BPM for All

[caseagile]

CaseAgile Will Show BPMN Data Exchange between Visio and Leading BPMN Tools

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CaseAgile Will Show BPMN Data Exchange between Visio and Leading BPMN Tools

CaseAgile announces a new release of Enterprise Composer™ add-on for Microsoft® Visio, which supports transparent exchange of BPMN diagrams designed in Visio with leading BPMN tools. CaseAgile will demonstrate capabilities of Enterprise Composer™ on upcoming “BPMN IN ACTION” event organized by The Object Management Group (OMG) in Seattle at December 10, 2018.

Enterprise Composer™ offers a seamless and efficient way for every Visio® user into the world of professional business process management (BPM) systems and process automation. By using Enterprise Composer™, Microsoft® Visio can create executable processes fully compatible with BPMN™ 2.0 standard from OMG®, which is the global de-facto etalon for modeling business processes and can be used both by businesses and IT. Every BPM practitioner working with Microsoft® Visio now can import BPM models created in most popular BPM suites directly into Visio® and can export models created in Visio® for further execution on all compatible BPM platforms implementing BPMN™ 2.0 standard.

Microsoft® Visio is one of the leading tools used to design business diagrams in companies of different sizes and specialization. Full support of BPMN 2.0 is among the prominent and widely acclaimed features of Microsoft® Visio 2016. However, Visio® itself does not support exchange of BPMN diagrams with other tools. The new release of Enterprise Composer™ removes these limitations entirely. Users can draw BPMN models in standard Visio® Professional and then exchange them transparently with any other BPMN tool not leaving their familiar Visio® environment.

“BPMN IN ACTION” event organized by The Object Management Group (OMG) will present real-time exchange of Visio® BPMN diagrams with other process modeling and execution tools by using Enterprise Composer™.

Date: Monday, December 10, 2018 Time: 5:00 pm 7:30 pm Place: Hyatt Regency Lake Washington at Seattle’s Southport, Seattle, Washington, USA

[caseagile]

Why processes are so important for the digital enterprise?

New Post has been published on https://caseagile.com/why-processes-are-so-important-for-the-digital-enterprise/

Why processes are so important for the digital enterprise?

Role of business processes in a digital company is far more important than in a traditional organization because digital organization literally consists of the digital business processes it implements.

Traditionally, most business processes are in possession of workers or groups of workers, in other words, process stakeholders. Every worker holds in memory, experience, notes or corporate regulations certain course of action to follow in every particular situation. This implicit or partially formalized set of rules comprises a business model of a company. The model is subject to change by mere verbal discussion and agreement between workers and management, happen business environment evolves or new challenges appear.

Situation is entirely different in a digital organization. Digital systems do not have any implicit awareness on business aspects, just an explicit algorithm to do exact functions, for which they were designed. Therefore, a digital business system is a manifestation of a business process or of a group of processes by virtue of its design. Creation of digital enterprise is imminently model driven act of implementation of enterprise architecture out of digital systems as its elementary business blocks. Digital enterprise is a continuum of coordinated digital processes.

[caseagile]

The role of BPM in the future of AI

New Post has been published on https://caseagile.com/the-role-of-bpm-in-the-future-of-ai/

The role of BPM in the future of AI

BPM will become a key driving force behind further development of AI. Machine learning in business applications is blind without guiding role of BPM, similarly as a company is blind without its management.

Despite impressive success, AI is still in its infancy in respect to its literal involvement into high level business processes. Concurrently with the increase of the role of AI in principal business contexts, there will grow demand for BPM in coordination and structuring of AI for business purposes.

As in any other business domain, BPM is suitable and responsible for proper AI positioning in business. Without precise BPM governance, AI bears excessive risks for a business as any important but poorly managed and not transparent part of ongoing operations in an organization.

[caseagile]

Gap between process model and real process

New Post has been published on https://caseagile.com/gap-between-process-model-and-real-process/

Gap between process model and real process

There always exists a discrepancy between a model of business process, however well designed and accurate, and real execution of this process in a business environment. The reason for this gap is an unforeseen depth and hidden details inherent to any real process.

Real business model of organization is ultimately unlimited in its depth. Going from highest management levels, it descends to individual departments, client relations, production units, technical code of equipment and controllers etc. In vast majority of cases, it is impossible and senseless to build a complete model covering all and every fine detail of the business.

Omitted lower layers of the model create (pseudo) random fluctuations during execution of the model. Real execution paths of a process never follow its model exactly. However, in case of the correct model, we can expect to see that an ensemble of execution paths statistically converges to the model as to its average path over a significant set of observations.

[caseagile]

Skills needed for digital transformation

New Post has been published on https://caseagile.com/skills-needed-for-digital-transformation/

Skills needed for digital transformation

The crucial skill needed for a digital transformation of business is the skill to transform business architecture. Surprisingly, most experts in digital transformation are fluent in digital aspects of their favorite platforms but cannot clearly explain and foresee its impact on business as a whole.

Too often digital transformation boils down to just implementation of certain digital platform or software titles. But software alone does not give any transformation as such. Vast majority of software solutions does not take care about peaceful coexistence and interaction with other similar solutions. Instead the goal is, as a rule, to eliminate competition. It often creates toxic and artificial alloys of randomly picked and poorly interoperable titles in IT landscape and business as a whole.

This explains ever growing demand of enterprises for universal business transformation technologies and skills capable to deliver smooth integration and evolution of existing business practice into digitally empowered and improved organization through efficient cooperation of workers and information technology into modern well managed business.

To succeed on this way, digital transformation must rely on architecture of business change. Carefully capture as-is processes, find a potential where digital components can improve these processes, draw expected to-be processes, estimate potential ROI and risks. These elementary BPM skills are too often absent or neglected, which leads to high rate of failures in transforming a business.

[caseagile]

Agile Processes and Customer Experience

New Post has been published on https://caseagile.com/agile-processes-and-customer-experience/

Agile Processes and Customer Experience

Despite all fashionable favor, agile processes are a disaster in terms of customer outcomes. Imagine that you ordered a fridge but received a dishwasher instead. It is unlikely that you will be happy on this sort of creative agility. Customer process must be as precise and reliable as a Swiss clock.

It is another story that customers always do their best to break this clock’s precision in every possible and impossible manner: change their mind ten times a day, disappear at the moment of delivery, break supplied goods and claim a refund etc. And yet, customers highly appreciate flexibility of a company in response to their instant whims.

We must not confuse agility of customers with precision of the company in response to agile client demands. Company can achieve accuracy and flexibility in serving clients only through rigorous process approach with detailed mapping of all possible client scenarios.

Naturally, this detailed work-through may yield dozens and even hundredths of complex client processes and variations. But none of these processes will be agile alone. However, a coordinated ensemble of these processes will ultimately deliver responsiveness, flexibility and precision, which agile clients value so much.

[caseagile]

Lead causes of sub-optimal process performance

New Post has been published on https://caseagile.com/lead-causes-of-sub-optimal-process-performance/

Lead causes of sub-optimal process performance

One of most evident but widely neglected reasons for poor process performance in a company is a failure to recognize a process as such. Systematic process mapping is an essential factor for efficient process governance and optimization of business performance. However, organizations often miss to distinguish processes they run and to reveal them as business models.

Another even more typical and closely related reason is that a company creates abstract to-be processes and strives running them while ignoring objective reality. Again, essential mapping of as-is processes is neglected for the sake of an imaginary abstraction often borrowed from a book or ready framework and disregarding crucial aspects of the specific organization.

Not seldom, externally enforced processes are even artificially simulated by workers to satisfy inadequate management requirements. It creates additional inefficiency due to a friction and time loss by workers to observe such a fake compliance. Fictitious processes are not less destructive for an enterprise than double books.

To avoid such situations, companies must always begin their BPM journey from scrupulous mapping of existing process landscape and take all care for timely actualization of business model throughout its whole life cycle. It can be achieved only through wide collaboration of analysts, managers and process owners in a contemporary transparent BPM environment.

[caseagile]

Why every company should have a process architecture?

New Post has been published on https://caseagile.com/why-every-company-should-have-a-process-architecture/

Why every company should have a process architecture?

Every company runs certain business processes, either documented or not. These processes can be simple or complex, depending on how big and complex is the company. Collection of processes comprises certain structure. To name this structure ‘architecture’ or not, is a matter of taste.

Suppose you decided for a short trip outdoor and intend to pitch a tent for a night. With some skill and common sense, you can arrange pegs and pins, spread a canvas and have a reasonable shelter for a while. Should you hire an architect for this purpose? Probably, not.

Suppose now that you decide to build a house. You can affordably buy some bricks, tiling and cement. With a bit of luck and advise you can compose these into a sort of walls and a roof. However, there will be a risk that the construct will eventually collapse right on your head. Detailed architecture and professional builders are always advised to avoid a trouble.

Enterprise architecture is a comparable challenge. If you keep a stall, drawing an architecture for it might be an overkill. But running a decent corporation without well developed process architecture will eventually lead into disaster. Remarkably many skyscrapers on a business landscape collapse just by missing their architectural foundation.

[caseagile]

Dangers of IT leadership in digital transformation

New Post has been published on https://caseagile.com/dangers-of-it-leadership-in-digital-transformation/

Dangers of IT leadership in digital transformation

Digital transformation is often seen and promoted recently as a primary factor of success for a company. IT is a resource delivering implementation of the challenge for digitization. This might create a false impression about IT as a primary driver of business.

Despite its growing power, IT is and will always be just a technology. As a technology, IT has its own logic of functioning and evolution. Even despite functionality and design of IT are largely shaped by demands of business, still principles and internal alignment of IT remain in a primary technical scope.

If left alone or followed as a beacon, IT will drive a company from its true business goals into a virtual world of elusive digital harmony. This danger is getting more and more real in the course of rapidly increasing role of digital governance and real time reporting. As a result, management tends to see the whole business through an IT prism creating a potential for a noxious aberration.

Deviation of a company from an artificial digital focus is an essential factor of self-healing evolution towards true business goals. The gap between business and IT is an objective and important safety distance, which protects business from dissolving in a digital ocean.

[caseagile]

Most needed BPM skills

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Most needed BPM skills

Cross-disciplinary architecture is among crucial and often neglected factors of BPM initiatives. Compatible multi-domain modeling is rarely available or seen as priority in BPM projects in favor of local automation tasks. However, exactly transparent and scale-able process collaboration across an organization determines long term success of the digital transformation.

The ability to capture a consistent view of an organization through precise mapping of relevant notations is a cornerstone of all subsequent BPM implementation. The goal of BPM is not a replacement of existing processes and technologies but their skilled alignment, which should ensure most effective and transparent interaction of the existing corporate infrastructure at minimum cost and modification.

Unfortunately, too many BPM initiatives go as vendor driven disruptions, revolutions, breaks through and other scenarios similarly dubious in terms of attractiveness and suitability for a continuous corporate growth. BPM is merely about bringing a harmony into established business structures, which is a skill too rarely found or distinguished as a demand.

[caseagile]

The best way to start RPA project

New Post has been published on http://caseagile.com/the-best-way-to-start-rpa-project/

The best way to start RPA project

Although popular and widely discussed recently, RPA by definition is very limited technology, not a panacea on IT problems existing in a company. In this capacity, RPA is senseless and dangerous when applied alone.

Technically, RPA is a fragile collection of scripts, which are difficult to impossible to adapt on even slightest change in business environment. An intent to rely widely on RPA is equal to an attempt to conserve indefinitely a status-quo with legacy IT systems. Evidently, it is only a matter of time when such a crippled construct will collapse and bury business.

However, it does not diminish an important role of RPA as a facilitator and accelerator of digital transformation through robust instant automation of routine legacy procedures. It should serve as a proof of concept in discovery of business transformation potential in an organization.

To reap all benefits of this automated discovery, it is essential to explore RPA only in the context of a business model where RPA will allow to quickly evaluate transformation potential for previously identified bottlenecks and inefficient processes. Therefore, always start with careful business mapping and solid BPM analysis to succeed with RPA.

[caseagile]

Automation of data driven processes

New Post has been published on https://caseagile.com/automation-of-data-driven-processes/

Automation of data driven processes

Data is an indispensable part of any business process. It is simply impossible to imagine a process, which operates without certain input as a starting condition and without an output representing its results. In one or another form, these inputs and outputs are always associated with certain business data. A process is a flow (in business terms, a workflow) transforming the data.

On another hand, data is amorphous and shapeless without a process behind. Data is always a result of certain process and always have a reservation of consumption by one or another process sooner or later. Rarely somebody stores the data, especially, business data, entirely without an intent for subsequent usage.

Business process is a fundamental foundation, which shapes the data and gives it a business sense. Data with an undefined or lost business context become a silos. Synthesis of the data and its associated processes in a business model is the cornerstone for consistent storage of the data and its effective usage in successful process automation.

[caseagile]

Why it is important to combine RPA with BPM?

New Post has been published on https://caseagile.com/why-it-is-important-to-combine-rpa-with-bpm/

Why it is important to combine RPA with BPM?

RPA mission is automation of processes. BPM focus is on process modeling and management. If RPA is done without BPM, it implies unmanaged processes. Unmanaged processes are especially dangerous when they are robotic processes bare of any human control and supervision. Implementing RPA without BPM is direct way to erasing control in an organization.

On another hand, RPA is an ideal environment for implementation of BPM initiatives. It allows for a quick practical structuring of processes in an organization through easy universal scripting of traditional human-centric interfaces. This implicitly initiates a convenient library of business objects suitable for further modeling, modernization and optimization.

In this way, RPA de-facto delivers company-wide process mapping as an essential but often disregarded side effect of its usage. Skillful attention to this aggregated formalization through a prism of BPM allows to integrate legacy processes and IT infrastructure of a company on a modern level of business standards and process control.

[caseagile]

Why digital transformation is so important for smaller companies?

New Post has been published on http://caseagile.com/why-digital-transformation-is-so-important-for-smaller-companies/

Why digital transformation is so important for smaller companies?

Major companies are not easy to transform digitally due to inertia of a large structure and deeply rooted traditions. Diverse IT landscape and distributed faculties make it especially difficult and expensive to migrate established business routine.

On the contrary, smaller companies can quickly transform their operations into digital field due to limited footprint and simpler workflows. For the same reason, an effect of innovation appears much quicker, is easier to measure and correct depending on obtained results.

Smaller companies simply cannot afford being inefficient, unlike their bigger counterparts, which have at least a temporal security belt of size and established market share. Quick technical and operational optimization offered by digital tools is the primary factor of growth for an emerging business.

Digital transformation offers to smaller companies unique competitive advantages by effectively replacing costly manual operations by affordable and adaptive automation of business processes. Digital operations in smaller companies are also much easier to control due to limited scale and complexity.

All these factors explain explosive growth of digital automation in smaller organizations far superseding respective evolution of large corporations and creating key competitive advantage of modern small business.

[caseagile]

The key to managing automated processes

New Post has been published on https://caseagile.com/the-key-to-managing-automated-processes/

The key to managing automated processes

Due to explosive growth in robotics and AI automated processes are quickly becoming an essential part of business. Wide adoption of automated processes creates significant challenges for business management.

Automated processes are both simpler and more complex to manage, compared to manual processes. Simpler, because automation is void of any personal attitude or bias of human workers. More complex, exactly for the same reason of absolute impersonation and concentrated responsibility.

In case of an error in manual process there is always a space for an additional control and adjustment of task by a worker. In contrast, automated tasks run autonomously and on far higher speeds. It makes a mission of controlling automated tasks far more stressful and dangerous. Any occasional error on a single process step can randomly propagate the whole running process chain causing catastrophic damages for the whole business.

These elevated control requirements for automated processes make it impossible to run wide scale enterprise automation without a detailed business model in place. Professional BPM and consistent EA are cornerstones in the success of process automation in any organization.

[caseagile]

How BPM turns agility into sustainable business advantage?

New Post has been published on https://caseagile.com/how-bpm-turns-agility-into-sustainable-business-advantage/

How BPM turns agility into sustainable business advantage?

Agile project management is becoming a popular practice, especially in IT development. It offers significant merit in splitting large missions into small sprints dynamically configurable across work teams. When applied creatively, agile approach may significantly improve business responsiveness to emerging challenges in dynamic economic environment.

Despite tempting benefits, agile management bears also significant business risks. Due to simplified decision making and direct informal communication agile approach may potentially dissolve centralized coordination and endanger strategic planning in higher level scope of the whole organization. For this reason, large corporations are typically very cautious on implementing agile practices and sustain from scaling them too widely.

How a company can combine all benefits of agile management and avoid associated risks? Key factor in achieving a balance is accurate business modeling. BPM technology brings necessary structuring and transparency lacked by agile techniques when used alone. Combination of BPM and agile ensures an ideal compound by optimally complementing rigid planning with competitive flexibility in task execution.

[caseagile]

How BPM turns agility into sustainable business advantage?

New Post has been published on http://caseagile.com/how-bpm-turns-agility-into-sustainable-business-advantage/

How BPM turns agility into sustainable business advantage?

Agile project management is becoming a popular practice, especially in IT development. It offers significant merit in splitting large missions into small sprints dynamically configurable across work teams. When applied creatively, agile approach may significantly improve business responsiveness to emerging challenges in dynamic economic environment.

Despite tempting benefits, agile management bears also significant business risks. Due to simplified decision making and direct informal communication agile approach may potentially dissolve centralized coordination and endanger strategic planning in higher level scope of the whole organization. For this reason, large corporations are typically very cautious on implementing agile practices and sustain from scaling them too widely.

How a company can combine all benefits of agile management and avoid associated risks? Key factor in achieving a balance is accurate business modeling. BPM technology brings necessary structuring and transparency lacked by agile techniques when used alone. Combination of BPM and agile ensures an ideal compound by optimally complementing rigid planning with competitive flexibility in task execution.