I know nothing about the corporate turf wars surrounding BPM, so I hope someone out there can help my anonymous friend, who writes: I manage the business analyst group for our company (our firm is about $4 billion in revenue annually) ? I work in the IT department. In a different department, they thinking of forming a BPM group. I?m trying to stay proactive so that the business analysts in IT don?
Nothing pegs my BS meter like a BPM keynoter waxing poetic about pi-calculus, especially to an auditorium full of business analysts. But now it looks like the pi guys have the last laugh. I noticed Technorati's #2 hottest new book on Amazon is, you got it, "The Pi Calculus," with 386 new links in the last 48 hours. Wow. And at 75 bucks its a steal! What are the rest of the top 5?
If you're new to BPM and want to better understand the technology, I'm doing an all-day training session in San Francisco on June 28, in parallel with the Brainstorm BPM/SOA Conference. The training is sponsored by BPM Institute and counts toward their BPM certification credential. Click here for more information.
One of the biggest changes to the BPM equation in the past year has been the intertwining of process and business rules. For a long time BPM and business rule management (BRM) did just fine as separate technologies blissfully ignorant of each other, but today users are finding it harder and harder to define the boundary between process and rules. While many BPM suites now integrate business rules in their IT-oriented design and runtime environments, the same cannot be said for the modeling and simulation tools they offer to process analysts.
I am expanding my 2006 BPMS Report series, which is available for free from BPM Institute. Over 1500 copies have been downloaded to date. Each report contains a 20-25 page walkthrough of a leading BPMS, all using the same analytical framework and report outline, and products are rated as to their strengths in several distinct process types or use cases. The first round, published last November, covered Adobe, Fuego (now BEA), Global 360, IBM, Pegasystems, Savvion, and Vitria.
SearchOracle.com discusses a recent Forrester report that claims SAP NetWeaver is winning the middleware battle against Oracle Fusion. The logic isn't fully revealed in the story, but the key seems to be more about the strength of those companies' enterprise applications and solution partners than the technical merits of the middleware itself. Forrester's Ray Wang, co-author of the report, explains SAP's advantage this way: "A head start, a partner ecosystem and a customer base are pretty much key ingredients for success.