Bpm News & Articles

It has been clear for some time that the market for software applications has been changing. "Agile" has become a buzz word in the apps world, with everyone talking about it, a few delivering and many more depending on their tried and tested on-premises apps.

As organizations around the world seek to “do more with less,” they are increasingly looking to integrate IT systems to eliminate redundancy and improve efficiency. Although point-to-point integration projects are sometimes necessary, putting a holistic integration strategy in place ensures that you are building a platform that can serve as a true foundation for future growth.

“Who’s the best pilot I ever saw? Well, uh, you're lookin' at 'im”
--Gordo Cooper, Astronaut, The Right Stuff

“What’s the best process improvement approach you’ve ever seen?”
I have answered that question differently over the span of my career and suspect you may have as well. In this article in my adaptive case management series, I reflect on the different business process improvement approaches and tools I have seen and share which one I think has the right stuff.

It's awards time for the film industry and like many, I took some time out to watch the Oscars last Sunday. It's great to see high quality performances recognized. But Oscars aren't just for the movies, so I thought it would be a good time to look at award-winning performances in our own industry.

With SharePoint firmly established in the enterprise, and companies looking to deploy an enterprise content management system across the company, many businesses are being forced to answer the question as to whether they should replace their enterprise CMS with SharePoint, or integrate the two.

It’s always hard to even guess at what’s going on in the IBM universe, let alone what’s going on with its channel partners. The announcement today by Prolifics that it is buying Atrium is a case in point.

 In January, Deb Miller wrote that “Business agility is all about being prepared for and able to quickly adapt to change." Perhaps Eccentex was listening. Today the dynamic case management solution provider announced that it had raised US$ 7.5 Million in Series A funding that will be used for expanding its PaaS cloud computing solutions.

It's only a little over a month since OpenText launched its business process management strategy and already we’re starting to see some moves from the Business Process Solutions group. This week’s announcement sees OpenText adding a list of process and case management solutions to the Azure platform.

This week in the document management space, OpenText extends its offerings on the Azure platform, we find that document security is still an issue with SharePoint users, Box gets easier email management, Kofax extends its document capture abilities, Zylpha offers secure document transfer and SmartSoft offers OCR.

Your ability to anticipate, respond to and maximize the results from changes to your external environments are the key drivers of success.” - Stuart Cross

Business agility is all about being prepared for and able to quickly adapt to change. There has been so much written about agility from gurus like Peter Drucker, industry analysts like Forrester and Gartner, and the large well-respected community of process improvement practitioners that it would seem there is nothing new left to be said. Well, challenge accepted.

In the document management space, it was always going to be interesting to see who would get the ball rolling for 2012. Kofax, as one of the most active companies last year in terms of product development and acquisitions, looks set to continue its momentum, this time with the release of Kofax DotImage Enterprise Edition.

Information management in the enterprise has clearly been a matter of considerable concern over the past year. Even leaving aside SharePoint 2010 (which we will look at in another post), interest in it has been intense. Here is a list of subjects that appear to have hit the spot. There are dozens more that could be included, but these are the ones that caught our attention.

In recent years, Complex Event Processing (CEP) has emerged as a key technology that leading businesses use to differentiate themselves from competitors. Traditional enterprise software responds to atomic events in isolation. CEP allows enterprises to identify related events (or even the lack of expected events). When combined with powerful real-time analytics applied to those event patterns, important business trends -- which are not visible in the isolated items -- can be revealed. These revelations can help identify, in near real time, risks and opportunities that the enterprise can use to gain advantage. However, those insights will not actually yield advantage unless related processes are in place, or can be put in place quickly, to effect business action. Business Process Management (BPM) software is designed to enable precisely this sort of agile, on-the-fly action.

Last month, in the wake of the Metastorm and Global 360 acquisitions, OpenText announced the creation of the Business Process Solution Group.

The Group gathers OpenText’s business process management offerings together as OpenText sets itself as a major contender in the BPM space. We talked to the Group’s CTO Steve Russell and asked him to outline the new Group’s strategy.

Have you seen the movie Real Steel? In the storyline of this flick, automation has replaced human fighters with 2000-pound, 8-foot-tall steel robot boxers. The moral is "humans out, automation in" -- end of story, right? Not exactly. As it turns out, it’s the right combination of human and machine that proves necessary for the win. Sounds a lot like business process improvement to me.