Business Process Management News & Articles

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.

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.

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.

This week in the document management space, Nuxeo and TEMIS integrate seeing Luxid connecting natively to Nuxeo Semantic Entities, Kofax buys Singularity, docStar releases v3.12 and IPS releases an attachment processing system.

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.

OpenText announced it has set up a separate business unit for its BPM acquisitions, and the release of a document-sharing product. Mindjet has released a SharePoint connector, Quadrant has announced a partnership and Kofax Capture picks up a document management award. Meanwhile, DocuLex gets health certification for document management.

It’s been a busy year for OpenText in the business process management space with the acquisition of Metastorm in February followed by Global 360 in July. To close the year, OpenText has announced the creation of a new BPM unit and what looks like the development of a new BPM strategy.

At CrowdConf in San Francisco this week, crowdsourcing and social CRM came together. CrowdEngineering announced that its self-service platform, Crowd4Self, is now integrated with Amazon Mechanical Turk, the Amazon marketplace for work.

This is the fourth article in a series discussing my Art Of SharePoint Success framework which consists of four key elements: Governance, Strategy, Architecture and Transition. Last month I began to explore the murky, misunderstood, often debated subject of SharePoint Governance by giving my view on what it is, and what it isn’t. This month I’ll be wrapping the Governance discussion by looking at how you actually do it.

Open source business process management vendor BonitaSoft has announced the latest version of Bonita Open Solution 5.6. The new release offers personalization by role that allows users to focus on how they need to work.

It’s been another good quarter for OpenText, even with the cost of the Global 360 and Operitel acquisitions taken into consideration. According to the figures, which were released late yesterday, revenues jumped by 32.5%, with profits of US$ 35 million up from US$ 21.7 million a year earlier.

While we have seen over the week just gone by the massive interest in SharePoint and a steady increase in the deployment of SharePoint 2010, how it is being used across the enterprise varies. A new EMC-sponsored AIIM report shows that one of those uses is as an enterprise content management system.

With all the money IBM has spent over the past three years on analytics, it’s hardly surprising that it is trying to get as many new releases out onto the market as possible. Over the week, it has added to what it already has in the analytics space by upgrading and releasing products aimed at improving business process and developing smarter applications.