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.

Under the Radar: "Why Office 2.0 Matters"

In this conference around 32 emerging technologies related to Web 2.0 and office 2.0 landscape has been introduced. Here is the list of participants which I have categorized them just by a quick look on their website. If you thing any of them should be placed in other categories please drop me a comment.

Organizer and social networking had been one of the most populated categories.
In general as we all know it's all about collaboration and social networking around
different subjects. With the quick look that I had on each of them. I liked
http://www.protosw.com/ which looks very good for building desktop mashups using online services. In Organizers category http://iscrybe.com looks promising, it has offline mode, note gathering, and other futures that base on the demo on the website they seem well integrated.
some of the features like thought gathering seemed useful I have to see weather I can integrated it with my blog or not.

Lesson learned from two mentioned website: multimedia presentation and demo in our busy life is getting more and more important! If you build your next application create a complete and yet very short multimedia demo on that. Maybe these two only had better demo but that worked for me!

Organizer (Task manager, contact manager, scheduling) - personal

http://www.bigcontacts.com/
http://iscrybe.com
http://www.smartsheet.com
http://www.stikkit.com/
http://www.timesearchinc.com
http://www.tungle.com


Social networking on online content (link tagging, recommending)

http://www.cogenz.com/
http://www.connectbeam.com/
http://www.firestoker.com/
http://www.diigo.com

Mash up

http://mashery.com
http://www.protosw.com/
http://www.teqlo.com/

Collaborating content authoring for enterprises and small businesses
(Wiki, Blogging, social networking around content)

http://www.blogtronix.com/
http://www.brainkeeper.com/
http://www.systemone.at
http://www.myworklight.com/

Presentation creation and presenting tools

http://www.slideaware.com/
http://www.spresent.com
http://vyew.com

Content management and document sharing and collaboration

http://www.approver.com/
http://www.koral.com/

Website builder and blogging tool

http://www.terapad.com/

Organizer - Team and project scheduling

http://www.longjump.com/
http://www.smartsheet.com
http://www.wrike.com

Design Collaboration

http://www.approver.com/

Spreadsheets (collaboration, sharing, ..)

www.editgrid.com
http://www.xcellery.com/

Payment System

http://www.mypaymentnetwork.com/

Form and survey

http://wufoo.com/

AjaxWorld Conference and Expo

Ajax is one of the components of 2.0 world. Although there are other ways to build RIA (Rich Internet Applications) applications the main open standard that many open standard contributes work on it is Ajax.

The two other competitors for building RIA are Adobe and Microsoft with their Flex and WPF/E. Although these two competitors being proprietary have some draw backs in nature, they are better than Ajax from couple of other aspects which is always the case in open environment. Ajax being open and getting contribution from all over the word still does not have a specified framework to be followed by developer. To be honest, Ajax is still not mature enough and need lots of improvements both for building standards and frameworks and to make it more efficient and productive for development. Currently, deadline with browser's incompatibilities, different third party libraries, trial and error debugging and makes Ajax developers life hard.

Today, by chance I was listening to Jouk Pleiter presentation at AjaxWorld Conference he was referring to mentioned problems and as the solution he was explaining a framework to reduce these complexities, make the Ajax code more structured and reusable, increase the performance and productivity. In his suggested framework the browser compatibility issues are taken care of by the framework, the eclipse based IDE increases the reusability of the developed code and productivity of the developers and some capabilities are provided for developers so the can do better debugging tasks.

Three Trends to consider for Enterprise 2.0

Andrew McAfee, discusses three main trends that we should take serious about Enterprise 2.0
this is very good post that I suggest you to read.

These trends necessary to to move toward a successful application of Web 2.0 in enterprises and in next generation of the Internet Applications.

People don't pay for stuff these days so you should Offer free services.
In addition we are busy enough so we like to use simple tools with good functionalists. one of the practices in this regard is shopify which is a simple way for people to open up their own online store. This is one of the new generation web applications that has been discussed in one of e-Business cluster sessions in Ottawa.

In addition, providing freedom for users to express what they want in the way they want is really important. User's like to have power not to be imposed by the system.

Finally, I'd like to add the networking and collaboration factor of the 2.0 online world.
As we have all seen all next big things now are consider communities and networks of people as one of their most their most important bases.

We should not forget that the syndication of information is what we all need in this new version 2.0 of the world which it is not really hard to get flooded with information in it. Web 2.0 environment not only helps us to increase the information (Wikis, Blogs, etc) but also helps to find what we want in the way that we want (RSS, Atom, tags, etc.)