Keith Swenson expands on Jacob Ukelson's post of a few days ago about checklists for case management. I agree with the idea of a checklist, but see it most commonly required at a specific task in a structured process. Maybe that's just a function of my clients, but usually there's some structured process that looks like the usual process map, then at some of human-facing steps in the process, there's a checklist.

I especially like point #1, which is true for many cloud-based solutions: your business is already using it. Particularly for documents that have to be shared with external agencies and business partners.

TIBCO adds in advanced statistical and predictive analytics to their business-friendly Spotfire data visualization tool.

The Google Apps Marketplace launched yesterday, and two BPM apps are available right out of the gate: Cordys ($95/user/year) and RunMyProcess (30Euro = $40/user/year). Yes, those prices are correct: between $40 and $100 per user per YEAR.

Cordys added a slideshow to the Business Process Management group on SlideShare (see link to entire group below comments section on SlideShare). Other vendors, feel free to follow suit (or just check out what's on the group), but don't get carried away.

Appian is hosting a webinar this week, Thursday at 11am Eastern, featuring Clay Richardson of Forrester discussing "Hitting the Lean BPM Target". Forrester has a Lean BPM index (anemic/lean/bloated) as we saw during their conference last fall, and Clay will apparently tell you all the secrets of how to hit the Lean bull's eye.

For Toronto-based readers: my friends Roger, Gladys and Ron are at it again, with seminars on BPM and business rules coming up in Toronto next month. Gladys and Ron also give a repeat performance in San Jose in May, accompanied by Kathy Long. For Toronto, use the code TOAE10SK for a 15% discount — tell them that I sent you!

A 15-day public review of the BPEL4People 1.1 specification starts today, and is limited in scope to changes made during an earlier 60-day review.

Some drivers for BPM within an organization. Although these are higher-level than the list of ROI factors that I linked to recently, these are the major areas that you want to look at for reasons to implement BPM.

Why you need to include the customer as a role in your business process, especially if you want accurate end-to-end times.

I often tune in for Active Endpoints' CTO Tuesdays podcasts, since Michael Rowley provides some good technical depth about BPM. This week: part 1 of 2 on state, persistence and long-running processes. This is a classic problem with system-centric systems that are trying to become human-centric, since many human-centric processes are, by their nature, long-running, whereas many system-centric are STP that complete in a matter of minutes or seconds. Much different considerations come up, such as persisting state, and also the impact of model changes to in-flight process instances (the later of which I'm not sure that he's covering). Disclosure: I occasionally do paid webinars for Active Endpoints, but I'm not compensated in any way for telling you about CTO Tuesdays.

Ann All discusses the ARISalign and BlueWorks online BPM communities, including some quotes from an interview that I did with her recently.

Although not comprehensive, a list of places to start looking for ROI when you're implementing BPM.

Jacob Ukelson of ActionBase on the use of checklists in unstructured processes. Call it what you will (e.g., case management), unstructured processes need checklists in order to prompt the human involved to execute the necessary steps, as well as to show required versus optional steps.

Some in-depth background on WebDAV (a standard for document management over HTTP), why it's important for ECM, and how the rumors of its death have been greatly exaggerated .

Paul Vincent of TIBCO presents some standard patterns for mixing CEP with BPM and SOA: standalone CEP, CEP enriching BPM processes and/or SOA services, CEP monitoring processes and services, CEP-based decisions for processes and services, dynamic process and service control, and embedded processes and services within CEP. Good examples with diagrams.

Organizations place less value on what we used to call "embedded workflow" (process management within ERP and other enterprise systems), since they realize that processes span multiple business and technology silos. Processes need to be orchestrated across systems, not just within systems. Of course, there's still strong use cases for inter-system workflows, but there needs to be a bigger picture to tie them together.

Gartner reports that BPM has crossed the chasm and will make it into the mainstream this year. I think that's the 3rd year running for that proclamation. More troubling, "The right answer in selecting a BPMS is often three BPMSs, based on the particular projects' needs.", which seems to indicate that Gartner is bowing to pressure from platform vendors that have multiple fragmented BPM offerings. Not a good thing for customers.

Some interesting BPM aspects to this: #5 is "enterprise platforms gaining a social layer", which is what I've been seeing (and presenting on) happening in BPMS for a couple of years. Also, #8, "enterprise social media workflow" is an opportunity for current BPMS vendors to get into the social space, or social media vendors to get into the BPM space.

Another small BPM SaaS player: is this the future of BPM for SMB (probably), and if so, when will we start to see some leaders emerge and market consolidation occur?

The #1 way: make collaboration part of a business process, in order to show ROI and further the business goals.

I'm a big fan of getting something simple into production fast, then adding on more features as the users work with the system and provide some real feedback. Steve Blank presents a nice view of why you want to implement the minimum feature set first, but how you have to sell the 18-month vision at the same time.

Jon Pyke on Garter's recent BPM conference in London: "BPM is far too important a topic to leave in the hands of product vendors", especially since the products are becoming indistinguishable from one another.

Michael zur Meuhlen of Stevens Institute is teaching a masters-level BPM course through their web-based distance learning environment. You can take this as a standalone course, as part of a graduate certificate in BPM, or as part of their Masters in IS with a BPM concentration.

Michael Blechar of Gartner on service-oriented development of applications, and how business process analysis tools support that by promoting cross-organizational reuse.

ARISalign — Software AG's online BPM collaboration offering — was put into open beta this week at Cebit. My review is yet to come, but here's one from Theo Priestley.

Some Q&A about ERP, BPM and SOA: how SOA is leveling the BPM integration playing field, where ERP vendors who also have BPM fit in, and the balance between integration and modeling capabilities.

The world of industry analysts is changing, and this wiki is capturing some of the ideas about how industry analysts are judged, and some best practices. Social media has had a huge impact here, breaking the previous correlation between insight, influence and exposure.

Is CMIS the killer app for mashups and ECM? Or are ECM mashup widgets just a way for vendors to create some eye candy to hold customers' attention while they rework their old user interfaces?

SAP now has a BPX training and certification program. I haven't seen any of the material so not sure how it matches with other programs, although it differs since it's specific to SAP products.

Pros and cons of Windows Worflow Foundation, which is working its way into a wide range of Microsoft products.

Although BPM could potentially help with #3 and #5, some BPM implementations are just turning into rigid enterprise-y software themselves.

If you enjoyed Forrester's #bpmjam tweet jam last month, they're holding a #crmjam on March 24th. One of the topics is whether BPM has a place in CRM strategies; interestingly, their wording of the question equates BPM with lean thinking.

Ovum's report on a decision matrix for selecting a BPM vendor. Provided courtesy of Active Endpoints (direct link to PDF).

Process and content go hand-in-hand, at least in my experience. Here's some tips on integrating ECM and BPM: these are mostly the "whys" rather than the "hows", but provides some good incentives for getting started with this.

Process mining: discovering business processes automatically by looking at audit logs of your SAP ERP system. This looks at some of the research available for this, but take note that Fujitsu's process mining product could be used for this already, whether or not you choose to use Fujitsu Interstage BPM, SAP NetWeaver BPM, or some other BPM to automate some of these processes.

Co-working spaces in Toronto. I'm thinking about getting a hot desk at one of these for one or two days each week: working from home is great most of the time, but sometimes you just need a bit of interaction. Lots of great people work at these spaces, which means some lateral thinking is injected into the day's work.

Theo exposes our super-secret vendor demo rating system: how many shirts can you iron while they are doing the PowerPoint part of what is supposed to be a live online demo? I'm considering a little graphic that I can include with my product reviews.

A 21-minute podcast on SAP BPM use cases available on SCN, and how they are helping other projects.

Heathrow airport uses Pega BPM software to manage aircraft ground flow and passenger movements. Nice to see this being done with generic BPM software that can be easily integrated with other data sources and monitoring software, instead of a closed system.

A history of BPM, including references to (and one graphic from) my 2006 "History of BPM" series on this blog.

Product review of Nimbus Control BPM, by Theo Priestley.

Evaluating CEP? Here's a checklist of functionality to start with for your evaluation scorecard. It's from TIBCO, so expect some bias towards their products.

Dion Hinchcliffe on whether making enterprise applications more social really make major difference to enterprises in a meaningful way. The answer: "It depends". He lists five major reasons how adding social aspects to enterprise IT can show real benefits.

My article on runtime collaboration in BPM, in the Cutter IT Journal. Subscription required.

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.

Ann All of ITBusinessEdge interviewed me earlier this week, based on my "BPM and Enterprise 2.0" presentation topic from the conference last week in Oslo. The interview covers mostly issues about why companies and individuals want to do collaborative/social BPM

Selling BPM versus selling ERP: why business executives "get" ERP from the start, but have to see the demo to understand BPM.

If you find the two dimensions of a standard BPMN editor to be just a bit too constrained, take a look at Ross Brown's paper on 3D process modeling in a virtual world: think BPMN in Second Life.

Continuing on from the link that I posted yesterday, Nick Malik with more on the job of business architect. Near the end, a good distinction between enterprise architect (all Zachman rows/columns), business architect (upper rows), solution architect (lower rows) and information architect (single column).