In February of 2009 SEARHC launched the ALERT Emergency Department Information System, becoming one of the first and largest tribal health organizations in the country to begin implementing this comprehensive electronic medical record (EMR) system.  The ALERT EMR is interconnected to ancillary systems (Novarad for diagnostic imaging, Mediware for pharmacy, Orchard for laboratory, etc) using the Health Level  Seven (HL7) messaging protocol.  HL7 facilitates a standard language between systems, but SEARHC recognized the need for process mapping and documentation in the messaging methodology since every vendor accepted and passed along data such as x-ray orders, lab reports and billing information in slightly different ways.

SEARHC’s use of Blueprint wasn’t just about process mapping and documentation, but really about communicating and collaborating with their external vendors.  SEARHC subscribes to Blueprint as Authors, where they can define and document processes. They then supply their vendors with Participant seats for viewing and providing feedback.  In this way, processes mapped out by SEARHC can be easily viewed and commented on by vendors.  Blueprint process diagrams are treated as working documents, providing SEARHC the ability to discuss HL7 workflow proposals and to negotiate changes on the fly.  Blueprint serves as a great collaborative tool as it allows for effective communication between SEARHC and its vendors.

SEARHC’s internal processes have also become more efficient after the concept of swimlanes was so easily demonstrated with Blueprint – now the right task is done by the right person at the right time!  According to Peter,  SEARHC staff have found the product to be very useful and are impressed with the updates – I’m sure they are excited about the latest Blueprint release!

Let’s take a look the enhancements in detail:

• Enhanced Process Analysis: We’ve introduced a new analysis mode in today’s release that allows you to instantly highlight the areas of your process that need attention and improvement. When you switch to analysis mode, Blueprint heat maps both the discovery map and process diagram with the data you’ve entered in the details for each activity. This allows you to instantly see which parts of your process have problems, excessive cost or cycle time, or that are risk points. It substantially increases the visibility you have into all of your processes, and is an excellent tool to help you make a business case for improvements.

  You can find the Analyze button in the toolbar whenever you’re viewing a process. Give it a try and let us know what you think!

• New Properties: One of Blueprint’s great strengths is that it’s always offered a template for documenting the important information about your processes — who’s involved, what’s required and created at this step, and the like. We’ve heard from you that there are a few other key pieces of information that you need to catalog at each activity, and today we’ve added the most valuable and frequently requested ones:
  • Systems
  • Cycle Time:
  • Cost
  • Value Added / Non Value Added
  • Risk
  • Supplier and Customer (SIPOC)

  All of these new properties can be heat mapped onto the diagram using the new analysis mode, which can be extremely powerful. Need to highlight areas of your process with unaddressed risk points? How about the areas that will be affected when you decommission one of your legacy applications? What about the non-value added parts that are wasting money? Analysis mode can make answering all of these questions a snap.

• Email Notifications: The Blueprint activity feeds are an extremely valuable tool for tracking and discovering changes that happen to your processes and the processes that you depend on. Since we introduced them a few months ago, we’ve heard from many customers that they’ve helped increase involvement and visibility across the organization, which has in turn led to many improvements that would have been lost previously. Today we’re introducing the ability for Blueprint to proactively push these changes to your organization via email. You can subscribe to a weekly digest of your activity feed, a daily digest of all the changes to your favorite processes and projects, and instant notifications of replies to the comments and feedback you’ve left.

  You can choose which emails you’re subscribed to on your user settings page, which you can bring up by clicking your name at the top of the page in Blueprint. Give them a try and let us know what you think!

In addition, this release also features many smaller improvements based upon what we’ve heard from you — everything from a better way to link to related processes to enhanced performance when working with large numbers of processes. Log in now and try it out for yourself! If you don’t have an account yet, just sign up for a free 30 day trial now. And if you want to hear the latest inside info on what’s coming next, make sure you follow us on Twitter.

In fact, last week we found ourselves presenting in Washington D.C. for the Brainstorm BPM, and Sao Paulo, Brazil, for the 2^nd International Congress of Business Processes, respectively.

This week it was the IRM BPM summit in London. Aviva, one of our large insurance customers, spoke about how they are using BPM to get measurable results across their organization.

Next week we are back at it at the Gartner BPM Summit in Orlando Florida, with seven Lombardi customers speaking about their BPM projects. If you are attending this one, you are in for a real treat – we have executives from Lincoln Trust Company, Wells Fargo, Medical University of South Carolina, Foreign Currency Exchange Corp. and others sharing their experiences and best practices for “How to succeed with BPM.”

But the world tour doesn’t stop there. We’ll also be at Forrester’s Business Technology Forum in Chicago next week where another customer, SIRVA, will be sharing their perspective on how BPM helps them drive world-class customer experience in the corporate relocation business.

Finally, we will be rounding out the conference season with Phil Gilbert speaking at a Banking event in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, as well as participating at both of Gartner’s Symposium/ITXpo events in Orlando, Florida and Cannes, France.

And that’s how you go around the world in 30 days with BPM. Pretty busy schedule, but certainly worth it because we feel that every company can benefit from process improvement if they take the right approach. We hope to see you at one of the events.

At Lombardi, we say this all the time. Obtaining useful data about the quality of decisions being made – as well as the patterns that drive those decisions – is the first step in realizing the promise of BPM.

However, in order for data to be turned into “wisdom,” I think it is important for companies to realize that it has to be viewed through three primary filtering principles. They are:

1. Visibility – Show me information in a human-consumable format. It needs to provide details that can be understood by mere mortals.
2. Analysis – Allow me to ‘twist and turn’ and ‘slice and dice’ the information views so that I can extrapolate information from the data and deduce higher-level knowledge as necessary. 
3. Control – Once I’ve seen, analyzed, and judged what the data is telling me, allow me to take some immediate action on the source of data (the process) in a way that lets me materially affect the outcome. 

In my mind, the three points made above are the key stepping stones that separate workflow automation from BPM. In fact, I think of automation as merely the “step zero” that must to occur in the sequence above before I can get any real insight into my processes.

Now, in contrast to my insurance customer example, there are also other many other business processes where the primary purpose of automation is to drive repeatability, and to deal with exceptions in such a way that it ultimately turns those exceptions back to repeatability. In essence, I’m talking about the industrialization of human decision making.
 
These processes do exist (for example, customers doing processes such as vehicle registration renewal, product returns, shipment re-routing, and even HR on-boarding) and in isolation, the biggest benefit that our customers derive from a BPM tool in this instance is the automation of their workflows. But in this case, the process reports that they receive either measure efficiency of the industrialization (rework, time spent, etc.) or only hold business value when taken in context with a higher-level parent process.

Perhaps the distinction between what could be referred to as “BPM-ripe” processes and “BPM-ambivalent-but-automation-ripe” processes is an important factor in determining an organization’s BPM Maturity Level.  

One of the mantras of the BPMC team here at Lombardi is to help customers understand that the difference between these two distinctions. This is really important, because it can mean the difference between companies doing the right thing for their unique BPM project starting on “day one” versus having them realize what the right thing is – much, much later in the project (such as during the third playback).

Let’s take a look the enhancements in detail:

• BPMN 2.0 Exports: We’re committed to ensuring that you can use your processes in whatever way you’d like with whichever system that works best for you. To that end, we’re delivering the first shipping implementation of the BPMN 2.0 export format. We expect BPMN 2.0 to quickly become the de facto standard for exchanging process diagrams among modeling tools. The BPMN 2.0 specification just reached beta status, and as Bruce Silver pointed out there are areas where it still could be improved. We hope that our implementation can help further the discussion and serve as a reference for others in the industry. We think that well designed and supported standards are hugely beneficial for our customers and we’re committed to making BPMN 2.0 just that.

  And don’t forget: Blueprint also supports XPDL 2.1 to give you the maximum flexibility with your models today.

• Full Text Search: Blueprint’s search feature now indexes all of the content in your account — project and process documentation, inputs, outputs, and all of the other assets you’ve entered. Have a question about the onboarding process in your company? You’re just a search away from the answer. Need to see everywhere your legacy CRM system is leveraged in your organization? Not a problem. We’ve been using the enhanced search at Lombardi for the last few weeks and it has hugely increased the visibility of our internal processes already. You’ll wonder how you ever lived without it.

• What’s New Feed Improvements: Blueprint’s What’s New activity feeds give you instant notifications and visibility into the information you care about to do your work more effectively. The feeds are very powerful — just like social networking sites like LinkedIn and Facebook do for you for updates from your circle of friends, Blueprint lets you know about changes to processes that are important to you at your company.

  Our design team has been listening to your feedback and as a result we’ve introduced significant improvements to the usability of the feeds. They are much more readable now, making it even easier to skim them for the information you need. Similar entries are rolled up to save space and reduce clutter, the times of updates are always visible to give you better context, and filtering options have been expanded and improved. Try it out and keep the feedback coming!

On top of that, there are many, many small improvements that we’ve added during this release — everything from tweaks to “where used” to longer process names. Log in now and try it out for yourself! If you don’t have an account yet, just sign up for a free 30 day trial now. And if you want to hear the latest inside info on what’s coming next, make sure you follow us on Twitter.

The innovations that Teamworks 7 offers customers is really helping them expand their BPM adoption exponentially throughout the organization. It increases their collaboration, governance and reuse abilities, and it helps them simplify nearly every task that they need to do across the entire process development lifecycle.

We’re proud to receive this recognition. But we certainly won’t stop here. Thanks to all of you for nominating Teamworks 7 as a winner.

It’s obvious BPM has come of age when mainstream media programs are starting to weigh-in on the topic.

The hour-long show featured ‘HIM: Handling the Human Side of BPM,’ and focused on whether the new Human Interaction Management (HIM) framework  is necessary given that BPM already addresses most of the same issues and is a mature discipline. 

In addtion to Phil, the other invited guests were Clay Richardson (senior analyst at Forrester) and Howard Smith (BPM author and CTO of CSC’s European Group).

If you are interested in hearing how BPM can help your organization,  or if you need a better way to explain its benefits to your executives, you should listen to the replay. You can access the replay here (not required to register).

“Evaluating a Business Process Management solutions vendor: What to ask” offers suggestions from analysts at Forrester and Gartner about what questions people need to ask BPM vendors up front to ensure we are providing a good technology fit for them. 

The article recommends that people check into the vendor’s industry experience, understand their service and technology offerings and provides a number of other useful tips.

We especially appreciate the suggestion for companies to use cloud-based collaboration tools like Blueprint to help with strategic mapping and planning, as well as to help them build their business case for BPM.  In fact, we have a series of whitepapers that further explain how to get started quickly with your process documentation and prioritization, as well as what to do next. You can access them here

FCE, which is a subsidiary of the Bank of Ireland Group, provides a broad range of currency conversion products and services to wide range of industries and uses both Blueprint and Teamworks as an alternative to traditional application development. Using BPM lets them deliver projects an eye-popping 50% faster than traditional  approaches.

Some important take-aways discussed in the webinar include:

• How they became self sufficient after their very first project
• How they gather business requirements in a much more collaborative way
• How they recevied valuable feedback during development, not waiting until after it’s 80% built
• How to engage the business to take ownership in their business applications

To listen to the FCE webinar, go here (you will need to register) or alternately you can listen to a podcast version of the interview here.

The article, “MUSC cuts error rates and improves efficiency with automation” discusses the financial grants management process that MUSC implemented in Lombardi Teamworks. It also points out the reasons why they elected NOT to go with an ERP system to accomplish this project, and and how they incorporated some legacy systems into the process.

Some nice ROI figures that MUSC achieved:

• [Teamworks] has reduced the per-grant error rate dramatically, from 85 – 90 percent down to just 20 - 25 percent initially, then finally 2 percent to 3 percent as users learned to use more efficient processes.
• “human touches” during the grants allocation process, traditionally a source of errors in any process, have dropped 65 percent.

You may read the whole story here

The article, entitled “BPM tools help firms bridge communications gaps in supply chains,” provides some interesting insight into how manufacturers can receive value from BPM. 

One of the customers is El Araby, an air conditioner manufacturer based in Cairo, Egypt. They had this to say:

 “Before Lombardi Software [BPM] was in place, all we could do for a customer was recommend them to the nearest service center and that was the end of it… We had no clue what happened next until the monthly report came out afterwards. Now, the Lombardi BPM software system handles all of the details of the repair process, even down to what technician is working on what appliance in what service center.”

We’re pretty proud that Teamworks customers around the world like to share such great testimony!

You can read the whole story here.

The author, Pete Swabey, points to the dramatic events of late as proof that collaboration software and online social networks are rewiring the fabric of society.

Here at Lombardi we agree, and have spent a lot of time and effort looking at ways to further expand the role of BPM to more people through social technologies. They are manifested in Lombardi Blueprint and Teamworks in many ways. You can learn how each incorporates social capabilities here and here respectively. 

The article also interviewed both Phil Gilbert (Lombardi’s President), and Aviva’s CIO, Toby Redshaw. It is a very good article – I encourage you to read it here

Let’s take a look the enhancements in detail:

• Model Portability With XPDL: We’re committed to ensuring that you can leverage the processes you create in Blueprint in anyway you like. That includes giving you the ability to seamlessly execute the processes in Lombardi Teamworks, but also any other tool that you choose. To that end, we’re committed to supporting the BPMN 2.0 specification when it is released. However, we know that you need a way to use your models today, so we’ve introduced the ability to export your processes to XPDL 2.1 format in this release. You never need to feel “locked in” when using Blueprint — you can get your information out in any format you’d like, whether that be as a PowerPoint presentation, Word document, or in XPDL.

• Enhanced Security And Access Controls: As you get more and more of your organization using Blueprint, it becomes increasingly important to make sure that you have the right controls, security, and governance procedures in place. To that end, you now have the option to restrict by IP address the places from which your account can be accessed. For example, this allows you to choose to only allow your users to log in from within your corporate network. Additionally, you also now have the ability to ensure that only people from an authorized set of email domains can be invited to your account. The combination of these two new security features allows you to ensure that only your employees and your trusted partners can see and collaborate on your processes.

• Top Customer Requests: One of the great benefits of Blueprint’s quick release cycle is that we’re able to quickly respond to your feedback. We made a bunch of small enhancements to address the requests we’ve heard most often. That includes improvements like making swim lane names more readable, making the user administration interface sortable and more usable, and much, much more. We think you’ll find this is the fastest and easiest to use version of Blueprint yet!

Log in now and try it out for yourself! If you don’t have an account yet, just sign up for a free 30 day trial now. And if you want to hear the latest inside info on what’s coming next, make sure you follow us on Twitter.

It’s a good report for you to send to those colleagues in your company who are interested in 3rd party takes on BPM technology.

The bottom line – excerpted from the report:

“Teamworks 7 is a full-featured BPM solution, with all the functionality expected of a market-leading solution. It really differentiates itself from its competitors in two distinct areas, one technical and one non-technical. By using a shared-model architecture, Teamworks ensures that the process model is always up to date, regardless of where and when changes to the model are made. Thus, changes to a running process instance can be reflected back to the high-level model. From a non-technical point of view the major focus has been on ensuring ease of use for any and all of the participants of process lifecycle management. This ensures that the people involved in the process are able to help in optimising the process, which makes far more sense than handing off the task to a ‘process expert’.

Allied to Teamworks is the Blueprint solution which creates a collaboration and communication environment that further empowers the process participants in all aspects of process management. A final factor worth highlighting is the graphical nature of the product – not just in process design terms, but in having the ability to graphically represent KPI and/or SLA non-compliance on the process map.”

We couldn’t agree more!

Butler customers can access the full Technology Audit report here, or you can also get it compliments of Lombardi here (if you have not registered with us before, you will be asked to do so).

Well, now there’s independent confirmation that BPM is, indeed, bigger than SOA – or at least twice as much BPM information is being searched. Google’s Keyword Tool shows that in May, the phrase “business process management” was used almost twice as many times as “service oriented architecture”, with a higher Adword value. (Too bad we don’t compete in the “consolidate student loan” space…)

I doubt if IBM or any of the other SOA stackers are in jeopardy of being bought by Lombardi any time soon, but at least with Lombardi you know you’re getting more bang for the buck. Twice as much value, in fact…

Editor’s note: The above is excerpted from Phil’s personal blog.

Details about their presentations are below. Also, stop by to see me and the rest of the Lombardi team in the Solution Showcase.

• Paul Tazbaz, Enterprise Architect at Wells Fargo, will present the best practices keynote session entitled “Architecting BPM through a Center of Excellence at Wells Fargo Bank”

Time: Tuesday, June 30, 2009 at 9:40 – 10:25 a.m. (all times are PT)

• Cheryl Mascaro, Enterprise Architect at Intel, will present a case study discussing “BPM vs. BPM – The Discipline and the Technology.”

Time: Tuesday, June 30, 11:20 a.m. – 12:05 p.m.

• Sean Perry, CIO, and Steve Nimmo, senior manager of business process and performance improvement, from Robert Half International (RHI), will share their BPM experiences in an end-user case study – “How Robert Half International is Delivering Results with BPM.”

Time: Tuesday, June 30, 2:10 – 2:55 p.m.

Also, Brandon Baxter, Lombardi’s senior product marketing manager, will present “Clear Directions for BPM Success.” Brandon will talk about how comapnies can ensure long-term BPM success by using proven project development and deployment capabilities. He will also be on the BPM vendor panel discussing “Tips for Starting and Maintaining a Successful BPM Initiative.” Those are always fun.

Time: Tuesday, June 30, 3:50 – 4:35 p.m., and the panel runs immediately afterward.

We hope to see you there!

The 2009 CIO 100 Awards honor 100 companies that are creating new business value by innovating with technology.

We are especially proud that Teamworks was the only BPM product specifically mentioned by CIO as delivering customer value in the awards, and that it has saved NACCO approximately $2 million, while improving their customer satisfaction and time to market.

Congratulations to the NACCO team!

I talked with Dave to hear how the course went and how BPM fit into the syllabus.

>>My talk with Dave (5:12): Take a Listen

Prof. Dave Angelow of Texas State in action.

Some of the topics Dave tackles:

• How a fair number of students also have day jobs (the course is taught at night) and how this allows them to directly apply what they’ve learned.
• How BPM, both Business Process Management and Modeling, fit under the quality management section
• BPM as a means of compressing cycle time and extracting more value for customers.
• Using Blueprint for a hands on modeling exercise and value the students saw in the tool.

Blueprint Educational Program

Lombardi provides free Blueprint subscriptions for educational use.  If you are teaching or taking a course where you think Blueprint would be appropriate, please contact us at blueprint@lombardi.com to learn more.

eWeek Logo

The twenty minute podcast, hosted by eWeek executive editor Michael Vizard, is entitled “Tying IT to the Business Process.” As always, it is filled with great anecdotes from Phil. I encourage each of you to listen in!

Michael’s interview with Phil (19:41) Listen (Mp3)

Let’s take a look the new features in detail:

• See Changes and Discover Relationships: Social networking sites like Facebook and LinkedIn can tell you when a colleague switches jobs or a long lost friend gets married. It’s news you wouldn’t have heard otherwise, or perhaps even known to ask about. Blueprint now does the same for process in your enterprise. The new Activity Feeds show you changes happening to your processes and helps you discover relationships between what you do and the rest of the company. Now you’ll know when something changes two steps upstream from you that will affect your job, or that the person in the next building over does something similar that you leverage.

• Involve Every Desktop In Process Improvement: You have core teams of people modeling your processes in the business, but how do you involve the tens, hundreds, or thousands of people that participate in those processes? We’ve introduced a new “participant” role in Blueprint that allows people at the desk level to reference, review, offer feedback on, and participate in discussions about their work.

• Share And Control Access To Processes: Once you start involving a larger audience in your process improvement efforts, it becomes essential that you ensure that the right people have access to the right information. To that end, we’ve added the ability to set access controls for each of your Blueprint projects that allow you to choose to grant full edit privileges, review only access, or no access at all to the appropriate audience. This allows you to keep sensitive information private, or even share a limited set of processes with your customers or vendors. And just like the rest of Blueprint, we’ve given you this power in an interface that doesn’t require a degree in rocket science to understand!

• Understand Relationships At A Glance: How many times have you been asked, “who is affected if we were to shut this legacy system down tomorrow?” or “who else in the organization depends on the work we do in this process?” Blueprint can now let you answer those questions with a single click. The new Where Used view can show you everywhere a person or system is involved in processes, where your inputs and outputs are used, or even where you see the same risks, problems, and opportunities for improvement.

• Better Usability And Experience: The Blueprint design team has been listening to your feedback and doing research on ways to make using the product even easier and more productive. To that end, we’ve redesigned the home page to make it far more personal–Activity Feeds and Favorites put information that’s relevant to you at your fingertips. We’ve studied your navigation patterns and made it easier to get to the view of the process you need with fewer clicks. We’ve made the Discovery Map better than ever by adding panning, zooming, and printing to PDF just like the Process Diagram. Finally, we developed the participant / read-only view for processes from the ground up to make sure the highest value information is viewable on the screen at all times.

What are you waiting for? Log in now and try it out for yourself! If you don’t have an account yet, just sign up for a free 30 day trial now. And if you want to hear the latest inside info on what’s coming next, make sure you follow us on Twitter.

I’m very excited about our recent launch of Lombardi University, because it provides a more mature and comprehensive kind of BPM education delivery and talent development program – one that is new to our current marketplace.

Now, we didn’t just add the word “University” to our existing training program (like so many other vendors have done).  Lombardi University reflects a fundamental change in the way BPM education is structured and delivered, and it was created based on the evolving demands of our market.

Over the last year, I have been visiting with dozens of companies undertaking BPM projects and programs.  Every company has a similar story – the “BPM journey” begins with some definite successes for the first few projects, but it is taking longer than desired for them to do BPM at scale with greater self-sufficiency.  When we researched what differentiated those customers and partners who are having the most success with adoption of BPM in their organization, it became clear it was a difference in their BPM talent – having the right number of people in the right roles with the right level of skills and experience.

So we created Lombardi University to help every Lombardi customer and partner fill the BPM talent gaps that they may encounter along their BPM journey.  There are a few key advancements that Lombardi University brings to the market that I’d like to highlight:

• Role-based Education Tracks – Enables all business and technical roles in your BPM project or program, not just yourdevelopers. This includes analysts, program managers, administrators – and executives.
• Multi-level Education - Provides a structured way to “graduate” fromfoundational to advancedto expert levels of maturity within each role.
• Certification of Skills – Utilizes exams to benchmark skill levels, annd practical skills must be demonstrated by completing actual projects.
• Mentoring – Provides hands-on guidance by a Lombardi expert to solidify practical education in the context of a real project at your company.
• Faculty Network -Expands educational offerings and expertise beyond Lombardi’s corporate boundaries through partnerships with well-known BPM experts such as Bruce Silver, Derek Miers, Andrew Spanyi and others.

Following a structured talent development program, provides the uniformity and consistency our customers require in their delivery – no matter where the resources come from; and that will reduce the risk of delivery problems.  Troy Hamlin, VP of Applications , Allianz Life Insurance Company of North America recently said, “I’m excited to see that TCS, our strategic partner, is working with Lombardi to certify their people in BPM. This helps me feel confident that when we source talent from them, we can expect those people to have a specific level of skills and those skills are easily measurable.”

We have many more details beyond what I’ve shared here on the Lombardi University website.  I hope you’ll take a moment and check it out.

We’ve made it easier for authors that are just beginning to use Teamworks. How many times have you installed a new software product that gave you overwhelming numbers of buttons and menu options while providing no insight in how to use it? The Authoring Environment in Teamworks 7 is redesigned to remove a lot of the noise and early confusion without losing the features that power authors need. You can see this from the completely new skin, simplified menus, and the way that Teamworks automatically organizes your process assets. In addition, all authors now build their process assets within the context of one process app (project) at a time, which ensures that no one is changing assets that aren’t related to their projects.

There are a considerable number of changes we made to simplify some of the common authoring tasks while matching current best practices within the Teamworks community. For example, we simplified the way that integrations to external systems work by removing the need to create separate integration definition and connector components. We have also introduced Teamworks Service types, including Human Services, Integration Services, Rule Services, and several others. This helps authors from making modeling mistakes like placing a service intended for human interaction into a system swimlane. We have also enhanced the data mapping capabilities to allow you to change activity implementations without having to redo your input/output data mappings.

We also added a lot of great new features that help new and experienced users alike. Many of these features like back-in-time, toolkits, and automated deployment are highlighted on our website, so please take a look there to see some examples of how these work. Our focus in adding these new features was to make sure that we added them in a way that makes sense for BPM and a model-driven architecture. We didn’t just bolt-on a version control system and tools designed to manage text-based code; we completely rethought how to manage changes to your process model as your processes evolve in a way that preserves the ability to build and iterate quickly.

Many of the features in Teamworks 7 were designed and built by people that have been on implementation teams for BPM projects and understand the challenges that many of you face each day. We think this release marks a major step forward BPM and for the experience of those that build processes every day. Let us know what you think.

Lombardi announced major advances in all three areas that determine success or failure in BPM:

1. The need to communicate — you have to make business improvement personal
2. The need to automate — you have to drive productivity and re-use
3. The need for talent — you need to be able to assess risk, plan, and lead

Forget about simplistic approaches to driving transformational change based solely on whether your BPMS (or “BPP” or “PAAS”) has a given feature. The so-called “Business Process Platform” as a sole-sourced technological salvation is a hoax. It’s a solipsistic approach by technologists to once again say “if I have a better tool, I won’t be as big a fool.” Go on, stare at your image in the water and try to pawn all this off on simply another development tool or architecture. Instead, you need to take to heart what Toby Redshaw, CIO of Aviva, said a couple of weeks ago (paraphrasing here): “If you’re in IT and not doing BPM, three years from now you won’t have a job.”

He wasn’t talking about a tool. He was talking about change and changing everything: how we relate IT to the business, how we use tools, and how we manage, nay, lead, change in our businesses through the use of BPM tools and methods.

Yesterday Lombardi re-defined what a BPM platform needs to be; three specific vehicles: Blueprint (Spring ‘09), Teamworks 7, and Lombardi University.

Together, these 3 pillars — communication, automation and leadership — combine to form the basis for the platform for BPM’s second decade. Lombardi is that platform.

Editor’s note: The above is excerpted from Phil’s personal blog. Follow this link to read the full post, including a discussion of each of Lombardi’s new products.

Usually only a relatively small number of people inside an organization do real modeling of processes. The vast majority of us have “day jobs” and don’t necessarily think of things in terms of flow charts, activities, and decision points. How do we participate in the process improvement discussion?

Blueprint now leverages social networking technology similar to sites like Facebook and LinkedIn to build a community around business improvement that everyone–modeler or not–can participate in. “Participants” can reference and offer suggestions and feedback on their processes without the need to know any mapping or diagramming  techniques. “Authors” can have threaded, two way conversations with the participants in the business and leverage Blueprint’s existing easy to use modeling capabilities to rationalize and improve processes. Tying this all together is a Facebook-style activity feed that proactively notifies you when your processes or the conversation about them changes.

We’re announcing the Spring ‘09 release today and it goes live on blueprint.lombardi.com on Saturday morning. Want to see more? Make sure you attend the introduction webinar tomorrow at 10 AM central.

We didn’t.

In particular, we could not help but notice the name similarity with Blueprint — our cloud based process mapping and modeling application that has been on the market for two years. Now, before you call me paranoid, know that we average several thousand hits to our website per quarter from IBM labs in China, Italy, Germany, Canada and the US. And we get dozens of requests for Blueprint accounts from IBM Labs across the world every quarter. So, at the very least, the IBM team was aware of Blueprint — if not imitating it. They are not the first to follow Blueprint’s lead — and won’t be the last.

Despite this, IBM has missed the mark — at least from what we can tell from the slide pitch.

Bruce Silver has had his head in the IBM Clouds lately and wrote up an interesting post on BlueWorks. The phrase that captured my attention was that “democratizing modeling and analysis” is key to creating a culture of BPM in a company. On that point, we could not agree more.

Bruce goes on to say that “BlueWorks does that”. From what we have seen so far, I could not disagree more.

BlueWorks is still “tooling for the few”.  What I mean by this is that IBM is missing the bigger point that needs to be addressed – that the future of BPM is dependent on our ability to enable everyone within an organization to collaborate on process improvements, within a “BPM” framework and language.

Making the entry point to these conversations based on IBM’s Component Business Modeling methodology or introducing eTOM Frameworks does virtually nothing to get broad set of people in your company talking about how to improve their everyday work. No matter if the tool is free, applies new metaphors from social networking and works in the cloud. It propagates the message that unless you are steeped in process knowledge, you have no part in the conversation.

Blueprint, on the other hand is about reaching and giving voice to the many. It is about upending traditional process paradigms and giving organizations the tools to be successful both inside and outside of traditional BPM roles.

We use social features and an “Enterprise 2.0″ approach as well — and as such it’s tempting to think that these two products are more similar than they, in fact, are. The underlying philosophy of Blueprint still stands in stark contrast to that of BlueWorks and its maker, IBM.

Blueprint is, as Bruce Silver also wrote, “Process Modeling for the Rest of Us.”

IBM said that version 1 of BlueWorks will be available some time on or after June 26. The fully mature version of Blueprint is available right now. In fact, if you want to hear how companies have already used Blueprint to drive process improvement, check out podcasts from Symantec, PRC and West Bend Insurance.

Get your own little slice of democracy right now by giving Blueprint a spin.

The following is reported to us by Stewart Mixon, Chief Operations Officer at the Medical University of South Carolina.

MUSC is the oldest medical school in the Southeast, with 1,200 faculty members teaching more than 3,000 students and residents annually. MUSC depends upon financial grants as a primary means of funding its medical research. The university manages the post award grants allocation process where up to 3,000 requests for grant fund distribution changes are made every quarter.

Previously, this process was entirely manual; the same information was keyed into different front-end and back-end systems, resulting in significant backlogs and delays, as well as many errors and rework efforts.  Due to error rates and other contributing factors, there were more than twice as many forms submitted in the manual process than are processed using the Lombardi Teamworks product today.

This new process quickly delivered significant benefits for the university, enabling MUSC to proactively catch and eliminate errors at the point of entry, bringing the per-grant error rate from 85-90% down to 2-3%.

Through the use of Teamworks, MUSC also was able to reduce “human touches” in the grants allocation process by an impressive 65% — allowing the university to free up several staff full-time equivalents (FTEs) for other important tasks.

Moreover, through the use of Teamworks dashboards, MUSC management receives key performance indicators containing real-time status information of all of its financial grants distribution activities. This important metric was impossible to collect prior to implementation of the new process.

If you’d like to learn more, you can also watch this webinar with Stewart and Salvatore Salamone from Ziff Davis.

One of the efforts that helped in this restructuring and which continues today is an effort to document, standardize and communicate all of the company’s processes.

Rachel Pace-Maron, Director of Operations Support Service was asked to lead this effort with a shoe-string budget.  Last week I chatted with Rachel to learn more about her effort.

My conversation with Rachel (11:19)  Listen

Some of the topics Rachel tackles:

• The goal with mapping PRC’s processes was to find out how they could do things better and faster and why things take so long.  They weren’t able to answer why a process took so long because no one person knew every step.  This is what lead them to process mapping.
• One of the first processes they mapped was “agent time,” how much time do agents spend on break and what is the management process for keeping them on the phone efficiently and within break parameters.
• They found each call center had a different process and none were doing it efficiently.
• By standardizing on a process for all centers and bringing them into metric, they had a bottom line impact on revenue.
• Before adopting Lombardi Blueprint for process mapping, groups had been using, Visio, Exel and Power Point.
• PRC has a group of people who are visually oriented and a group who are narrative oriented. As Rachel explains, “Blueprint’s ability to marry picture to narrative has been fantastic and, I’m not going to say life altering, but certainly business altering.”
• Her excitement over the latest Blueprint release and how the addition of participants will help PRC break down silos and take their process initiative to the next level.

Finextra has more here.

Toby Redshaw, Aviva’s CIO presented at the Gartner BPM Summit this past February with a session titled: “Aviva End-User Case Study: Modern BPM – Doing More for Less“. In his talk, Toby shared real-world insight on how companies can get started with BPM, how they should grow fast for maximum impact, and lessons learned from four years in the trenches with modern BPM.

We’re also proud that Toby has gone on the record, saying that:

“I consider modern BPM to be one of a handful of breakthrough technologies that can have real short-term P&L impact. In an era when virtually all IT shops are being asked to do more with less…we believe partnering with Lombardi now will get us there faster and better than any other choice in the market.”

Toby hits the nail on the head — no issue is more relevant to companies large and small than process, and process excellence. BPM has been shown to reduce costs by 20% in the first year and is the #1 priority for CEO’s in 2009.

Stay tuned as Aviva progresses – we’ll loop back to provide metrics, best practices, and lessons learned as soon as they are available.

Here are a couple of interesting thoughts/takeaways that came up during the conference.

The BPM Talent Gap

As companies really try to ramp up their BPM initiatives, they often encounter a “BPM talent gap” in their own organizations as well as in the partners they typically use for solution delivery. Phil Gilbert, Lombardi’s President, talked about how this talent gap is found in multiple roles – from Business Analysis to Program Management to Business Leadership. The good news is that this gap can be readily addressed – often with the team you have at hand. Its just a matter of recognizing the gaps and developing a known set of skills. In fact, Toby Redshaw, CIO at Aviva, talked about the fact that anyone who wants to work in IT over the next few years must be focused on gaining the skills and capabilities required to succeed with BPM. This talent gap issue was also discussed at Gartner’s BPM Show in San Diego this Spring as well as in a great research article called “IT’s Unmet Potential” in the McKinsey Quarterly. Definitely recommended reading.

The Importance of Success Stories

The best way to launch a BPM Center of Excellence (COE) is with success stories. Sometimes the inclination is to focus only on defining standard templates, governance bodies, org structures and the like. In his session, Paul Tazbaz, Enterprise Architect from Wells Fargo talked about how they focused on documenting a set of BPM success stories at the beginning of their COE initiative. These success stories formed the basis of their early conversations with lines of business and corporate IT as they championed BPM across the company. Note that these success stories were about BPM – and many of the success stories predated the formation of the COE. No matter – Paul’s group is focused on getting business units to take advantage of BPM. No better way to do that than to tell them 10 stories about groups in Wells Fargo benefiting from BPM today. Sure makes for a more interesting first meeting with your lines of business than “This is BPMN and you WILL use it.”

Stay tuned for more tales from Lombardi Driven Online. Note that the conference is still available on-demand. If you are a customer or partner and missed the live event, you can still register for access here.

I caught up with Devin to learn about process improvement at Symantec and how his team was using Blueprint.

>>My talk with Devin (11:53): Take a Listen

Devin Rickard of Symantec's Business Process Improvement team

Some of the topics Devin tackles:

• Symantec has grown through rapid organic growth as well as acquisition.  This has led to processes being executed in islands. Devin’s group works with the islands to try and “pull them together into a single continent.”
• The team practices “stealth six sigma.”  They have adapted the processes and tools from Six Sigma so that they fit the Symantec corporate culture.
• What started as a nice tool for the practitioners has ended up becoming the core catalyst that brings together individuals and helps them to visualize what they are trying to improve upon for Symantec customers and partners.
• As business owners or process managers become engaged they are becoming aggressive adopters of Blueprint.  They find it gets them a picture of their business that they’ve never had before and they want to find the areas within their own processes that they can make improvements to.
• The interest/involvement of the business has noticeably shortened the time to improvements.
• Some of the projects Devin and team have used Blueprint for: transforming the quote to cash process and the procure to pay process (Blueprint helped to cut the time to pay employee expense reports from 3-5 weeks to 2-3 days) as well as working on ways to make the process of integrating acquisitions smoother.

Using their existing processes, complying with the new rules would have required hiring over 12,000 new employees.

Recently SearchCIO reporter Kristen Caretta wrote an excellent piece on how UCLH met this challenge using BPM.

The piece is especially helpful as a case study in how to evangelize BPM internally, and getting buy-in from senior management on the business side.

To read more about executive-level buy-in, you can check out this post too, by VP of Services Toby Cappello.

Along with lesser known companies like Microsoft, Sun and Rackspace :-) , Lombardi Blueprint is a gold sponsor of the event (actually since I took the screenshot to the left, Aserver, Rightscale and Zeus have also joined the golden ranks).

As a gold sponsor we get to deliver a 5-7 minute lightening talk at the beginning of the event.  The only restrictions are that it be cloud related and it can’t be a product pitch.  I will be talking about the cloud and democratization of information.

What, When, Where…

The event takes place next Saturday, April 25th from 10AM – 4PM down at Austin City Limits on the UT campus. Here’s how the webpage sums up the event:

CloudCamp is an unconference where early adopters of Cloud Computing technologies exchange ideas. With the rapid change occurring in the industry, we need a place we can meet to share our experiences, challenges and solutions. At CloudCamp, you are encouraged you to share your thoughts in several open discussions, as we strive for the advancement of Cloud Computing. End users, IT professionals and vendors are all encouraged to participate.

(Here are a few more thoughts regarding the event from co-organizer and Red Monk analyst Michael Cote.)

Free for All

The cost of the event is FREE and all you need to do is register online so they know how many folks are coming (heck, I bet if you showed up that day they probably wouldn’t turn you away.)  So come on down next Saturday and enjoy and learn.  And remember, since its an unconference that means anyone can propose and lead a session and we all learn from each other.

For those who will be in the Austin area then, hope to see you there!

Foote Partners’ CEO David Foote says “what’s unique about this downturn is that IT departments are hiring talent in certain areas – such as business process modeling and project management – while laying off in others connected to weak product lines.”

And, indeed, coming in at the top of the list was Business Process Modeling:

1. Business Process Modeling

Business process management, methodology and modeling is one of the few IT niches that saw pay gains in the fourth quarter of 2008, according to the quarterly IT salary survey compiled by Foote Partners. In particular, companies were willing to pay for workers with ITIL IT best practices and CobiT IT governance experience. Pay for these skills was up 10.3% from a year ago and 5.6% from the previous quarter, the Foote report says.

Kevin Faughnan, director of IBM’s Academic Initiative, says business process modeling is one of the key skills that business majors should be studying. “It’s about how does our business work, what are the business processes and how do we analyze them,” Faughnan says, adding that this is a key issue for companies to consider before applying IT to solve business problems.

This seems to make sense to me. It is always important to know your business processes in order to be able to modify and refine them to keep pace with change… and today there is an extra helping of change that we all must not only keep pace with but get ahead of.  Business Process Modeling is a key first step.

And the rest…

For the curious, the other 9 skills were:

• 2. Database
• 3. Messaging/Communications
• 4. IT Architecture
• 5. IT Security
• 6. Project Management
• 7. Data Mining
• 8. Web Development
• 9. IT Optimization
• 10. Networking

To watch in High Quality: after clicking play, click the “HQ” button that will appear on the bottom.

Some of the topics Scott tackles:

• Ford’s goal of becoming one of the world’s leading social brands.
• Setting content free.
• Innovation is made up of small tweaks on existing platforms that build value over time.
• How did Ford come to decide they needed a head of social media and how did they pick Scott.
• The two things coming up that Scott is most excited about: the Fiesta Movement and the evolution of Fordstory.com into Ford’s social media hub.

BTW, If you want to follow Scott on Twitter, its @scottmonty.

The five minute podcast, hosted by Peter Schooff, ebizQ’s editor, is entitled “BPM Now More Than Ever: Live Podcast With Lombardi,” and summarizes Jim’s presentation from the conference. 

We especially enjoyed seeing the comment Peter made that he “always enjoys the opportunity to record a live podcast with one of the big speakers at the event.”

Jim’s session was definitely one of the top draws during the conference, with nearly 200 people attending.

Peter’s interview with Jim (5:23) Listen (Mp3) 

Lombardi’s voice was heard pretty loudly! In addition to a best practices presentation from our Vice President of Global Marketing, Lombardi had four customer speakers at the conference - from PNC, SIRVA, Wells Fargo and StubHub, who are all leading the charge for BPM in their respective companies. With a central message of “Clear Directions. Clear Results.,” the Lombardi team was able to talk with many of the conference attendees about how they can use BPM to deliver success and value to their organizations.

But have no fear, all work and no play make for a long week away from the office. So on Tuesday night, we threw a party with our take on the classic game show “The Price is Right!”  Conference attendees had the chance to bid against one another to win fabulous prizes, that is …if the price was right!

• Farrukh Humayun, vice president of information services, PNC Bank, will present a case study session entitled “How National City Bank is Delivering Clear Results with BPM.”

Time: Monday, March 23, 12:05 – 12:30 p.m. PT.
Location:  Grande Ballroom “B”

• Erik Keller, CIO at SIRVA will present a case study entitled “Leveraging BPM to Deliver Mission Critical Applications – One CIO’s Perspective.”

Time: Monday, March 23, 2:30 – 3:30 p.m. PT
Location: Grande Ballroom “B”

• Paul Tazbaz, enterprise architect, EA Solutions at Wells Fargo Bank will present a case study entitled, “Building a Process COE at Wells Fargo Bank.”

Time: Tuesday, March 24, 09:30 -10:30 a.m. PT
Location: Grande Ballroom “A”

• Dan Wang, manager of business process architecture at StubHub!, will participate on a BPM case study panel session entitled “Change Management in Action – Are You Ready for BPM?”

Time: Wednesday, March 25, 10:00 – 11:00 a.m. PT
Location: Grande Ballroom “B”

In London we talked with several companies from across Europe. All of them were looking for immediate solutions to their process problems. As a leader in the BPM space, Lombardi was able to draw upon past customer successes to explain how we can help meet the needs of the different industries represented at the show, such as energy, financial services, government, and healthcare. In talking with delegates, we learned that most companies already see the need for BPM, and they say that process improvement is an important priority now. This is definitely a change from previous conferences we have participated in. Companies are starting to move forward with BPM initiatives in order to thrive, despite the surrounding economical uncertainties.

We recently purchased licensing rights to the report, “Vendor Snapshot: Lombardi Blueprint Bridges Gap Between Process Discovery And Execution” and it is now available here.

Quotable Quotes

Here are some of my favorite quotes from the report:

Blueprint provides a process modeling and discovery platform that blends collaboration and documentation capabilities into an easy-to-use, low cost, software-as-a-service offering that can be used by beginner to expert process analysts.

Blueprint combines the best of both worlds for analysts: the “ready-to-use” feel of office productivity tools and the comprehensive knowledge repository found in traditional BPA tools.

Lombardi Blueprint represents a new way of developing, delivering, and interacting with software — the combination of SaaS, Web 2.0, and business process.

From the very beginning, BPM suite vendors sold business and process analysts on empty promises of easy-to-use modeling capabilities. Lombardi is one of the first BPM suite vendors to deliver on the promise of ease of use for process analysts. Lombardi Blueprint combines collaboration, ease of use, and a centralized process repository into an inexpensive and elegant SaaS-based offering.

But don’t take Forrester’s word for it…

And if those quotes don’t get you to sign-up for a free 30-day trial of Blueprint, I don’t know what will. :-)  Check Blueprint out for yourself.  Sign-up for a free trial here.

Gartner positions vendors in the magic quadrant based on their completeness of vision and ability to execute. Delivering on both of these axes is the big challenge. Good quote from Rod Favaron – our CEO – on exactly this point: “From my perspective, leaders in this analysis must not only have a vision for BPM – they need to demonstrate success in executing that vision.”

2008 was the best year in Lombardi’s history.  In 2009, execution is going to be more important than ever – not just for us. Our customers and partners need BPM now more than ever. We are looking forward to the challenge.

Each year, people are given a couple of weeks during work time to work on a project that extends the base platform of Blueprint or Teamworks in some cool new way.  As the official Science Fair rules state:  “Anyone at Lombardi can enter… all you have to do is think up a project, register the project on the wiki page  build the project, and show up ready to pitch your project on January 27!”

This year there were close to 40 projects and awards were given in three different categories as well as one project that was picked as “Best in Show.”    The winners received iPod Nanos and the Best in Show was the recipient of cold hard cash.  Not only that, but all of the winners will be show cased at Lombardi’s upcoming customer event, Driven.

Everyone Wins

The real cool thing for customers, Lombardi and the entrants is a that lot of these out-of-the box projects find their way into the products over the coming year.

This was my first time at Science Fair and I was really impressed with how elaborate the whole shebang was.  Nice way to keep innovation pumping.

I and several of my colleagues will be in London next week (Feb. 23 – 25) for the Gartner Business Process Management Summit. We are an event sponsor of the three-day event that is themed “BPM: Thrive, Survive, Capitalize.”

We are excited that two of our customers have been scheduled to present at the summit.  If you’re there as well, please stop by see their presentations.

Toby Redshaw, CIO at Aviva plc, will provide a BPM end-user case study entitled “Aviva End-User Case Study: Modern BPM – Doing More for Less.” Toby will share his insight on how companies can get started and grow fast with BPM, and offer lessons from what he’s learned from four years in the trenches with modern BPM.

Raju Oak, Head of Process Services at Kleinwort Benson Private Bank, will present his company’s BPM experiences in a case study entitled “How Kleinwort Benson Delivered Clear Results with BPM,” Raju will review how Kleinwort Benson improved the efficiency of their deal settlement processes by 60 percent while at the same time reducing its complexity by nearly 30 percent.

Come out and see us, if you’re at the conference.

Take a look at this screencast for a quick rundown or see the full details after the break.

Let’s take a look at the improvements in depth:

• Autocomplete Revamp: We’ve heard from you loud and clear that the autocomplete lists in Blueprint needed some work and we think you’ll be really happy with them now. They look nicer, work faster, search more intelligently, and are less intrusive. More importantly, they now only contain active assets. So if you archive a process, you won’t have to see all of that process’s obsolete artifacts cluttering up your lists anymore. Misspelled the name of an input? No problem–just delete it in your process and it won’t show up in autocomplete popup again either. These improvements have already made us quite a bit more productive internally here at Lombardi. Try them out for yourself and let us know what you think.

  

• Swimlane Improvements: If you haven’t set a participant on an activity in Blueprint, it will end up in the “Unassigned” swimlane on the Process Diagram. In this release, we’ve made a couple of nice tweaks to the way that special swimlane works. First, when it’s empty, it will automatically hide itself so it won’t take up space unnecessarily either on screen or in your printouts. Second, you can now double-click the Unassigned swimlane and rename it. This can be a huge time saver if you want to give a bunch of activities to the same participant in one go.

  

• File Attachments and the Word export: We introduced file attachments in the Year End ‘08 release and they’ve been a huge hit. The biggest request we’ve heard is that you’d like to see your attachments show up in the Word and Excel exports for your processes. Well, now they will; each attachment will be listed with a hyperlink back to Blueprint that you can click to securely download it.

  

What’s next? We’ve got some really exciting things we’re working on right now that will debut at our Driven 2009 user conference. Between now and then, be sure to follow us on twitter to keep up with all the latest!

Here is the Executive Summary from the Forrester site:

Austin-based Lombardi Software’s latest offering, Blueprint, positions the vendor to extend its leadership in human-centric business process management (BPM) and takes direct aim at Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, and Visio as the tools of choice for process analysts. Blueprint provides a process modeling and discovery platform that blends collaboration and documentation capabilities into an easy-to-use, low cost, software-as-a-service offering that can be used by beginner to expert process analysts. To stay ahead of the pack, the platform needs to continue extending its collaborative Web 2.0 functionality as other BPM suite vendors play catch-up by introducing similar offerings. Consider Lombardi Blueprint if you need a collaborative and lightweight process discovery tool that is tailored to support geographically dispersed process discovery teams.

We are in the process of licensing this report and as soon as we do, we will be making it available on the lombardi.com site.  If you are already a Forrester client, you can log in access the report here.

If the above has piqued your interest, you might be interested in signing up for a 30-day free trial of Blueprint and seeing for yourself. :-)

Karen Tricomi, who is Systems Engineer, Enterprise Methods & Processes, for a major financial services organization, wrote a wonderful in-depth review of Lombardi Blueprint for BPMInstitute.org.

Entitled “The Process Practitioner: An Independent Evaluation Of Lombardi’s Blueprint,” the piece attests to how easy and useful Blueprint is for people of all skills levels. It also discusses each of the major product areas.

Karen writes:

“Documenting processes is the first – and in my opinion, the most important – step in the improvement cycle. When Lombardi recently offered to demonstrate Blueprint, their web-based documentation and collaboration product, I approached the demonstration as a business professional with processes that need improvement, rather than an IT analyst or industry expert. Criteria for evaluation were ease of use, a short learning curve, and good collaboration features.”

And:

“Overall, business users will find the application intuitive, easy to use, and helpful.  For those still using an unstructured graphical program, or trying to describe their processes in text form, this tool has advantages over both. . .companies trying to get a handle on their process will find this tool worth the price.”

It’s one thing of course for us to tell you that Blueprint is great, but as with the Intelligent Enterprise award that we announced recently, it is particularly gratifying to see our products achieve solely based on merit.

If you want to give Blueprint a spin, you can sign up for a free 30-day trial here.

I recently learned that Joyce introduced Lombardi Blueprint as a tool within her class and had a lot of success.  I called her up to learn more.

>> Take a listen (6:11)

Some of the Topics we tackle:

• Who are the students that make up her class and what are their backgrounds?
• Mixing concepts with hands-on exercises
• Replacing Visio/Word/Excel in the classroom
• How the strongest Visio advocates at the beginning of the term became the biggest Blueprint champions at the end of the course.

Blueprint Educational Program

Lombardi provides free Blueprint subscriptions for educational use.  If you are teaching or taking a course where you think Blueprint would be appropriate, please contact us at blueprint@lombardi.com to learn more.

Be vewy, vewy quiet, we’re hunting pwocesses

Dan is clearly sold on the value of business processes and BPM:

For large and small firms, the business process is the right way to think of what to do and how to do it better, whether or not it is automated or supported with technology. BPM puts the focus where it should be–on what you must do to make your company successful, not on the capabilities you happen to have.

What he wants to know however is how are these processes captured in the first place?  If the processes being submitted aren’t of quality, how can you expect the BPM results to be?  Garbage in, garbage out.

Incremental and Collaborative…that’s the ticket

Dan argues that developing the processes incrementally is the only way you can be assured of solid inputs.  The three approaches he advocates are: Wiki-based process discovery, Task-based process discovery and Mash-up based process discovery.  And this is where the Blueprint shout out comes in:

Lombardi Software has recognized this trend and recently launched a Web-based service called “Blueprint” that allows for collaborative brainstorming and definition of processes. Using this service, you start with a bunch of ideas and can end up with a nice diagram. The JargonSpy imagines such a system could be used as the scratch pad for capturing and refining the processes that emerge in the other three methods.

Thanks for the mention Dan, and thanks for pointing out the importance of iterative and broadly inclusive input collection up front.  For without that, are we not building our BPM castles on diagrams of sand?

It’s no shock or surprise that IT budgets are staying flat this year – in fact, a recent Gartner survey of over 1,500 CIOs found flat IT budgets across North American and Europe with slight increases in Latin America but decreases in Asia/Pacific.

It likewise isn’t surprising that business process improvement is once again the #1 priority for businesses.

As Gartner’s Mark MacDonald says: “It’s time for CIOs to develop business process improvement capabilities as part of the core of IT. . .this will enable them to respond to executive expectations that see business processes as important to business performance.”

Continuous process improvement is a mantra that we at Lombardi stand behind every day, as we seek to drive cultural change and badly needed efficiencies across the business.

The economy aside, it’s nice to see that so many organizations are planning to take advantage of the opportunity in 2009 the re-think the way that they operate and find ways to improve efficiency, effectiveness, agility and visibility within their operations.  For more on that, look no further than our own Phil Gilbert’s recent thoughts in CIO Magazine.

Check out the Gartner report – it’s a great piece of research and worth a read if you want to see where many other CIO’s see an opportunity to build a competitive edge in 2009.

Specifically, we were called out for our human-centricity and exception management:

“Business process management systems knit together the people and systems involved in end-to-end processes. Lombardi Teamworks shines in both styles of integration, but human-centric-workflow and event and exception management are its strong suits. Lombardi always seems to be on our short list for BPM.”

More on the awards from Editor-in-Chief Doug Henschen:

“Technology complacency is not an option if you expect to outsmart the competition; nor is this a time for heedless investment without specific goals for competitive advantage or return on investment. To guide you to vendors that have been leading the way in innovation and business optimization, we present our 10th Annual Intelligent Enterprise Editors’ Choice Awards. We considered scores of companies that are helping organizations move toward the ideal expressed by our publication’s name, Intelligent Enterprise.”

Congrats to everyone involved. You can read about all of the winners here.

Stacie and I discussed how she worked over the last year to help create a small commercial offering which, before BPM and process mapping, had not been practical to offer.

We also discussed the role that process mapping played in the recent IT department re-org, helping to streamline processes and breakdown silos.

My talk with Stacie (7:17)

West Bend BA, Stacie Kenney

Some of the Topics we tackle:

• West Bend’s “Smart Business” offering and how it leverages new technologies like services, content generation tool and Teamworks.
• Given that the “Smart Business” premiums were small, the goal was to de-complicate the process so that the agencies could set up the policy with very little time up front.
• Before Blueprint, the BA’s leveraged Visio for flows along with a “mammoth” spec doc in Word.  The biggest issue with this approach was keeping the content in sync.
• West Bend was drawn to Blueprint by its collaboration and document generation capabilities.
• The “Road To Excellence” and the IT re-org, breaking down silos and centralizing the BA’s.
• Using process mapping to document the flow of work coming into the BA group from the business, categorize it and then deliver it back on a monthly basis.