Business Process Management

Business processes manage the operational flow of business and when optimized achieve cost containment and flexibility as they need to be efficient and able to adapt to changing business conditions. The art of planning and implementing process management requires all the best cross-functional project management skills one can provide and tools that facilitate the task. Yet when trying to improve the management of processes, the business is often constrained by tool limitations that impose additional artificial barriers that impede success. These barriers result from design considerations and limitations of the capabilities, performance, and scalability. This article details these barriers to BPM and what is required to minimize or eliminate them. Process Management and Technology Process management has long been inspired by the latest available technology. Recall t... (more)

Notes on Big Data

Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world's largest particle accelerator that is being used to find the elusive "God particle," generates about 40Terabytes (1 TB=103GB) of data per day from its four main detectors. Assuming an average size of 1GB for a movie, that amounts to a data stream worth 40000 movies(!) in a day. This massive amount of data is distributed to selected institutions across the world for further research. Thus, in one year, the CERN pumps about 15 Petabytes(1PB=106GB) of data into its private network and the Internet. Similarly, multiple information sources acros... (more)

Great Solutions for Big Problems…

Managed Services Providers face a variety of challenges. They struggle trying to sell an intangible and invisible service. Quoting Harry Beckwith, author of the book “Selling the Invisible”: ‘You can’t see them – so how do you sell them? That’s the problem with services.’  However some services can be transformed into something tangible, PR services can be touched and sensed in the publications for instance, telephone services are sensed when making a call; but the IT managed services are never sensed, these services just are there. The computer works, the antivirus is updated, ... (more)

BPM on Demand – Fantasy or Fast Track to Agility?

The automation of processes is a key enabler of the Cloud phenomenon – without process the Cloud remains a passive environment that undoubtedly saves you money and removes some of the operational headaches, but does little else. The Cloud without process cannot deliver on the promise of Business Technology or the Service-Oriented Enterprise. All of the thoughts and ideas around assembling applications quickly to support a business imperative simply will not happen without process technology. However we need to be very clear – process management in the cloud is not just about BP... (more)

Transform Your Applications to Drive Business Innovation & Growth (Part 3)

Businesses can be transformed, sometimes through new leadership, sometimes through new market realities or business relationships. But perhaps the easiest way, for IT at least, to transform the business is by enabling the business to evolve from a data silo'd organization to a data-centric enterprise and by unleashing the power of data in new ways. Of course, easy is a relative term, and there are substantial challenges to truly transforming a business environment and proactively supporting business needs through the use of data. These include: Achieving a Single Source of Truth ... (more)