DOCUMENT Magazine - April 2008 - (Page 7)

BPM: Improving the Way You Process Contributing Writers Seth Earley, this issue’s featured writer. Seth Earley has been implementing content management and knowledge management projects for over 12 years and has been in the technology ﬁeld for 20-plus years. He is the founder and president of Earley & Associates, a consulting ﬁrm offering specializing in content management and collaboration systems. Mr. Earley is also the founder of the Boston Knowledge Management Forum and co-author of Practical Knowledge Management from the IBM Press. He is former adjunct professor at Northeastern University, where he taught graduate courses in Knowledge Management Infrastructure and E-Business Strategy. Mr. Earley has developed search, content and knowledge strategies for global organizations and has developed underlying taxonomies for a diverse roster of Fortune 1000 companies. He is a popular speaker and workshop leader at conferences throughout North America, speaking on intranet design, knowledge management, content management systems and strategy, taxonomy development and other related topics. Other writers for this issue: Roger W. Applewhite Arthur Gingrande Todd Haycock Ray H. Killam Craig Le Clair Jim Minihan Seth Surchin Paul Traite Steve Weissman Workﬂow; BPM: You Say Potato, I Say Potahto By Jim Minihan For the uninitiated, entering the market for a process management application can be daunting. An alphabet soup of acronyms abounds, with many having multiple meanings. And then there is the age-old debate of “workﬂow” versus “BPM.” With such a range of products all claiming the same marketing space, regardless of how capable they are, one can’t help being confused. Indeed, this problem has been so pervasive it hindered the marketplace adoption of the entire workﬂow /BPM product class for a good ﬁve years before some sense emerged from the fog of the marketing wars. So how do we bring some deﬁnition to all this? Sufﬁce to say that at some point, the more robust products started to carve out a new world to trump the old. More speciﬁcally, this meant that an ability to collect process metrics and operate variably on a much more sophisticated array of “rules”driven parameters became a distinguishing characteristic. At the same time, it seemed that every application in the world claimed to have a workﬂow component. From an enterprise view, this meant that there were a number of “line of business” systems, each with its own workﬂow. Since enterprise processes generally span multiple application systems, these silo-restricted workﬂows fail to do much for an enterprise-wide view, thus, the need to orchestrate these individual systems and the people that interact with them comprehensively. So is workﬂow still relevant? Has it been replaced by BPM entirely? The answers depend on what you want to accomplish. At a departmental level working within a single application, you might very well decide to employ a workﬂow product to better control the processes and procedures that surround that legacy application that may not have a workﬂow. This is still a legitimate, if narrowly deﬁned, approach to getting better control of a tactical problem. For the heavy lifting of sewing together many applications and the people that interact with them in a strategic way, a BPM tool should be your focus. This class of application has become increasingly popular with the advent of service oriented architectures (SOA) to orchestrate and connect the various components that comprise a solution. A useful BPM suite will have several essential components. A modeler is used to express the process and the various elements of it. A process engine (different vendors may have other names, such as “rule processor” or “orchestrator”) is the run time component that serves as command central for activities in the process. A Business Activity Monitor (BAM) is another component focused on accumulating process metrics that can be used to cause real-time adjustments at the process engine and provide management data about the operation. Tools and APIs are also included to enable the connection of the BPM to applications and, in some cases, application to application. In addition, some suites will include BPEL (Business Process Execution Language) as another tool to tie system-to-system transactions together, and some vendors will also assert that a simulator is necessary to test a process prior to deployment. Don’t be surprised if you hear people insist that many of these components existed in workflow applications long ago. Some will even claim that BPM had nothing to do with workflow and came about independently to set their products apart. Dismiss this as more marketing wars hype, and concentrate on what the product can do for you today and leave the history to the historians. Jim Minihan, a pioneer of workﬂow and process management, is an acknowledged expert on automation of service sector enterprises and their processes. You can write to him at bpm@imergeconsult.com. DOCUMENT appreciates all the writers who made this issue possible. To submit an article, please contact Allison Lloyd at email allison.l@rbpub.com. www.DOCUMENTmedia.com april.08 document 7 http://www.DOCUMENTmedia.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Document Magazine - April 2008

Document Magazine - April 2008 Contents Editor's View The Research Desk The Response Center BPM: Improving the Way You Process Contributing Writers Mapping Out Performance Build the Context Before You Move into the House of ECM Taking On the Big 3 The Human Connection Addressing Your Addresses Don't Call Us, We'll Call You The Mulitplying Image Recognizing Accuracy New Products Calendar Advertisers

Document Magazine - April 2008

For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.