Process Discovery a Paper by Lombardi Software

I am reading "Process Discovery" by Lombardi that I have downloade from www.bpminstitute.org. Here are my notes and comments on the paper that I share with you:

Note: Process Discovery:
Prioritizing the target processes for BPM project through stockholders conversation about
"goals,
responsibilities,
problems and
Processes"

Comment: this is a name anyway but I don't like it to me process discovery is more of a finding out processes that we do in our business operation and they are not known to us. Is that possible? Yes since many of the processes are grown just in a natural way and not in a systematic way and they are not documented. I have seen this in a health care case study. To be honest nobody knows what's going on in the process it is just something in the head of the physicians and other involved parties.

Let say process prioritization in my term "process discovery" in Lobardi term. Then is this an important task in a BPM project?
Yes for sure. BPM projects can be very huge and risky and go to the south if there is no prioritization in place.

I guess the introduction of the paper has been written by someone else because the definition of the "Process Discovery" in the rest of the paper is something that you more expect form the name:

" Describe your company's key processes" and find out information about them.

The challenges on the way to do this task are:

" 1: Getting More People Involved"

Processes are usually cross departmental and spread around the organization . Don't stick to couple of key people to discover them.

In another part of the paper it is mentioned that "Daily Workers" might have the best information that you are looking for.

That is definitely true, especially for natural grown human-centric processes.

"2: Getting the Right Information"

Workflow information is not the only thing you want you need " key activities, responsibilities, problems affecting performance and key goals that this process affects"

"3: Prioritization"

Find out the answer of "What first" or "What next" question.

"4: Leverage"

Turn the documented process to executable ones.

One important point that is mentioned in the paper in this section is process implementation is not your last step. BPM is an iterative approach and you have to always do the steps from discovery to implementation to be always successful in the project.

Problem with current options :
In the eye of writers of this paper the problems with current systems are:
Business Process analysis (BPA) tools:
1) They are complicated and complex for business users.
2) Significant Investment required

3) No clear consensus on key problems
Comment: I am not sure how true is this one about IDS Sheer's tool I am reading a book that describes some of the features and capabilities of ARIS methodology and they seem good to me. I have not tried the tool yet. I hope I get the chance to do that and then I'll let you know. However some of the features that they have like "Process Portfolio Quadrant". Btw, we are planning to use URN to implement this :)
4) Integration with process execution engines is also hard

BPMN Process Modelers:

1) too complex for most users:

Comment: I don't think BPMN is complex!

2) They don't provide collaboration option

3) Do not help with prioritization

Office Tools: (Vision, Power Point, etc)
1) Do not enforce a consistent structure to the information
2) inconsistent and unstructured output
Comment: I was looking at Visio 2007 process modeling tool the other day there are some enforcement and checker mechanism in place and at least it enforces the BPMN. However that's true there is not much of a semantic behind Visio templates. I have to look at Visio 2007 in more detail though.

What Lombardi offers?

They offer their application as SaaS which is good from some perspectives. (e.g. collaboration) It is a Wiki based software I assume.

One of the downsides for SaaS especially when it comes to processes that can be the competitive advantage of business and they might not trust to SaaS. Btw, I have to read about trust issues in SaaS a bit if anyone has a good source I appreciate it.

I have submitted a request to evaluate Lombardi's Blue print.
I'll update you if I get the chance to do it.

Human-Centric BPM vs. Integration Centric BPM

I was reading this post by Bruce Silver. He explains the differences between human centric and integration-centric BPMS. He compares them from the technical point of view and points. Here are the main different that he believes they have.

 
 

Human-Centric BPMS	Integration-Centric BPMS
Synchronous messaging	Asynchronous messaging
Don't care about exception handling	Do a good job for exception handling
Just support simple data objects	Support complex data object mapping
Tend to provide and easy modeling environment that used both by IT and Business users	Does not have an integrated modeling environment
Does not support SOA properly	True support of SOA

 

Web 2.0 in practice – putting together a project plan

I just tried to use some collaboration features of web 2.0 applications for putting together a project plan with one of my colleagues at university.

Well we started very eagerly with Microsoft Groove. I guess we did not have enough knowledge about value proposition of the Microsoft Groove. Our perception was like we can share a document and work on it together and we were so happy that we no longer need to go to the university during the weekends like they way we always. However after 1 hour we realized that Groove is more of a file sharing program. Although it can be used to provide what they call it a work space for a project it cannot be used for working collaboratively on one document at the same time. However it can be used for keep all the team members sync with others are doing individually. Then we tried to use MS oneNote. To be honest with Microsoft rivals, oneNote is a great tool and I really like it at least when I work individually and gather notes for my research or anything else. It has a very interesting feature that enables you to share a live session and start working on a document collaboratively. We tried it for almost one hour it was great but after that … the problems started to appear. I not still sure was it oneNote or something else that cause couple of crashes on my friends PC and then we always got disconnected and got this message that network is not available. Anyway, after a bit of challenged we moved to Zoho Project. I guess although it is very interesting you find it a bit more complex that required for a simple project plan. We built couple of millstones and task lists but I guess my friend did not find it useful. What I don't like about Zoho project is it is not integrated with Zoho Writer! Yes that's correct. Even if you want to log on to Zoho Writer you have to register one more time and create a new account!!! After trying Zoho we move to google documents. O God, it is slow and you feel you are in nineties in terms of editing capabilities. Anyway after couple of days of challenge, we went to school today and finished our work in physical world as opposed to virtual world. Do you guys think web 2.0 is mature enough that businesses can count on it? I mean, me and my friend both of us are computer and internet savvies and we could not finish a simple 4 pages project plan using collaborative features, how come we expect an office worker to do that?

Blogging right from MS Word 2007

I guess this post is somehow against Web 2.0 practices that we are talking about it here in this blog J however experimenting Blogging right from MS Word is something that I wanted to do. Well, I guess so far it's been easy to setup the thing and get it to work. When you click on new post for the first time, you get a pop up that asks you whether you want to setup your blog or not. Then it is just one easy step of entering your username and password. You can also specify an Image server provider as well. They only problem is after you setup your account you get this another pop up that tells you, using this method for blogging someone might be able to read your information "including username and password" which is a bit scary for me.

Let's move on to the functionality. Well, I guess one of the things that I like about this method of blogging is that you can also do it when you are not online which makes it simple in many cases. One of the things that I don't like about blogger is the fact that when you right a draft the post date would be actually the data that you wrote you initial draft. I like the post date to be exactly when I post it. The background spell check is also interesting. I guess this one is not specific to MS Word it would be a feature in all offline blogging tools.

I like the fact that you can also manage your account and have several blogs. Editing functionalities are also cool specially the fact that you have the headings to use very handy.

Now let see why I am writing this in a Toward 2.0 blog J. Well I guess I sometimes realize that having offline capability is also important. So the whole idea of just being online is still a bit problematic and it would be till couple years. We still don't have enough maturity in online productivity systems even in blogging tools which now have been around for a while. I am really trying to move to some online productivity tools. I really did not find any online word processor yet that gives me what I want. Like most of them are still similar to MS Word 97.

For me one of the functionalities that I really like is to good support for right-to-left languages which I did not see any of them support. Working with tables and images is still challenging and reminds you of office 2000. I am not sure when we are going to reach to the same level of maturity that we have in desktop application on web based applications but for some time still using desktop applications that gives you the same level of collaboration as online applications would make sense. I like to have all my "productivity" tools online and portable one day but right now some of them still make me slow as opposed to "productive".