A few more of Deb Miller’s thoughts on the ACM tweet jam.

Keith Swenson also lists several other people’s posts on the ACM tweet jam.

Deb Miller’s summary of last month’s tweet jam on Adaptive Case Management.

Keith Swenson’s summary of the tweet jam on Adaptive Case Management last month.

I like the list of the types of process monitoring and management tools here: instance management, workflow initiation, workflow monitoring, workflow statistics, audit trails, and resource organization. There are likely others, but you should definitely be looking at these if you’re doing BPM.

On the synergies of doing BPM and EA together: "From an organizational perspective the enterprise needs to leverage the synergistic powers of robust architectural planning and agile business optimization represented by EA and BPM respectively. From a technological perspective the enterprise needs to establish a platform that will enable the appropriate collaboration by creating visibility, traceability and integrity between targets and solutions across all roles and tools. Both are required components for a sustainable approach to agility."

"The business unit that purchases a software tool before engaging with an Enterprise Architect is breaking several cardinal rules. But the first one is that they don't understand the role of technology." It's the business people's job to understand the business, and the architect's job to match that up with technical services.

Nick Malik presents a chart for measuring the maturity of a business capability, based on how the business engages with business architects. I know few companies who are at level 2, and none beyond that, but this gives me hope that they exist.

"In enterprise architecture (EA), BPM, and SOA modeling, the most important question is how to bridge the gap between business and technical orientations. A coherent answer is the key to a successful BPM and SOA implementation. The trick is combining the various modeling viewpoints in one repository." It's exactly this sort of discussion that had me become interested in EA several years back: it provides a better understanding of modeling in BPM.

How recognizing, capturing and reusing patterns in knowledge work can be useful: repackaging parts of cases into a new case to speed the work. This is a bit like having some structured subprocesses available to call for a case as required: that blend of structured and unstructured that allows the knowledge worker to select a preexisting pattern if one exists, or do their own thing otherwise.

Adam Deane's funny take on the "war" between BPM and ECM that is being caused by case management: both vendor camps want to claim it for their own. Underneath the humor, some good points (and a fun read).

What needs to be added to a basic ECM platform in order to do true case management (which, of course, starts with the assumption that CM is built on ECM).

Under the title "Advanced Case Management and BPM: Are they the same?", a discussion from IBM on their case management strategy. Unclear how they are overlaying their product suite on this definition yet; their definition extends into areas of both ECM and BPM, for which they have multiple products.

How the ECM vendors are repositioning their products (accurately or not) as case management.

A case is not just documents: it's a container for documents, rules, other data and the relationships between all of them.

The need for business data in process reporting, not just process data — key point, often overlooked (or ignored by vendors during demos).

The need for business data in process reporting, not just process data — key point, often overlooked (or ignored by vendors during demos).

A really interesting progression of links and excerpts on structured and ad hoc work: although framed in the context of Enterprise 2.0, these same issues about collaboration and emergent processes are coming up in the ACM discussions. "The road ahead is integration 2.0"

The phrase "corporate debris" is just so perfect for out-of-date process models (and for many other artifacts). Process models need to be "living" — constantly updated and published to the community — in order to be useful.

A presentation by Cheryl McKinnon on the changing face of ECM, including the impact of the adoption of the CMIS standard as well as SharePoint 2010.

A sample of the type of research that you'll see presented at BPM2010 in September: Petia Wohed (who I met at BPM2008 in Milan) and team are proposing research on the integration of BPMS with social software.

Analytics are a critical part of BPM, not just after the fact, but in order to inform manual and automated decision-making during processes. Now that we're starting to get our processes under control, it's time to turn our attention to solving the next problem: how to properly analyze all the data that those processes produce.

The interest in case management lately spends a lot of time talking about the knowledge worker: here's a definition of knowledge work and knowledge workers: it's about goal-orientation and self-direction.

The role of the sponsor on a BPM (or any) project: cut the red tape, and put the fear of God in everyone.

So rarely do we see BPM poetry, much less satirical BPM poetry. Unfortunately, the general reaction was not as enthusiastic as mine, since Mike has decided to cut his Friday humor posts. I vote for more BPM poetry!

ABPMP and OMG are both pushing their BPM certification programs. Worthwhile, or just a money grab? It's difficult to tell if these programs will be useful 1) as BPM training, and 2) as a required certification for BPM professionals in the future.

E-forms are a pretty critical piece in automating processes that are currently paper-based: reasons 1-5 are all directly related to process improvement.

More in a series of Q&A posts by Frank Michael Kraft on ACM: what does "adaptive" mean, and how can ACM and BPM work together?

A few discussions recently about business analysts on process projects led me to this post about webinars for BAs, including one on process mapping.

4-minute video showing the processWave.org process modeler within Google Wave – watch it in 1080p HD full screen if you can or you'll miss some detail. Shows the capabilities of the BPMN and UML modeler, but also the collaborative capabilities in Wave.

Ann All sums up some of the recent writings on social BPM, with links to several relevant blog posts and vendor products.

Although listed as requirements for ACM, these are really requirements for any enterprise software in order to take on social functionality.

Dick Hirsch on using RAVEN Cloud as a way to start with textual process descriptions before process modeling, and why textual descriptions are important. Not really specific to social BPM, in spite of the title.

An interesting slide by Clay Richardson on the emerging social BPM patterns: extended discovery, runtime process guidance, and process reflection.

Very interesting discussion on working with business analysts in BPM: I think that this is critical for BPM success, and is a key weakness on many of the projects that I've worked on: even though I've been in the role of application architect, I've had to take on the role of business process analyst because the BAs have no experience or training on process analysis or process modeling.

Neil Ward-Dutton's take-aways from the recent TUCON conference: the value of event-driven processes and what the "two-second advantage" really means.

Very interesting discussion on working with business analysts in BPM: I think that this is critical for BPM success, and is a key weakness on many of the projects that I've worked on: even though I've been in the role of application architect, I've had to take on the role of business process analyst because the BAs have no experience or training on process analysis or process modeling.

Neil Ward-Dutton's take-aways from the recent TUCON conference: the value of event-driven processes and what the "two-second advantage" really means.

Comparing two open source BPM solutions: one full-suite solution intended to run standalone, the other an embeddable set of BPM capabilities to be built into other solutions, such as ECM.

Tom Baeyens of Activiti BPM responds to questions about their open source approach.

One part of a skirmish between Active Endpoints' CTO and the newly launched Activiti BPM team: questioning the feasibility of using a process virtual machine. Interestingly, BPEL is never mentioned; I think that Activiti stirred things up for BPEL-based vendors like Active Endpoints by stating that BPEL is dead.

I've seen the new Visio BPMN support and it looks good, but when Bruce Silver endorses it by using it to teach his BPMN class, you know that it has legs.

The 2nd part of a detailed technical and functional review of how Savvion fits into the Progress portfolio.

Jacob Ukelson points out that putting process design into the hands of the users isn't just a cultural change, but that the software usability issues are not trivial: it's difficult to present a user experience that allows full-features processes to be designed, but can be managed with little or no training by the average business user.

Jacob Ukelson looks at the link between ACM and project management. We're undoubtedly going to see some crossover/confusion in the marketplace between project management and ACM.

Keith Swenson comments on Malcom Ross' series on case management. A few disagreements, but in general, a balanced review of the series. Nice when one vendor can comment on another vendor's blog posts with an appropriate degree of common courtesy.

Fifth in a series of posts by Malcolm Ross on case management: be sure to read back through all of them, linked from this post. Sounds like the series will continue for a few more posts, all of them covering case management definitions and the technical product features that are required.

Just as IBM is positioning FileNet as a primary ACM entrant from their product suite, EMC is positioning Documentum Content Server as ACM. If nothing else, ACM will definitely breathe new life (which you may or may not construe as emergency resuscitation) into some of the ECM suites.

This is a bit meta, but a link to Keith Swenson's excellent links and comments. I linked to some of these as well, but enjoy his commentary.

As this chart from Gartner reminds us, there is nothing new under the case management sun.

Ashish Bhagwat on the culture of case management and BPM, and how many tools could do both equally well. I think that he has some points: some companies want to put more control in the hands of the knowledge workers and tend to create case management scenarios; others want (or need) to lock down the specific processes, so tend to use pre-defined processes.

Keith Swenson live-blogging my BPM and CM webinar – the highest compliment

The webcast recording of my BPM/CM webinar with Pegasystems.

My presentation (from a webinar sponsored by Pegasystems) on BPM and case management.

Follow-on Q&A about ACM, specifically the relationship to BPM.

Since the topic of case management has been bubbling around for the past weeks, some basic definitions and background are helpful.

Examples of situations that are too complex, too unique or too simple to actually bother modeling the process in advance.

Defining processes by their outcomes, not by rigid execution. Although Max Pucher's blog posts tend to be self serving (each of them expounds on how his product does everything that is needed for whatever he is writing about), he does have some good points on goal-directed versus pre-defined processes. Not sure that I like the Gantt chart approach to visualizing the dynamic process map.

A collection of ACM posts today, collected over the past few weeks. Keith Swenson posits that case management is not just BPM done on the fly, but something quite different: "The concept of a process is essential to BPM. Case management, on the other hand, might have a process, but it might not. Many cases have no process at all." Although you might use some of the components of a BPMS for ACM (analytics, connectors), that doesn't necessarily make it quack like a duck. Great discussion in the comments with a wide variety of opinions, including the one by Max Pucher that "solutions are being created by vendors, but markets are created by analysts". This is as much about whether a new market is being defined as whether new products are emerging.

"The shocking truth is that many of the Fortune 2000 are still flying blind when it comes to their business processes. They have incomplete, out-of-date and conflicting views of their business processes, held in a variety of formats in different places, and with only the loosest governance." Even though many companies aren't doing anything about it yet, at least they're starting to become aware of the problem.

The lack of good enterprise search, either with or without ECM systems, is making it more difficult to find information. Ever wanted to "just Google that" inside your firewall?

Cheryl McKinnon of Nuxeo comments on the new AIIM report on the state of the ECM industry, highlighting the open source and cloud aspects.

A good summary of why it's not a good idea to consolidate multiple existing ECM implementations onto a single platform: "consolidating systems requires an awful lot more skills than just document migration; you effectively have to reverse engineer everything". What he fails to mention is when one of the systems requires such a radical upgrade that it is effectively a migration onto a new system (albeit from the same vendor); in that case, you might as well look at consolidation.