BPM Think Tank Day 1: Mike Amend

Mike Amend, deputy CTO of BEA, gave the first sponsor presentation of the day (if you don’t count the Accenture talk, which probably came about due to their sponsorship). They’re still using the “secret sauce” catchphrase that Fuego used to use, and use the same chef/cooking analogy that I saw at another conference (maybe theirs) that I attended earlier this year, although he’s toned down the analogies since he only has a 20-minute time slot.

Key points:

  • Standardize on a common set of tools: modelling for business users, development tools with shared models, and web applications for human interaction and metrics dashboard.
  • Identify suitable first targets: low maturity level that are easy to improve, low complexity that are easy to automate, and high impact with customer/partner touchpoints that can be a competitive differentiator.
  • Plan for scale: select scalable tools, and put the right processes and methodologies in place for continuous improvement and the ability to move beyond a departmental project.
  • Move past the division/department boundary to create cross-divisional and enterprise-level services (and presumably processes, although he’s talking mostly about SOA here).
  • Simulate and test processes with real-world assumptions about staffing, system performance, costs and throughput.
  • Monitor and measure processes: establish key metrics for processing time, activity time, workload distribution and current state.
  • Establish a process centre of excellence: COO, executive IT, BPM technology owner, business analyst and business operations staff.
  • Follow a methodology: implement and follow guidelines from centre of excellence, leverage best practices from the vendors and peer communities.

He finished up discussing their lifecycle methodology, and the readiness assessment tool that you can find on BEA’s website.

Off to lunch, then we’ll have a full afternoon of BPM standards geekdom.

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