links for 2010-02-20

In this recorded SAP Mentor Monday Webinar, Anne Kathrine Petterøe and Richard Hirsch provide an overview of the Enterprise Social Messaging Experiment, or ESME, a social tool that takes the immediacy of messaging and applies it to real-time business process problem solving.

Holger Kisker on the convergence of BI and BPM: how BPM solutions are including increasingly more BI functionality in the move towards intelligent business processes.

MIT Sloan on the cycle of process improvement failure. This is focused on process improvement through methodologies such as Six Sigma, without considering the impact of technologies such as BPM to make the improvement stickier once the improvement expert goes away.

Alexander Samarin is working his way through some of the concepts from his recent book. In this one, he discusses how model-driven development is key to BPM: what the business/process analysts model at the front end should be directly translated into the executing system in some way. He doesn't necessarily call for a shared-model approach, but states the necessity of robust standards to support model exchange.

A list of fundamental functions expected in an enterprise service bus: communications and protocol transformation, data format transformation, orchestration or integration workflow, and messaging and process management (optional, and may be provided by a higher layer such as BPM).

Summary of the Forrester tweet jam that they held last week. Very sorry to have missed it, but the record lingers on in Twitter's search (at least for a few more days). Interesting point by Connie Moore that over 50% of BA's can't cut it as a process analyst.

BPM tweetjam last week: unfortunately I missed since I was travelling that day, but if you check the hashtag #bpmjam, you can follow the conversation. Great idea from Forrester to host!

Anatoly Belychook on using exclusive event gateways to handle alternative message processing, and why this BPMN construct should not be considered optional if your processes use external messages where the outcome may be one of several message types or a timeout. Scott Francis adds a comment to state that the vendors should step up and state if they support this construct.

One of the first of what I'm sure will be many BPM iPhone apps. I'm not sure that doing the process modeling on an iPhone makes a lot of sense; I'm more interested in using it for process execution.

How complex event processing fared in the Intelligent Enterprise Editors' Choice Awards (to which I was supposed to contribute, but ran out of time).

Timo Elliot of SAP discusses how to use their new collaborative application, 12sprints. He links to other resources, such as tutorial videos from their YouTube channel, and steps through a very detailed example with screenshots to follow along.

From BP3's bpmCamp, a conference for Lombardi customers (but not by Lombardi), a discussion on BPM requirements. Some good points to consider on how requirements change during process discovery and development — something that Lombardi customers might struggle with if they ever become IBM GBS customers.

Rick Geneva, who started blogging about process modeling when he was at Intalio, with a discussion of conditions versus events, and how to model event-driven business processes.

Craig Le Clair of Forrester discusses case management, and how document-centric BPM is starting to move in this direction. They've also published a report recently on case management, worth a look.

A review of Process Master, a process discovery tool. There are a number of tools emerging for business users/analysts to use for capturing business processes without having to learn much about process modeling.

Michael zur Muehlen discusses the BPMN "DoDAF" subset (which I believe to be mis-named), how it came to be, and why it's of value.

Theo Priestley interviews Forrester's two primary BPM analysts, Connie Moore and Clay Richardson, about what's coming in 2010, Social BPM, and the future of BPM.