Recap of SimplyBPM at IBM Impact

Posted on May 25, 2012 by Yogesh Kondaskar

IBM Impact 2012 was a great success. Undoubtedly, IBM BPM and Cloud Computing had the spotlight during the event. We launched SimplyBPM which is our solution offering for IBM BPM at Impact. We also got the opportunity to speak to a few of IBM BPM users and potential users about our solution and service offerings. Including us, there are a few short of 100 partners that showcased their offerings in the Solution Center and with all the knowledge sessions there was a lot of information up for grab at the event. So in this newsletter I would like to highlight some of our capabilities and how we can contribute towards building a successful IBM BPM Center of Excellence in your organization.

Our Services

Business Process Management and IBM BPM

We know IBM BPM inside out. We have had a BPM practice for over 5 years and we have worked closely with Lombardi Teamworks even prior to IBM acquisition. We have among the biggest pool of certified IBM BPM resources. On our implementations, we work closely with business SMEs in discovering the process, building and improving it and also getting the most ROI. Using the approach we follow, we also involve and mentor your in-house resources thru the implementation of the process so that the knowledge gained is retained by your organization.

Some of our BPM service offerings are:

  • Process Discovery
  • Enterprise Architecture and Process Design
  • Setting up BPM Center of Excellence and Governance
  • Introduction of agile playback methodology in the enterprise

Simply BPM which is our solution offering for IBM BPM includes:

  • Industry Solutions
  • Ready to use Common Toolkits
  • Center of Excellence Manager
  • Out-of-box Managerial Reports
  • Integration with other external systems

SimplyBPM is the developed using our years of industry experience and uses the industry best practices which would enable you to quickly develop the business process and put more focus of process optimization rather than worrying about common reusable components. All these features allow you to get faster ROI and put you ahead in the game. The industry solutions or pre-packaged applications are production ready and could be used as-is or are easily customizable as per your needs. This severely reduces the development time many folds.

We also offer Migration service for Lombardi customers who are still running version 5 or 6 and would like to migrate to IBM BPM 7.5 or 8. Our Migration solution includes best practices and guidelines for migration based on our prior experience on similar initiatives.

ILOG and IBM Decision Management

We have very good experience in ILOG implementations and interfacing ILOG with IBM BPM. We would help you design and author your business rules for prompt automation using ILOG and IBM Decision Management tool. Some of our offering on the BRMS front are:

  • Architecture and Design of the Rules Solution
  • Define life cycle for the Business Rules
  • Mentor business SMEs in Rule Authoring
  • Setting up governance of the Business Rules
  • Managerial Reports for Auditing Rules Change

IBM Business Monitor

We offer services to help you utilize IBM Business Monitor to design a complete graphical dashboard over your business processes that would give you more visibility over what is exactly going on within the processes. Here is what we offer:

  • Create a framework for quickly building Reports and Dashbaoard
  • Crate reports on in-flight as well as historical data
  • Mentor in-house resources to develop reports

Apart from these, we also have experience resources in WebSphere MQ, Message Broker, Portal Server, Tivoli, Cognos, ECM, Sterling and Cast Iron.

Feel free to email Joana Flores at jflores@bizteon.com if you have any questions or would like to learn more about any of our offerings.

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Roadmap of IBM BPM at Impact 2012

Posted on May 1, 2012 by Samarth Mehta

Heard about the near future of IBM BPM from the horses mouth.

Looking at the road map that IBM has to integrate its most sought after products was quiet exciting. When I heard about the various offerings that IBM have and the way they all eventually fold into one and other it is inevidible that it will all merge into one complete solution that IBM provides.

 The key products being offered as bundle:

1. Blueworks Live:

Tool that IBM has for process discovery and design that is typically used by business/process analysts

 2. IBM BPM:

This is the workflow/process automation tool. The runtime environement (Process Server) for the process artifacts and a repository (Process Center) to store all these deployible artifacts.

 3. Operational Decision Management (ODM):

Business rule management and business event processing. This is the main rules authoring and execution frameowork. This mainly focusses on automation and governanace of frequently occuring, repetable decision that control critical business systems. 

 4. Business Monitor:

This is a BAM software which gives you more real time realtime operational visibility. It provides a rich dashboard with lets you make managerial decision on various inflight proesses.

IBM’s idea of combining these 4 powerful tools into a single unified offering is definetly going to be a great value add for the clients.

 

Posted in BPM, IBM BPM | Leave a comment

Social BPM: Myth or Reality?

Posted on October 18, 2011 by Yogesh Kondaskar

Business Process Management (BPM) is about collaboration between people and so is Social Networking. BPM is about capturing, improving and managing business processes. BPM requires collaboration between various people responsible for the process. Social Technologies provide the ability for people to collaborate, discuss, provide feedback/reviews, share documents. So logically it makes sense to utilize Social Technologies for Business Process Management.

Forrester’s Clay Richardson coined the term “Social BPM” referring to Process developed and improved through the use of social technologies and techniques.

Does that mean that we can utilize the existing Social Technologies available for BPM?

The answer is yes and no. I will try to explain the reason for this ambiguity.

Public social networks like LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter are very popular networks and are excellent at gathering knowledge because of the wide reach. But being public network, there is a risk of unauthorized access to company’s intellectual property and business  information which is critical in maintaining market leadership. That makes these public tools not appropriate for BPM.

Private social networks like Yammer and Socialtext overcome that limitation by using the business email addresses to restrict access to the network. These private social network can be good tools to collaborate between the employees of an company in collecting and sharing the process knowledge and trying to improve the process. But they need to be used in conjunction with Office tools such as Word and Visio for documenting the process. That limits the use of such tools for Social BPM.

There are tools like IBM Blueworks and SAP AlignSpace that have tried to address the above concerns, and provide a process modeler with social networking features to enable Social BPM. They enable collaborative process design and social networking. These applications run in the cloud and also provide the ability to export the process model, so the ideas can be implemented using BPM Suite such as IBM Lombardi.

So, Social BPM does seem to be a reality. Oh wait, what if my Process workers like to collaborate and share the knowledge for process improvement or discuss ideas of making the process efficient or just need to collaborate to get the work done?

Watch this space for more information.

Posted in BPM, Social BPM | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Can you do BPM without a BPMS?

Posted on May 23, 2011 by Yogesh Kondaskar

I recently came across an interesting discussion, can you do Business Procecss Management without using a technology solutions or a BPM Suite (BPMS) posted by Nicholas Kitson. That got me thinking for a few moments. If an organization is doing process improvement without using BPMS, can that be termed as a BPM effort?

Well, some people will definetly argue that it is a BPM effort, but these people are missing the point that BPM as an organizational practice is incomplete without a BPM Suite. They need to draw a line between classical Business Process Improvement (BPI) and utilizing BPM for BPI. This is because:

  • Business Process Improvement is nothing new. For decades organizations have been using IT Softwares and Solutions for reducing the human intervention and improving the processes.
  • Organizations have been utilizing tools such as Visio for orcestrating Business Processes.
  • Processes owners have utilized Business Intelligence (BI) tools for getting reports on how the processes perform and in some cases, tried to utilize those for improving the processes.

So, why now organizations are setting up BPM Center of Excellence (COE) and implementing BPM Suites?

That is because BPM Suites have revolutionized the way organizations can approach Business Process Improvement.

We know that in the current times organizations have to be agile to change with the market needs. Also, Managers need a real-time view of the organization to make the right decision.

Here are some of the features of current BPM Suites that have resulted in these BPM initiatives:

  • Business Process Modeler to orchestrate the as-is and future process.
  • BPM Engine that runs the process you model, providing an easy handshake between business analyst and IT developers.  IT builds on the same shared model that the business has come up with as a part of the future-state process.
  • Rich UI Framework to automate human tasks.
  • Ability to integrate with ERPs and Legacy Applications to ensure that the investment in those applications is properly utilized.
  • Ability to monitor the process instances at run-time and quickly point out the bottle-necks.
  • Real-time reporting on the application data.
  • Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) to track KPIs.
  • Governance capabilities to manage the processes effectively.
  • Additionally, some BPM Suites also provide Social BPM features which let your end-users participate and contribute to the process improvement effort.

This is the reason why BPM is catching up as an Organizational dicipline for process improvement. Organizations are able to setup BPM COE as an umbrella group working with the IT and Business teams for automating processes.

Posted in BPM | Tagged , | Leave a comment

IBM Business Process Manager: Best of both tools

Posted on April 15, 2011 by Yogesh Kondaskar

For everyone in the BPM space, the biggest surprise anouncement from IBM @ Impact 2011 is that of next version of IBM WebSphere Lombardi Edition (WLE) which will be known as IBM Business Process Manager (IBM BPM) version 7.5. IBM releasing the new version was probably expected, but whats in it is definetly a surprise.

IBM BPM, will be a combination of the WebSphere Lombardi Edition and WebSphere Process Server (WPS), and seems to be thoughtfully designed combining best of both the tools. IBM BPM takes the Process Center of WLE driving both the human workflow centric Process Designer (same as WLE Authoring Environment) and the Integration Designer (or WPS). On the backend, IBM BPM takes the Depolyment Manager from WPS giving WLE which is very powerful and user-friendly compared to the currect WLE deployment process.

IBM BPM will come in 3 flavors:

Express Edition, is similar to the current WLE Express Edition and will be bundled with WebSphere and DB2 for quickly setting up a trial environment.

Standard Edition, will include just the Process Designer for developing human-centric workflows. This will be similar to the current WLE and this is what will be included for the WLE customers as part of existing license.

Advanced Edition, will aditionally include the Integration Designer.

Personally I am very excited to see these 2 products bundled as ONE giving the users the ability to use the most appropriate tool.

Posted in BPM, IBM BPM | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment