Friday review - 26th February 2010

Here are some of the links posted over on the Process Cafe Espresso Shots this week¹

The Business Process Improvement Conspiracy | CIO - Blogs and Discussion - I was struck by how much of this aligns with a Process Cafe post I wrote about 'Best Practice'. What do you think?

Outsourcing Fail: Motor insurance Co shows how not to do BPM - BPM:redux blog - A prime example of a big company not understanding that the customer should be at the heart of the process. Just wait until the MD's wife has a bump and needs to make a claim, things will change quickly enough.

Gartner BPA Magic Quadrant: the winners and losers - BPM redux blog - Theo at the BPM Redux has a quick summary of the MQ changes for this edition. Check them out there.


¹ The Process Cafe Espresso Shots is a place for linking to process related articles written by other people that don't merit a full post on the Process Cafe but are still worth your time reading. Sort of an espresso shot of 'The Process Cafe'-eine.

Friday Review - 19th February 2010

Here are some of the links posted over on the Process Cafe Espresso Shots this week¹

Column 2 : Bad Processes? Great Service Makes Up For A Lot - I love stories of process failures - or more particularly of process failures which turned into some sort of success. Sandy Kemsley has an excellent example here related to - what else - the airlines. To me this is a prime opportunity to curry favour with your customers and these airlines did it well. My challenge to all you 'outside-in' mavens is "How Would Southwest have dealt with this? Or Ryanair?" (Actually I know the answer to this for Ryanair. They would have told you to go away)

Rand's Place: (Fun) Business Process Mapping - Why can't all process maps be like this? - A little bit of fun related to a process map. I love the apparent complexity of this which is actually very easy to follow. Makes you wonder why all process maps aren't as entertaining and well drawn as this one

A Think Piece: How HR Caused Toyota to Crash : ERE.net - An interesting piece identifying HR issues as a contributory factor to the Toyota quality issues. Basically the metrics associated with success are not aligned with the quality ethos. Does this sound familiar to anyone?

How to make customer service a priority | CustomerThink - The thought is - "How can we improve the process to make customer service inherent in the way we work?". The Outside-In mavens say that this is the way to go, so how is it done?

What Exactly Do We Need a Cloud For? - Gartner posit that the real question to ask in relation to the cloud is not 'How do we use it?' but rather 'What exactly do we need it for'. An interesting read.

Don't Talk the Process - Walk the Process - Craig at the Process Ninja has a few choice words to say about the quickest and easiest first step in understanding the process. I like that fact that this is a way of learning something whilst also getting to meet the people and help them understand what you're doing.

Did Garry Kasparov Stumble Into a New Business Process Model? - Harvard Business Review - The key here is having a good process will always beat having good people. A point worth noting (and a great little article)


¹ The Process Cafe Espresso Shots is a place for linking to process related articles written by other people that don't merit a full post on the Process Cafe but are still worth your time reading. Sort of an espresso shot of 'The Process Cafe'-eine.

Best practice revisited

I read recently an article from Gartner on the subject of best practice as it related to the cloud. My reply to that was: "How does 'Best Practice' come to be? Is it just an example of "most common practice"? In fact, what's 'best' in 'best practice'?

The article mentioned that there isn't a standard definition of best practice for cloud operations yet. I have written about 'best practice' in an earlier post when I said :

"The problem I have with "Best Practice" is that it isn't always "best". Often times it's one company succeeding in a business then being approached by others wanting to know how they've done it. The company provides examples of their 'practice', it gets assimilated by the inquirer and disseminated to others. This becomes "Best Practice"."

Friday Review 12th February 2010

Here are some of the links posted over on the Process Cafe Espresso Shots this week¹


Weeding Out Bad Data in a Business Process | Blogs | ITBusinessEdge.com - A slightly cynical - but quite accurate - view of data quality within a business process

Is your CIO making themselves helpless in terms of their people? - People are the single biggest factor in determining the effectiveness of IT, according to CIOs

Who Owns the Employee Onboarding Process? - A typical process question about where the responsibility for a process falls when two departments own a common factor in the process. In this case the factor is an employee

The ROI of High-Quality Decision Support Infrastructure - Info from Forrester about ROI in data warehousing

BPM vs. Unstructured, Ad-hoc, Human Processes | ActionBase blog - Thoughts on unstructured processes and how they link into BPM. This can only be a good thing. Right?


BPM redux - an audience with - An Audience With....Terry Schurter - Terry talks about BPM and the cloud. Is Lean really the way to go?

Gartner Identifies Seven Major Guidelines to BPM Project Success - Any thoughts on these?

Announcing a new name and our launch date! - Of course my question - as with all these tools is 'Is it any good?' Anyone have knowledge or experience of this?

How To Have Fun On A Snowy Day: Tweet Jam With Business Process Pros (#bpmjam) - Sounds like fun. Did anyone who reads this participate?

If you can’t stand the heat, get your cloud out of the kitchen - Some thoughts on best practice. My thoughts can be found at The Process Caf

The Perceived Effects of Business Process Management | Business Process Orientation - Some interesting information from this paper.



¹ The Process Cafe Espresso Shots is a place for linking to process related articles written by other people that don't merit a full post on the Process Cafe but are still worth your time reading. Sort of an espresso shot of 'The Process Cafe'-eine.

Is the user the best person to design his or her processes?

The internet (or that part of it which follows BPM) was alive with discussion last week about the announcement from Salesforce.com that they have created a tool which will allow their users to design and run their own processes.

Now before we go out and start wailing 'the end of the world is nigh' let's get a little perspective on this.

As Theo Priestley quite rightly said in his post on the subject

What a palava this is causing on the net newswires. Saleforce.com comes up with a process workflow tool and it's suddenly a BPM solution provider that threatens the world. Calm down. There are already solutions which offer the same simplicity, Casewise Synergy is one that springs to mind I saw last year. Fair enough it's not a Cloud solution (yet) but it offers the same web modelling capability by a business user to automate workflow simply using form based methods. Ask Alcatel who have been using it extensively for a year. It was built in conjunction with PNMSoft btw...

Hot topics last month at the Process Cafe

After checking my visitor logs recently I wanted to let you know what were the 5 most visited pages over the last 30 days (i.e during January) here on the Process Cafe

1. Your criteria for choosing a BPM tool
2. Review:  Lombardi's Blueprint software
3. In any business 60% - 70% are non-value activities
4. BPM - The truly useful capability you just have
5. What's the difference between ERP and BPM?

Be sure also to check out the categories listed on the left and see posts related to my thoughts on BPM, case studies, business rules and the marketplace

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All information is Copyright (C) G Comerford

See related info below

The tool is NOT the process.

I wanted to say a few words about the use of BPM/BPA tools in the context of process management. I’ve spoken with a number of customers who are convinced that the way to effectively ‘manage’ their processes is to stick them into a BPM or BPA tool. This is as effective as managing your favourite fantasy football team by dropping every player's name into a large spreadsheet - nothing will happen by itself.

Sure, the work involved in managing a process (or your fantasy football team) is facilitated by the use of a tool, but the tool is not, in itself, the answer to the problem.

Friday review 5th February 2010

Here are some of the links posted over on the Process Cafe Espresso Shots this week¹

Where Business Process Meets 2.0 - An interesting post from Susan Scrupski on the usage of SAP's new 12Sprints platform in the business.

Pegasystems says Agile BPM this way comes - SOA Talk - Some advice from Pegasystems on smaller, more focused process projects.

Salesforce.com enables business process building for cloud : WHAT?? - I'm really in two minds about this. One the one hand I like the concept that process design should be easy and user focused rather than IT focused. On the other hand Salesforce.com are not a process design company, nor is it always feasible to allow users to design their processes. If it was this easy, why hasn't it been done before? I would be interested to hear anyone's thoughts on this. (See below for information about a post discussing this topic)

Business Process When Implementing UC is not a One & Done Project - Unified Communications Strategies - Some common sense information and advice linked to unified Communication strategies and business process work. A lot of this can probably be summarised by the phrase 'Outside In'

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COMING NEXT WEEK on the Process Cafe:

'The Tool is not the Process' - An article about confusing 'what we manage processes with' and 'what the processes themselves are'. If all you have is a hammer then every problem is a nail.
'Should the users define their own processes?' - My thoughts on whether tools which put process definition directly in the hands of end users are a good idea or not.

¹ The Process Cafe Espresso Shots is a place for linking to process related articles written by other people that don't merit a full post on the Process Cafe but are still worth your time reading. Sort of an espresso shot of 'The Process Cafe'-eine.

We all want an excellent COE, don't we?

According to a recent poll quoted on the teraneon web site,  only 12% of companies have a business process centre of excellence. I have no empirical evidence to think this number is wrong so I'm willing to believe it. The question that this statistic raised in my mind is : If 1 in 8 companies have a BPM COE, how many of them are doing it right?

What defines a good COE? Especially as 1 in 3 companies has no intention of creating one at all and only 1 in 3 is thinking of going to the trouble of creating one. Is there fear, uncertainty and doubt about COE's??