When told that a recent survey of 146 firms showed 54% wanted BPM training but didn’t know which kind to choose, BPM expert Derek Miers – who delivered the pre-conference workshop  at Gartner’s BPM Summit – said he wasn’t surprised at all.

 “Is that all?” I actually would have thought it would probably be higher than that,” said Miers. “Because if they’re doing it right, they need to send all of your people on a training course; we’ve got so many questions and alternative directions and it’s really imperative that organizations ensure that their BPM initiatives are successful.”

But they really need to keep one thing in mind, and that is that with all this wonderful technology out there -- and yes, I’ve spent the last 20 years looking at this stuff – the people involved still need help,” noted Miers, who developed the BPM Learning Framework of on- and offline courses.

 A Yawning Skills Gap

At the same time, firms must organize BPM in a way that will assure success and master the toughest best practice techniques – they’re also being faced with what Miers called “a yawning skills gap that is starting to appear and getting worse.

“That’s from the top down on how to run the BPM project to begin with, and to assure the success of the outline, and also around the very special sort of skills that are required in business modeling and process architecture and analysis.

The BPM Focus site is designed to serve as ongoing resource to give people set up and run BPM projects and learning BPMN, but also as “a way of stepping outside the box and seeing the process for what it really is,” Miers said.

“But the BPMF Learning Framework is designed to be a balanced and comprehensive program of BPM-related training and skills with individual course components, detailed methods and best practices through project delivery through the modeling and process architecture and business analysis.

The Advanced Process Modeling course covers:

--Simulation, which Miers asserted should comprise comparing and contrasting assumptions and understanding process rather than a deterministic approach designed to fulfill management’s assumptions.

“Nine out of ten simulation model are deterministic in nature, i.e., in that the answer is decided beforehand and then we build a simulation to make it look like that.

--RADS: While Miers partner is the original core original author of the BPMNs specification, the APM course also incorporates Role Activity Diagramming, or RADS.

“That’s really about looking at how roles collaborate and work together in terms of being goal-focused; it’s very much more practice-focused.

--Business Capability Modeling: “Think of it as a sort modeling the business as a set of collaborating services. It’s almost like SOA for the business itself.

“IT people certainly need to grow business skills and the business people need to grow technology skills, because the two are really sort of fused together when you start trying to create The BPM Center of Excellence,” Miers notes. “The BPM Center of Excellence really sort of brings those two ends together and creates a group in center that can support and drive these sorts of improvement initiatives.

Business vs. IT Skillsets

Another objective is to show business analysts -- often trained in Six Sigma, Business Process Re-engineering experience, LEAN experienced Total Quality Management – all of which involve process – how to drive business performance improvement by capturing the right kind of information, analyzing the rules and the processes, looking at the cases that have been running through these process that might be existing already.

“Let’s say you’ve got a BPM suite that’s gathering the information; it’s being able to look inside the data that’s been you’ve been gathering the data over the last month and discovering that all right,  you see that for argument’s sake that the average turnaround time is .6 of a day, but 98 percent of cases go through in .2 of a day, but then there’s this other  2 or 3  percent of cases that take 20 days, and that’s where we should go look and improve next,” Miers noted.

“On the other hand,” Miers said, “the IT specialist who, for argument’s sake,  has grown up with UML and process flow diagrams and what have you, needs to really understand the drivers in the business and the things that really make a difference in terms of its competitive position in the marketplace and that means being able to become easier to do business with and turn cases around much more quickly and being able to look inside the state of a process and allow customers to actually see where things are up to.”

I mean think of, for argument’s sake, we take it for granted now, but FedEx have gotten to the points where they can predict within an hour of when they’ll have a package delivered to you,” Miers observed.”It’s gotten to the point where you can say, ‘I want it delivered at this time.’ Now when you think about the scale of that business and the ability to drive change through the organization and be able to understand their processes so well so that they can make that short of prediction, it’s a big step.

Starting With Small Projects

Now many people go out and they think, “Well, let’s go out and find a mission-critical application;  were going to address that,” when the reality is that the mission-critical application is a big problem that has had several go-throughs in the past,” Miers said.

“Really you’re far better off choosing the small things that you can prove success, build skills and build credibility with the organization. Getting that kind of message across is I think a very important thing to have happen in order for BPM to be successful in the long term.

For much more on BPM Training objectives – including more ways to become customer-centric, being easier to do business with, lowering costs,increasing speed, ensuring compliance and creating an agile enterprise – listen to the entire podcast.

For much more from Miers on the most desirable BPM skill sets – go to http://www.bpmfocus.org. 

Posted by gtrotta in BPM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Role Modellers’ recent release of HumanEdj represents a “new breed of human productivity software”, based on the principles of Human Interaction Management.

“Human Interaction Management, usually abbreviated to HIM, is a new way of looking at work, a way that deals properly with creativity and collaboration in the workplace, said Keith Harrison-Broninski, CTO of UK company Role Modellers and author of ebizQ’s IT Directions blog.

“The basic idea is to do for knowledge work in the 21^st century what Scientific Management did for industrial production in the 20^th century,” said Broninski, who noted that while evolutions like Six Sigma and Lean Manufacturing are usually put under the umbrella of Total Quality Management, there remains a huge body of work carried out by any organizations  that such techniques leave completely untouched.

That’s because all the standard TQM methodologies trace their roots back to assembly line manufacturing  and are currently reflected in mechanistic business proceses.

"Mechanistic processes cover things like manufacturing, certain kinds of testing, logistics, order processing, invoicing, settlement, payroll and so on,” Harrison-Broninsky notes. Human-driven processes cover things like research, design, marketing, sales, customer support, team leadership, managing organizational change, software development, and so on – any work in which humans interact to create and innovate solutions.

“HIM covers many types of knowledge work, as well as some work that people might not describe as knowledge work, but that is actually quite creative and mentally demanding, like fault resolution in a telecommunications providerm,” Harrison-Broninski notes. “What HIM is really about, is work in which people collaborate to come up with a solution -- HIM provides a whole host of useful principles, patterns and techniques for doing interaction work better – and equally important, for managing it better.”

BPM AND WEB 2.0: NO HELP THERE

Harrison-Broninski also explained why in his opinion, BPM and Web 2.0 tools are limited in this area. The former are too technical for ordinary business people, don’t give a means to evolve the process from within “or  provide much collaboration functionality – certainly nothing like the features people need in order to share messages, documents and data in a structured way,” Harrison-Broninski said. “They also that work “flows” from step to step, which is not how humans do interaction work.”

“People create private information spaces, they share information at different times with different people, they have ongoing activities, they make decisions and choose activities in very flexible ways, new players may be introduced at any time, old players may leave,” he observed. “Some organizations have tried workflow or BPM and ended up with expensive failures. Some have tried using “groupware” tools – messaging, document sharing, content management, and so on – but found that these solutions don’t scale. They seem to work OK when the interaction work is limited to a few people, but once you roll groupware tools out across an organization, they actually cause more problems than they solve. People end up spending a lot of time writing messages to lists, circulating documents, updating shared documents, etc without there being any way to control what is going on. Or even to know what is going on.”

Nor are Web 2.0 tools – which Harrrison-Broninski described as “just another set of groupware tools,” any help. “The same problems apply to editing wiki pages as to updating documents in a content management system. I think a lot of people are becoming very unproductive as a direct result of groupware tools, including Web 2.0."

HOW HIM HELPS

HIM, Harrison-Broninski believes, helps by providing a simple, general way to structure  delivers the most business advantage to their organization.

“If you are using a HIMS, you open it first thing in the morning, and see all the human-driven work processes you are engaged in,” Harrison-Broninski observed. “But it’s not like workflow, where you get a list of “Notifications” or “Tasks” to work through one by one, like a robot. Instead, you see a complete context for each process. You can see information and messages, old and new. You can choose the Tasks you want to carry out. You have the option to join or leave processes in a controlled way. And everything you do is managed by the system, in the background.

“For a start, a HIMS remembers everything you do, which is fantastically important if you need to demonstrate compliance with regulations, strategy or policy,” Harrison-Broninski said. “This alone is a time-saver, and when it comes to things like SOX, can even be a business-saver. A HIMS also lets you manage your work. On a personal level, you can undo any actions you take, including changes you make to documents, and this is also recorded for audit purposes.

“On an organizational level, a HIMS lets a manager see what their staff are actually doing during the day, so they can help support their staff and make them more efficient,” he added. “For most people, the HIMS is like having a personal assistant that they can rely on completely. The HIMS saves them all the bother of writing and filing status reports, typing up data in a CRM system, filling in SOX-compliance forms, and so on. As much as anything else, the HIMS is the individual’s way of demonstrating what they are doing for the organization - with zero effort required to do so. A HIMS allows you to communicate with your management when you need to. And cover your back when you need to.”

A free standard edition and instructional screencasts are available at the Role Modellers Web site.

Posted by gtrotta in BPM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

A recent survey of 146 companies Professor by Yvonne Antonucci of Widener University showed that a staggering 54% of respondents were planning on sending their employees to external BPM training -- but were unable to find appropriate training mainly because they did not know what training was needed.

And since a large number of our First Look listeners are also asking us about BPM training programs, we’re going to be talking to the creators of such programs over the next few weeks.

Leading off is Dr. Bruce Silver, a leading independent BPM industry analyst and author of the 2006 BPMS Report series, the blog BPMS Watch, and a regular column for the BPM Institute. He's also the author of two BPM training courses, one on BPM Tools and Technology, and a new one, Process Modeling with BPMN.

 Silver started by noting that his initial foray into user training was related to tools and technology for process execution and monitoring in BPM Suites, including workflow, integration middleware, business rules, and BAM.

“But I've discovered that most people getting into BPM are not yet ready for that,” he noted. “They're really trying to learn the basics. What is BPM? How do I do it? They're starting at the beginning. The first thing they want to do is to model their current or as-is process, analyze its shortcomings, and perhaps model improved to-be processes.

“The thing I've learned about training in general is that far more than the 'What is it?' part, users want to know 'How do I do it?'” Silver added.

 BPMN’s Training Advantages

Silver explained how his Process Modeling with BPMN course benefits from the BPMN stardard’s wide acceptance – and its compatibility with many inexpensive, and in some cases, totally free tools. That's a move away from proprietary tools that required users “to bet on a particular tool before they really understand what process modeling is, or how to do it,” Silver notes.

BPMN’s reflection of human workflow, its support for SOA and its ability to be used for everything from high-level process descriptions to performance analysis to process generation in BPEL are added advantages.

“So you have the situation here of a popular standard, with no vendor-provided methodology and training, no OMG-provided methodology, and -- on the surface at least -- it's more complicated than traditional modeling,” Silver said. “And users want to know how to do process modeling with it. That's the need we're trying to fill with the new training Process Modeling with BPMN.”

The course itself provides “ a methodology for how to organize your thinking about end-to-end processes, how to do top-down modeling using BPMN sub-processes, drilling down as needed to add detail, and then how to translate that thinking into the notation,” Silver said.

 Three Levels…

 The course shows how to use BPMN at three distinct levels:

1. Descriptive modeling – “the kind most BPM consultants typically talk about -- high-level, not especially rigorous, but easy to communicate across the organization, linked with a methodology for how to do it,” Silver said.
2. Analytic modeling that is “more detailed, showing all the steps, the exceptions, needed to either analyze process performance using simulation or create detailed requirements for an IT implementation,” Silver observed.
   
3. Executable modeling, where BPMN can actually generate implementation code. “ This is really execution-language dependent, so the training focuses mostly on levels 1 and 2,” Silver noted.

In the training, users get a mix of theory and hands-on with the Process Modeler for Visio from ITP Commerce BPM tool.

“BPMN Essentials focuses on the subset of commonly used diagram elements and patterns to show the broad base of process modelers how to capture their as-is and describe improved to-be processes using a top-down how-to methodology,” Silver said.

“The second section, which we call BPMN Deep Dive, focuses on events and exception handling, the part that goes beyond traditional workflow and is admittedly harder for some business people to grasp,” Silver notes. “It's really not that hard, and you really need to model at this level in order to analyze your process performance or to use the model as a requirements document. “

The third section -- Simulation Analysis with BPMN -- talks about how to run your model through a simulation engine to analyze process performance. “That's not part of the BPMN spec, but it is a part of most process modeling tools, so we show you how to do it in 3 specific use cases -- cycle time improvement, optimizing resource utilization, and activity-based costing,” Silver said. 

Online, Flash and Certification

The courses are offered in Flash-based online formats; a two-day classroom version is also planned.

"The advantage of online/on-demand is convenience. You take the training from your own desktop at your own pace. It's organized into 15 Flash videos, totaling seven and half hours, which play through a browser. We also provide student notes in PDF,” Silver noted.

“Flash is great because in addition to the narrated slide show you can include screencams of using the tool, automated pauses to let the student complete exercises before showing the solution, and quizzes,” Silver added.

“There are also exercises you have to complete,” Silver said. “Some we give the answers to inline in the training. Others we don't, and you have to email them in to complete the certification requirements.”

“We think certification is important. This makes for a couple hoops to jump through, but we will publicize the list of certified students on the BPM Essentials Web site,” Silver said.

“We're offering certification at both the BPMN Essentials level and the BPMN Deep Dive level, so you don't have to go through all 15 parts to be certified.

Silver went on to detail other facets BPM training could encompass – and the prospects for a common curriculum and certification to both “raise the quality of BPM projects and make solid understanding of BPM a marketable skill in the corporate world,” he concluded.

Editor’s Note: For more information, listen to the entire podcast, visit BPMessentials.com, or send email to bruce at bpmessentials.com.

Posted by gtrotta in BPM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

For many more details, listen to the entire 10:19 podcast Download file


Executive Summary:
The time-honored paper chase seems to have been replaced by a new, equally wasteful digital document diaspora.

A recent study revealed that employees spend up to 25 percent of their working day on non-productive, document-collaboration related tasks. Another reveals that 80 percent of engineering and manufacturing errors are caused by use of improper versions of drawing or documents.

And this is happening at the same time the rush to SOA and compliance solutions put a new premium on quickly producing the correct documents. So the elite First Look Research Staff set out to find a more intuitive and inexpensive solution that could also facilitate SOA and BPM efforts.

Last month, Alfresco Software announced the latest enterprise version of its open source Enterprise Content Management System -- the first that could be easily embedded in other applications via the Java Virtual Machine.

But first, what’s with unusual company name, which conjured up visions of restaurants rather than repositories?

“Well, the idea was that we came from Documentum, and we wanted to have a freshness about the company around open source,” said Alfresco’s Chief Marketing Officer Ian Howell. “And we thought alfresco is open-air dining, which infers open source and seating in the open air. We also wanted a name that began with “a” so it would always be at the top of the list.”

Howell noted the continued changes marketing and Open Source product entails. Instead of long sales cycles, innumerable demonstrations and post-installation handholding, his customers have often already installed and done further development on his product.

“By first time they’ve talk to you, they’ve already used the product and they don’t want simple demonstrations. And that has some big implications on your sales cycle and also the product itself. It has to be really, really simple to install and very simple to use,” Howell said.

“So what we brought was something that was just like a shared drive because that’s the most dominant document management system out there and as easy to configure as email rules,” Howell added. “And that’s what we aim to do as well -- something that replaces the shared drive and gives you the core functionality for version control, searching and compliance, but still is as easy to use as a shared drive."

The whole goal, Howells said, was to ”give you the functionality of a Documentum for a price of SharePoint and that’s as easy to use a shared drive or a SharePoint as well.”

Howells also drew a parallel between the relational database market of the early ’90s, when the SQL standard transformed the market.

“We recently did a similar kind of benchmark around an equivalent standard for content management benchmark called JSR-170 and put in a highly scalable benchmark and worked with partners like mySQL and Red Hat. So we see JSR-170 being a very important standard for content management,” he said.

Another key standard is Open Search, which can search across multiple Alfresco repositories and integrate other Web sites or RSS feeds or blogs for a true kind of federated and distributed search.

Processes that can encompass the application and the content-management system -- Howells used the example of changing a standard operating procedure in an ERP system -- link ECM to SOA and BPM.

“We see a couple of key standards here, really BPEL -- Business Process Execution Language -- linking into Web Services as being core for BPM,” Howells said. “And also, within the Open Source world, we see jBPM being very important.”

“So that kind of links to architecting SOAs because we believe it’s going to be very important if you are going to have standards for BPEL, to have Web Services for content so that your BPEL engine can call the content-management system using standard Web Services calls as well,” Howells noted.

“So from an architectural perspective, what really we’ve got here is what would classically be called an SOA or a loosely coupled environment and you need standards around Web Services that are designed for Web content -- and that’s exactly the tack we took,” Howells added.

“The other standard we see in this kind of very loosely coupled environment, which is a Web 2.0 standard, is the REST standard, which is more URL-based, so you can very easily combine and mashup various applications very quickly” Howells said.

For many more details, listen to the entire 10:19 podcast Download file


Executive Summary:

Posted by gtrotta in BPM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)