus and
other information about BPM I hope you'll find useful. Your comments,
suggestions and stories are always welcome. If you find that my efforts here
aren't useful - please feel free to opt- out.
Quote of the day....
"Automate
the rote and repetitious work, free up people to do the creative stuff."
by Michael Hugos, Darwin Magazine article titled:
"Toward A New Technology Strategy"
He
continues, "By automating the mass of rote, routine and repetitious
work, you will get great cost efficiencies. By empowering people to handle
all the non-routine stuff, you will become very responsive to unique customer
needs. It is this blend of efficiency and responsiveness that will enable you
to outperform your competition."
to read the entire article....
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"BPM's Third Wave" by Howard Smith and Peter Fingar
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This article describes the history and future direction of
BPM.
While
these authors are academics, they do have significant insight to many
issues regarding BPM planning and implementation.
They also
arrive at the conclusion that "the value proposition for implementing
a BPM platform is so compelling that no company can afford to ignore this
new development."
to read
more about their book see:
http://www.fairdene.com/about.html
to read the entire article.... »
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Beginning your
BPM initiative. How do you start?
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Craig Schiff, in his article titled "Maximize Business
Performance: Getting Started: The BPM Project Life Cycle" describes
the steps you'll go through to implement your BPM initiative. (The BPM
Craig is talking about is not business process management but business
performance management-but the implementation life cycle is identical)
In this
article he describes the BPM project lifecycle from needs analysis through
vendor selection, product implementation and optimization.
He
properly identifies some of the risks associated with implementing BPM
project including user acceptance, interdepartmental battles.
He ends
with the thought that "when properly used, BPM lets the people who can
exploit opportunities and respond to problems find them. That puts larger
numbers of personnel in a position to improve profitability.
to read this article.... »
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Forrester
Research gives Ultimus highest score for best human workflow
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Forrester Research, a leading independent technology research
firm, has given Ultimus high marks in its February 2004 BPM TechRankings. Ultimus was among the select companies
that Forrester invited to participate in its BPM TechRankings.
In this evaluation, the Ultimus BPM Suite received top scores for Human
Workflow and Cost.
The
Forrester TechRankings for BPM evaluated 10
vendors in the industry on a number of topics including automation, human
workflow, product architecture, presence, design, analysis and
optimization.
In their
evaluation of Ultimus, Forrester found:
· The Ultimus BPM Suite provides a robust workflow portal and strong UI
design tools. The product supports an extensive list of client options and
works with third-party form tools. This means that firms can use the
product to automate people-intensive processes, and users will find it easy
to interact with the processes.
· The product also provides solid repository features such as automatic
version management and check-in/checkout functionality for unpublished
processes. This makes the modeling environment a strong tool for supporting
team-based design collaboration.
· The product provides strong support for Web Services, including process
interrogation and automatic WSDL generation for all processes. This means
that firms will be able to integrate Java-based components into process
designs using Web Services.
to see the results from Forrester..... »
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Book Review Workflow
Modeling, Tools for Process Improvement and Application Development
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While the title is a little misleading, Alex Sharp and Patrick
McDermott have created a well written "practical exposition of what
works, by practititioners for practitioners"
This is a
book that can hold your hand through the entire process of workflow process
modeling, business process improvement and application development. Each
chapter is designed to be put to use as soon as you read it.
Their
approach in a nutshell (Chapter 3) is organized into four phases:
Frame the process
Understand the current (as-is) process
Design the new (to-be) process
Develop use case scenarios
The
intended readers of this book are for people working on or responsible for
a process improvement process including:
Business analysts, consultants and project leaders
Systems analysts defining IT requirements
Business managers with a mandate to fix their process
This book has lots of practical advice from consultants that do this for a
living. HIGHLY recommended
To read Amazon reviews of this book..... »
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Migration guide
to version 6.01
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For those of you planning up upgrade to version 6. there is a
new migration guide available
Note of
caution. Please save all of 5.x process definitions somewhere off line
before you upgrade to version 6.0. If you upgrade a process to 6.0 you
can't go back to v5.
Saving a
second set of process definitions will allow to to
go back to v5 if necessary
to get the migration guide... »
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Check out my BPM
information website
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Since I started this newsletter, I've had a lot of requests
for past articles, white papers, etc. So I created a website (my first) to
store this BPM information.
It's
still a work in progress but I've posted all of the previouse
newsletters, book reviews, links to BPM organizations etc.
Please
stop by from time to time as I'll be adding more information.
Your
thoughts, comments and suggestions are always welcome. Please be kind, I'm
not a webmaster or programmer. The company that provides this service is
1and1.com. It's FREE (for 3 years)! We'll see how it goes.
To get to my new BPM site.... »
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Quick Links...
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