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Category: BPMS

The new version of PRPC v5.4 is just round the corner, and is loaded with exciting new features. continue reading…

The question on Slashdot was actually “Do You Like Your Workflow or BPM Software?“.

The questioner was interested in “firsthand experiences with these kinds of products and in unbiased reviews” and requested information on following products:

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Apache ODE, as in “Apache Orchestration Director Engine” (wow thats a mouthful), is a Top Level Project under the aegis of the Apache Software Foundation.

The stated objective of the ODE is “to create a reliable, compact, and embeddable component capable of managing the execution of long-running business processes defined using the BPEL process description language“, and the focus has been on “developing small modules with minimal dependencies that could be assembled (and easily reassembled) to construct a full featured BPMS“. LEGO blocks of BPMS?

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One of BPM’s early pioneers, Dr. Setrag Khoshafian, Vice President of BPM Technology at Pegasystems (previously Senior Vice President of Technology with Savvion), surely knows a thing or two about BPMS. In this short and interesting white paper he diffuses what he identifies are Six Myths of Rules and Business Process Management.

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FACT #1: The Standish Group’s 1994 Chaos Report found that the top three project impairment factors across 352 companies and 8,000 projects were

  1. Lack of user input (12.8% of respondents),
  2. Incomplete requirements and specifications (12.3%), and
  3. Changing requirements and specifications (11.8%)

FACT #2: Almost 50% of defects identified during testing to be due to defects in requirements. Source: “Calculating your return on investment from more effective requirements management.”

How does one address this? Let’s first understand the processes and tools that are in place today.

  • Development Process (the way we do it)
    • Waterfall
    • Iterative.
    • eXtreme Programming
    • RUP
  • Tools (the hammer and tongs of it)
    • Word, Visio, Excel, Power Point (all are documents)
    • UML – Visual Paradigm, Rational
  • Experience (hey cant dismiss that)
    • Business experience (Knowing the business is critical)
    • IT experience (What do we have, what do we need to build, the know how and prior experience with similar requirements)

Notice something?

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In a seemingly innocuous note softly tucked away in a comparative discussion on Human-Centric Business Process Management Suites, analyst Connie Moore makes a this poignant and quietly thought provoking observation:

most buyers consider Pegasystems a high-end business rules vendor with BPMS aspirations.8 In reality, Pegasystems – a successful company with 2004 revenues reaching $96.5 million — has completely morphed into a BPMS vendor that uses its business rules/process engine to tackle and simplify complex processes.

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Analyst Connie Moore devours 12 BPMS vendors across 215 criteria to understand the renewed trend towards Human-Centric business processes.

She segregates Business processes today into 4 major groupings:

  • Integration intensive
    • Order fulfillment, HIPAA transactions, Supply chain mgmt
  • People intensive
    • Employee on-boarding, Claims processing, Handling exceptions
  • Decision intensive
    • Mortgage loan origination, Underwriting, Retail inventory mgmt
  • Document intensive
    • Accounts payable, Contract mgmt, Proposal mgmt, SOX and other compliance processes

Given that most vendors play across these groupings and have offerings that could be classified under more than one group, she observes that the processes themselves are either

  • Human-centric processes
    • those that require people to get work done by relying on and interacting
      extensively with business applications, databases, collaboration tools, and documents
    • ex. claims processing, loan approvals, accounts payable, and customer
      service
  • System-intensive processes.
    • manage interactions between packaged applications, custom applications,
      external applications
    • typically involve millions of transactions per day that are handled
      on a straight-through basis with no to minimal human involvement and few exceptions
    • ex. trade reconciliations, supply chain management, and line provisioning

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