I missed the first morning of the IQPC Lean Six Sigma & Process Improvement conference in Toronto today, but with my usual impeccable timing, showed up just in time for lunch (where we had to explain the rules of curling to the American attendees). The first session this afternoon is with David Brown, a black [...]
IRM is running both a BPM and business analysis conference in London on September 27-29, and the calls for speakers are open until March 8th. The BPM conference is looking for presentations on: Building BPM capabilities Using BPM to change how businesses are managed BPM governance and the centre of expertise BPM success stories Process [...]
In a nice break from the past two years as a road warrior, I’ve only been on one trip since November. Even better, some conferences are coming to Toronto so that I don’t even need to travel (although not sure that February up here is a big draw if you don’t already live here). This [...]
It’s webinar day here at Column 2: this is my third in a row, this one an update on the BPMN 2.0 standard by Robert Shapiro, who participates in both the OMG BPMN 2.0 and WfMC XPDL 2.2 standards efforts. We’re already starting to see vendor support for BPMN 2.0, even though it’s not yet [...]
The ARIS online community is running a contest until the end of November to get people started with process modeling: create a process model (using their free downloadable ARIS Express process modeler, of course) that falls into the category “BPM is useful” or “BPM is fun”, and submit it on their site. I’m not sure [...]
I had a briefing this week on Fujitsu’s just-released Interstage BPM version 11 as well as an update on their cloud platform. I’ll cover the cloud platform in another blog post, since this one is getting a bit long. Version 11 has a lot of new features for handling ad hoc, collaborative, knowledge-intensive work; this [...]
Roger Burlton, who organized the BPM track here, gave a presentation this afternoon on process discovery techniques that fit well with Kathy Long’s previous presentation on process notations. He looked at different levels of BPM (and therefore of models): enterprise, business process, and implementation. Most of the BPM models done at the enterprise level are [...]
The pool at the Bellagio was a big draw, but I’ve kept on track for this afternoon’s presentations, starting with Kathy Long on process notations. She spoke about the necessity of documenting processes, as well as the levels to which documents should be documented. Documenting the current process should only be done down to a [...]
To wrap up the proceedings from last night, I was asked to critique the efforts of the groups and pick a winner: as it turned out, I was the only judge. Each of the groups did great work, and I want to call out some of the specific efforts: The Business Use Case group had [...]
8pm We’re just getting started with the Process Design Slam: one of the face-to-face sessions that make up the collaborative design process that started a couple of months ago on the Design Slam wiki. Marilyn Pratt has identified the six groups that will each work on their part of the design, collaborating between groups (a.k.a. [...]
Wolfgang Hilpert and Thomas Volmering gave us an update on NetWeaver BPM, since I was last updated at SAPPHIRE when they were releasing the product to full general availability. They’re readying the next wave of BPM – NetWeaver 7.2 – with beta customers now, for ramp-up near the beginning of the year and GA in [...]
We had a blogger roundtable today with Soeren Balko, VP in the SAP NetWeaver BPM architecture and design group, and Marek Kowalkiewicz from the Brisbane section of SAP Research with an overview of the research and special projects going on at SAP. Innovations tend to emerge from the research centers – in conjunction with the [...]
I was sitting in the blogger room this morning at SAP TechEd in Phoenix, and heard Marilyn Pratt mention my name over at another table: usually something that makes me perk up my ears, since Marilyn is a primo community builder, and I had the feeling that I was about to be recruited for something. [...]
I first saw Fujitsu’s process discovery offering last year, and it looked pretty useful at the time, but it didn’t have much of a track record yet. Today’s session brought forward Greg Mueller of Electro Scientific Industries (ESI), a manufacturer of photonic and laser systems for microengineering applications, to talk about their successes with it. [...]
Bill Rosser presented a decision framework for identifying when to use BPA (business process analysis), EA (enterprise architecture) and BPM modeling tools for modeling processes: all of them can model processes, but which should be used when? It’s first necessary to understand why you’re modeling your processes, and the requirements for the model: these could [...]
Chen Li of University of Twente gave the last presentation of the conference on process variant mining. We heard yesterday in the tutorial on flexibility about process variants; one issue with process variants is that there needs to be some way to identify which of the variants are important enough to update the original process [...]
In the first of two papers in the final session of the conference, Josep Carmona of Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya presented on process mining calculation strategies. The theory of regions shows how to derive a Petri net representation of a process model from the process log, which shows the transition between states, but it’s very [...]
Diogo Ferriera of Universidade Tecnica de Lisboa presented a paper on process discovery based on unlabelled event logs: where the events in the log are only identified by the specific task, not by the process instance. Consider that a process instance may be executed via multiple paths through the process model, resulting in a different [...]
Manfred Reichert of Ulm University and Barbara Weber of University of Innsbruck presented a tutorial on the challenges, paradigms and technologies involved in enabling flexibility in process-aware information systems (PAIS). Process flexibility is important, but you have to consider both build time flexibility (how to quickly implement and configure new processes) and run time flexibility [...]
I know that a few people had a problem with the link to the 7PMG paper that I referenced in a post earlier today; here’s an updated link to a pre-press version sent to me by Hajo Reijers, one of the authors, which also includes guidance on how to prioritize the guidelines. Enjoy!
