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Keith Swenson's recent presentation comparing Model Preserving Strategy and Model Transforming Strategy for BPM, from the recent Process.gov conference in DC on Jun 19. Slides with synchronized audio.

Brandon Baxter of Lombardi: "Think about BPM as the layer between your people and your systems" – in other words, part of the functionality is to do things that your existing systems don't already do, plus orchestrate multi-system processes. This is positioning a unified UI capability as a primary driver for BPM; unfortunately, a lot of BPM implementations still do a lot of "swivel chair" integration with multiple applications still visible on the screen, due in part to deficiencies of the BPMS and part because of the lack of services/integration layers in the enterprise applications. Some good points on the value of BPM.

"Ask your analysts to provide world class requirements including functional and non-functional ones. Persude them to stay away from providing technical solutions so you can figure out how to automate your firm’s processes within the context of your SOA efforts." Excellent point on what business analysts should and shouldn't be doing. I very often see BA's delving deep into design (when they have no actual skills or experience to do so) instead of sticking to where they can add real value.

Nice. I already use some of these, but this gives me lots of ideas. Via Stephen O'Grady.

82% of organizations have ECM shelfware that's not in production "yet". Depressingly accurate.

Social software + traditional business processes = social innovation? Via Lee Bryant at Headshift.

More on the problems with conferences these days. Unfortunately, companies like Gartner are in the conference business, so have no motivation to take Scott's advice and focus on content rather than turnstiles.

Bruce Silver reviews a cloud-based BPMN process modeler. Not favorably.

I didn't read the Forrester report that James refers to ($749 seems a bit steep), but I agree with the ideas in the summary as well as James' comments: end users are going to be doing some of their own "development", and we need to ensure that they have secure and functional tools to do so. BPMS, BRMS and mashups are key players here.

Intalio shows modeling and executing a process from a spreadsheet representation. Interestingly, Savvion also has a table view of process models now — for some, the spreadsheet is mightier than the flowchart.

A detailed review of Pegasystems and its CEO. Lots of good detail on the product, and some colorful back stories.

Documententum developer edition of Content Server now free. Why can't all vendors do this? It's bound to increase acceptance, the revenue loss would be negligible.

How analyst firms are changing, and new firms and business models that are emerging.

Not ready to push all of your documents into an ECM? Consider an in-house Google appliance that indexes your documents across heterogeneous repositories. For documents that don't require ECM capabilities (e.g., retention management), this is a much cheaper alternative, while providing full-text searching across those currently unsearchable shared network drives.

Great set of tips for conference bloggers. If you're a regular reader here, you know that I live-blog at every conference that I attend (there were 18 last year, believe it or not), and I have come to a very similar set of practices. I highly recommend Windows Live Writer for blogging rather than a text editor or Word, since you can format and publish directly from there.

A free online PDF to Word converter. PDF to Excel also available. Via JC Dichant.

Things that you no longer need to worry about when you outsource your infrastructure.

Why we need more collaboration and flexibility in BPM: 85% of BPM users "often" or "occasionally" design their own workarounds in order to get things done.

A fairly lengthy review of BPM concepts and vendors.

Some nice new social aspects added to Lombardi's Blueprint.

BPMN – the novel. No, really.

A set of tests to determine if you need business rules. For most of the business processes that I see, the answer is yes to at least four of these five tests.

Bruce Silver's review of IBM's upcoming BlueWorks community process modelling site. There seems to be a lot of BPM community sites springing up all of a sudden; it's going to be difficult to wade through and figure out what they all do, and where it is worthwhile participating. This offers some free process modelling and collaboration tools as well as the usual community stuff such as articles and forums. Export of the models from this environment is only discussed for WebSphere Business Modeler, not to FileNet P8 BPM.

A 14-minute demo of creating and executing a process on TIBCO's iProcess platform. Nicely scripted walkthrough. Also, ScreenToaster looks like a cool way to do a screen recording and publish it to their site or YouTube, or download it as a .mov file, all using a free Java applet-driven site.

A presentation from several months ago showing IBM's roadmap for ECM (including BPM) in the FileNet suite. A lot of this now refers to already-released products.