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December 07, 2007
What collection of approaches will transform YOUR business?

Mike Kavitz had an interesting post today - Transforming the business with BPM and SOA - and it made me wonder what collection of approaches you really need to transform a business. While experts, and I can be guilty of this too, like to push their own approach "just do what I say and you will be a success", the reality is that many things contribute to truly transforming a business. Mike correctly identifies a couple of them but I would add a few (using their most common names):

• Business Process Management (BPM)
  Allowing the business to participate and even own, for the first time, the definition of how their information systems support their business is clearly transformative.
• Enterprise Decision Management (EDM)
  Automating and improving the operational decisions within these systems and processes to ensure precision, agility and consistency changes the role of front line staff, turns better data into better actions and thus outcomes, and empowers executives to change the way their organization acts. I think that counts as transformative.
• Complex Event Processing (CEP)
  The ability to move to event-driven approaches instead of process-centric or batch-oriented responses is a key component for a real-time enterprise. Complementing and complemented by BPM and EDM, CEP gets the nod for enabling this change of mindset.
• Corporate Performance Management (CPM)
  You can't manage what you can't measure and performance management is how you measure the success or failure of different process designs, event responses or decision strategies.
• Business Activity Monitoring (BAM)
  Closely related to CPM, BAM is about pushing the results of this monitoring to the people who need to act. Combined with automating responses where possible and managing the processes that handle these responses, BAM can truly make a difference.
• Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)
  Underpinning all of these, a focus on reusable, coherent, composable, well defined services instead of large, monolithic applications.

One notable absence from this list, you will notice, is Business Intelligence. An odd omission, you might think, given that BI is on the top of everyone's list of things to do this year. But BI alone will not transform your business. It should help you understand how and why and perhaps where to transform your business. It can make many of the transformative approaches I list more effective by underpinning them with current, accurate, understood data. What I don't believe it can do is really transform your business.
But what do you think?

Posted by jtaylor in Business Activity Monitoring • Business Process Management • Business Rules • Decision Technologies • Event Processing • Predictive Analytics • SOA |Digg This|Add to del.icio.us

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Posted by: Jean-Jacques Dubray at December 8, 2007 03:00 PM

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