When you set off on a process transformation initiative, it is intrinsically about where you want to go and how you want to be, how differently you want to do things – it is about to-be, the target state.
It is about the Future.
News, Views & Reviews on Digital Process Automation, BPM, Performance Management & IT industry trends
When you set off on a process transformation initiative, it is intrinsically about where you want to go and how you want to be, how differently you want to do things – it is about to-be, the target state.
It is about the Future.
In a recent short commentary on Strategy in the McKinsey Quarterly aptly titled “Synthesis, capabilities, and overlooked insights: Next frontiers for strategists”, Fred Gluck (who was also the founder of McKinsey’s Strategy Practice way back in 1988, as I learned) says strategies always come from one of three sources – strategic planning, strategic thinking, and opportunistic decision making. In this article, Gluck delves a bit into how these three work, touching upon some interesting insights. I recommend you read it…
When the gunshot is fired at the start of the Olympic final of a 100m dash, 8 world-class sprinters on the block will leap towards their dream of Olympic glory. All 8 equally skilled, each one equally trained, equally driven, all of them with the same hunger to win. Each one committed to chasing (pardon the poor pun) their life’s single purpose and calling, and each one, to be sure, aspiring to be chased from the moment that gunshot goes…
When you are an enterprise spending top dollar on software products, you like to be assured that you are betting on products that satisfy a fairly logical and predictable check-list that assess the vendors products on maturity, stability, cost effectiveness, ability to deliver to the need and so on. For decades these have really been at the core of buyer expectations that software vendors have tried to talk to. And in a sense, most vendors have traditionally also built and…
I’ve just returned from a rather adventurous and eventful trip involving two important dots on Gartner’s magic quadrant for BPM. One is a tech behemoth interested in almost everything related to IT, and the other, a vendor that has a laser focus on BPM. The first dot is of course IBM and the other dot, allegedly the ‘best one’ on the quadrant, Appian. I am talking, of course, about IBM IMPACT at Las Vegas and AppianWorld at Washington D.C. Although…
Even as the enterprise IT landscape evolved over the past decades, markets, economy, and technology forces have affected key considerations that dominate and influence annual IT budgets. The nature and the unique mix of these forces, in any given year, have correspondingly triggered a rather unique set of influencers shaping IT budgets. We saw the wave of ‘seamless’ enterprise thinking; then the idea of an extended enterprise arose. Next was data-intelligence, followed by compliance, and then there was E2.0….
Earlier today, I read something that made me snort on my afternoon coffee. Not just because it was funny, but because, to me it had some additional insight that I thought was worth sharing with you, especially when you think about Intelligent Processes and how they can be crafted for a BPM initiative. Here it is: Two men walk into a bar. The first man says I’ll have some H2O. The second man says I’ll have H2O too. The…
Last week, while I was in London on work, I had to stand around for over an hour outside a client’s office building, in the cursed cold weather, waiting for my colleague to show up. I could only enter the office with him as he was the one with access to the building and authority to sign me in. This kind of a situation isn’t always a very pleasant experience. Especially if it was a first-thing-in-the-morning meeting, and more…
It must have been around a decade ago when I first received a ‘text alert’ from a bank on my mobile phone. My bank had let me register my mobile phone number with them for this and once they activated it, I started receiving text alerts after every credit card transaction I made. Today, I still receive these alerts, but I also have an ‘app’ the bank has additionally given me, from which I can do a lot of…
All this Business Process Management talk is getting boring. And clichéd. Blogs. Forums. Communities. White papers. Analyst calls. Product vendor presentations. Webinars. Analyst events. One-on-one meetings. Gardens. Roof tops. That’s an indicative list of all the places where it has been said time and again that BPM is first a (management) concept THEN a technology. Not one, not two, but hundreds of bloggers, analysts and thought leaders, including the self-proclaimed (the tribe is ever increasing) have said that enough….
Very thought provoking question on the ebizQ forum today: “What is the biggest barrier to companies starting a BPM project?” Quite a few interesting responses. My post, was this, IMHO: “ The biggest barrier is really not technology, vendor, product, SI or that consultant or anything else outside the firm. They could become barriers, yes and they well might. But that’s really not your biggest problem. The biggest barrier is not acknowledging the fact that the biggest barrier could be something…
I think there is a need for this thing called Agility in your organization. You agree? You do? OK. I had a feeling you would. It is a burning need, no? Third degree, even. Now let me ask you this. Of all those people in your organization – CXOs, Business users, process owners, compliance managers, IT, you name it – who do you think has the biggest need for that agility? [sound of clock ticking] Ok, let me pose that…
It is about to become something of the past. That’s sad because it really is something from the future. Something that could have even shaped it. If you had a Wave account, you might agree with me. Google announced the end of the Wave project months ago, but last weeks mail from the Wave team was sad to read and if you have an account, am sure you felt the same way. The Google Wave project excited the imagination…
A little more than a fortnight ago, I had bounced a few thoughts about how BPM should not merely be about automation but should instead be about unlocking competitive advantage. I had taken an example of two firms in a quest for competitive advantage implementing packaged software; and discussed whether they would find a definitive edge over each other even if they both choose the same software products. If they both got on the BPM bus, there could in fact…
2010 was a good year for BPM – more firms took to BPM, while many firms already using BPM set off to unlock more value from BPM; most top vendors posted another year of great growth; overall BPM visibility increased significantly and it is gradually becoming less of a concept understood only by few and defined differently by many. What most purists and proponents fundamentally think and opine on BPM tends to get a little muddled – if I may…