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Great analogy for off-the-shelf versus custom. Think software.

Sandy Carter moving from her position as IBM's VP of SOA marketing and strategy to VP of business partner sales. Not sure why it makes sense to move a supposed expert in BPM and SOA out of a role that actively promotes those products and technologies.

Cool! Looking very much like Google Docs and other web-based document editing apps, Gantter is a web-based project management app. Imports and exports MS-Project files. This would be really useful if you could use your Gmail contact list (for example) for resources and sharing, but this is a good start. Via Steiner Carlsen.

Jim Sinur quotes some cases of social networking inside enterprises, and attempts to get a conversation going on combining BPM and social software. I smell some new Gartner research coming; they should be taking a look at some of the other links in today's post.

A paper by Petia Wohed (who I met at the BPM conference in Milan last year) and her colleagues outlining their project on integrating BPM and social software. This attempts to address some of the shortcomings of BPMS, namely lack of context, inflexible decomposition of work activities, lack of differentiation between work distribution and authorization, push-oriented perspective, and single case focus. In their project (over 3 years), they'll be designing a set of services for integration BPMS and social software. I'm hoping that Petia will be presenting on this at the BPM conference in Ulm in September.

Discussion of flow-directed versus goal-directed processes, with some interested comments from readers. My comment stated "Many processes need to be a combination of flow-directed and goal-directed: parts of the process need a pre-defined path for regulatory reasons or to guide tasks done by less-skilled or outsourced workers, whereas other parts need considerably more flexibility for knowledge workers to make choices about what steps to take in order to achieve the goals."

Enterprise 2.0 starts to look more at the enterprise concerns than at the technology, and also considers how to integrate with structured business processes (BPM), a topic that I've written and presented on in the past. This is good news for both BPM and Enterprise 2.0: these concepts and technologies need to come together to really address the business process needs of enterprises.

Tom Baeyens presentation on what's coming up in jBPM 4.

Part 2 of the ECM CoE series, with the center of excellence services spelled out this time.

Part 1 of a set of posts on an ECM center of excellence. I did a BPM CoE webinar recently, and there's lots of similarities here (as there would be with any CoE): reusability, governance and standards/best practices are the key goals.

Separating decisions and processes. Check out the diagram for a good reason why you don't want to code a decision tree in a BPMS, but there are some other important factors that James lists: rules often change more frequently than processes; process and rules are often defined by different people; dynamic rule invocation works best for long-running processes; and the decision logic is reusable across processes and other applications if it is separated from the process.

It’s essential to discuss how and why projects fail in order to avoid doing exactly the same thing in the future. Plus, there’s a certain amount of schadenfreude enjoyed by those whose failures are not quite (yet) as spectacular as those that they hear or read about. We’re having a FAILCamp event in Toronto in July, which is not dedicated to IT project failures, although you can be sure that there will be a lot of those discussed. http://failcampto.eventbrite.com/

A great post (and presentation) by Lauren Cooney on building your personal brand. Very timely, since I was giving a very similar talk to the IBM Women in Technology group the day before, discussing external networking and the value that it brings.

Lombardi’s user conference, moved online to accommodate those without a travel and conference budget, is now 3 consecutive days of 3 sessions per day. The first day is company and product strategy plus a keynote from the CIO of Aviva, the second day is more detail on products and services, and the third day is two customer keynotes (CIO of Sirva and Enterprise Architect at Wells Fargo) plus a partner presentation.

Live blogged from the mesh conference earlier this week, some legal advice for startups: before you start, incorporating, partnership agreements for co-founders, employees/contractors, and other general legal concepts.

SharePoint Designer 2007 is now free, and downloadable from Microsoft.

Great example of why you want to externalize decisions from processes: building decision trees in process notation gets really confusing really fast.

An example of the three levels of BPMN (previously discussed by Bruce Silver, as referenced in this article), and the point that the anaytical diagram *is* the functional specification for the system.

A good set of BPMN links.

"The "E20" group of major ECM vendors will conclude their summit meeting at the AIIM Expo today with a communiqué urging enterprises to permanently suspend efforts to manage content" — nice to see that some people still have a sense of humor for April 1st!