We’re glad that the Orlando area is having a temporary break from its drought,
because it forced us to stay inside the walls of our faux Italian villa resort
complex while attending Pegaworld 2007 to stick around and see how a few Pegasystems
customers are actually implementing BPM.
One shouldn’t generalize, but when we look at BPM, customers expect it
to either (1) provide a more business-focused approach to integrating applications,
or (2) offer a more flexible, reusable framework for developing custom applications
that are simply too complex or address requirements beyond the scope of conventional
packaged software. Call it a freak of sampling, but at the conference, most
of the customers we sat down with were trying to pick up where the ERP folks
left off.
Pegasystems provides a rules-driven approach to BPM that it recommends be implemented
using iterative, rather than waterfall development. Among those we spoke to
today, one customer, Helphire Group plc, took that advice to the extreme with
an approach that fused principles of agile development and lean manufacturing
called Lean Software Development.
Their presentation raised an interesting riddle: to what extent can you apply
agile principles to implementing a technology whose hallmark is agility?
Helphire is a UK business process outsourcing firm that performs various services
for auto insurers who are dealing with policyholders who have had accidents.
The project was to replace the 15-year old core business system that dated back
to the company’s founding. What’s interesting is that the company’s
IT managing director, who championed the lean techniques, knew well what he
didn’t want. In a previous life in the employ of the UK government, managing
IT director Richard Edwards was involved with development of SSADM, a mother
of all waterfall development processes.
Helphire benefited from having an entrepreneurial culture, where the CEO and
founder remains very hands-on, and business users are encouraged to engage with
IT and vice versa. And it benefited from having an IT director who was also
a process expert — and knew how to pick his targets. In this case, selecting
a bare bones implementation of the core end-to-end process, but without all
the branching. OK, you couldn’t use the software, but at least business
users could be impressed that the thing could work.
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