So, I am a couple of days behind on this (sorry !) but it appears that Alfresco and Intalio have come to an arrangement to work together, intergrate and bundle(?) each others tools.
Alfresco already had integration with JBPM but Intalio are delivering a sophisticated product suite, and having met John Newton quite a few times, and Ismael Ghalimi only the once (at his Office 2.0 conference last year) it does not surprise me that these two open source leaders should get together.
With Alfresco with its integration with the LifeRay open source portal, Intalio for BPM, plus say Sugar CRM and an open source ERP (such as TinyERP or OpenBravo), plus plentyful RDBMS such as PostgreSQL and MySQL, and many many open source web content managment systems, blogs, wiki's, collaboration platforms etc - and a powerful linux desktop with OpenOfficeOrg, (with Linux or BSD servers behind the scenes) are we at the dawn of the full on 'open source enterprise' ??
Maybe........
Showing posts with label BPM. Show all posts
Showing posts with label BPM. Show all posts
Friday, 14 March 2008
Sunday, 3 February 2008
ECM and BPM
So, on Friday I had a good long 'futures' session with our University Secretary, our equivalent of CEO, CIO and Chief Legal Council all rolled into one. We were strategising as I will be leaving the my current employer at the end of my contract on the 30th of April, as I am emmigrating to Canada, but the ECM Programme here will continue, so there was plenty to talk about.
Of particular interest though was the interplay between our ECM efforts, as part of overall information management, and what is normally characterised as 'Business Process Management'. Of course I can not going to go into details of what we discussed, but the overall concept was one of ECM and BPM being different sides of the same coin - nothing new there you might be saying, but for our organisation, taking that view is a somewhat radical, and of course necessary if we want to move forward. For example, we have a few big, inhouse developed systems which have some built in workflow, and at least one division which has mapped its processes to the n'th degree (only to find no one follows them.....), but a lot of units do not have very good documentation for thier 'as is' processes and this has come to the fore as our computing services divsion looks at what we can do with the tools available (the EMC Documentum Business Process Management suite).
So, it will be interesting to see the differences in the context of the particular business units, and which takes priority, the information or the process. Of course for some outcomes, the process will remain human oriented and ad hoc, more about collaboration. For these use cases the ability to subscribe to content, to use built in threaded discussions, to receive notifications and alerts etc is more important than 'traditional' aspects of BPM, such as whole process encompasing workflows.
One good thing, the 'boss' has "unfrozen" a post for an ECM Programme specific Business Process Analyst - which means my colleagues will not have to rely on just my experience (and what I learnt on my AIIM BPM Specialist course).
Of particular interest though was the interplay between our ECM efforts, as part of overall information management, and what is normally characterised as 'Business Process Management'. Of course I can not going to go into details of what we discussed, but the overall concept was one of ECM and BPM being different sides of the same coin - nothing new there you might be saying, but for our organisation, taking that view is a somewhat radical, and of course necessary if we want to move forward. For example, we have a few big, inhouse developed systems which have some built in workflow, and at least one division which has mapped its processes to the n'th degree (only to find no one follows them.....), but a lot of units do not have very good documentation for thier 'as is' processes and this has come to the fore as our computing services divsion looks at what we can do with the tools available (the EMC Documentum Business Process Management suite).
So, it will be interesting to see the differences in the context of the particular business units, and which takes priority, the information or the process. Of course for some outcomes, the process will remain human oriented and ad hoc, more about collaboration. For these use cases the ability to subscribe to content, to use built in threaded discussions, to receive notifications and alerts etc is more important than 'traditional' aspects of BPM, such as whole process encompasing workflows.
One good thing, the 'boss' has "unfrozen" a post for an ECM Programme specific Business Process Analyst - which means my colleagues will not have to rely on just my experience (and what I learnt on my AIIM BPM Specialist course).
Friday, 11 January 2008
Butler Group ignoring EMC's Business Process Management ?
What an interesting day this is turning into. So, this morning I sat in on a demo by one of our Documentum experts for our Research School. They have a requirement to build a 'system' to handle research grant submission, which is currently mired in the "email with Word attachments" chaos. Andy did a great demo of a rapid prototype he had banged out using Documentum workflow and content lifecycles, whilst I chipped in with a demo of eRoom (for general collaboration around the grant submission process).
4 hours and many meetings later, I get an email saying I can download Butler Groups new report on BPM, so I did. Now, I have not read it properly yet, but I flicked through the 'Technology Audits' chapter - no sign of EMC ! OK then, on to the 'Vendor and Product Profiles' chapter - still no sight whatsoever of the EMC Business Process Suite , which since the integration of the ProActivity product line is a lot more than 'just' Documentum Workflow. I am a tad surprised by this omission, but perhaps when I have read the full document it will make sense (??).
4 hours and many meetings later, I get an email saying I can download Butler Groups new report on BPM, so I did. Now, I have not read it properly yet, but I flicked through the 'Technology Audits' chapter - no sign of EMC ! OK then, on to the 'Vendor and Product Profiles' chapter - still no sight whatsoever of the EMC Business Process Suite , which since the integration of the ProActivity product line is a lot more than 'just' Documentum Workflow. I am a tad surprised by this omission, but perhaps when I have read the full document it will make sense (??).
Thursday, 15 November 2007
Business Process Management stuff
Had an interesting day yesterday, with an EMC UK Ltd 'Business Process Management' specialist, who provided an excellent two hour overview of their Business Process Suite. It was interesting in the way that the pitch is now at a higher, strategic level since EMC acquired ProActivity and its tools. Interesting because we are know looking at 'BPM' on mulitiple levels.
We will shortly be advertising for a Business Process Analyst who will work alongside our 'Information Management Advisors" when introducing the ECMS into a business unit. This is most definately 'tactical' process management, identifying processes that can benefit from automation with the ECMS' workflow, subscription and notifications facililities.
The other side of the coin is the higher level strategic stuff you can do with the business process analysis, simulation and monitoring tools. Indeed we discussed the 'one ring to rule them all' scenario, with an enterprise scale process under the management of the 'Business Process Suite' but firing off workflow tasks and receiving output from the tools built into CRM, Call Center and other software.
Of course your 'Entperprise BPM' suite need not be from the same supplier as your ECMS, as long as your systems leverage BPEL and other standards, but the main point is, if your process deal with, contain, move about information in any form then the marriage of the two can only be a good thing.
Spotted this topical presentation on SlideShare:
From: mzurmuehlen, 4 days ago
Keynote held at JAX 2007 Conference, November 8th, 2007 - Munich, Germany.
SlideShare Link
If you want to improve your knowledge of Business Process Management check out the AIIM training courses, I am studying the online version of the BPM Practioner progamme at the moment, and its good, well presented and interesting.
We will shortly be advertising for a Business Process Analyst who will work alongside our 'Information Management Advisors" when introducing the ECMS into a business unit. This is most definately 'tactical' process management, identifying processes that can benefit from automation with the ECMS' workflow, subscription and notifications facililities.
The other side of the coin is the higher level strategic stuff you can do with the business process analysis, simulation and monitoring tools. Indeed we discussed the 'one ring to rule them all' scenario, with an enterprise scale process under the management of the 'Business Process Suite' but firing off workflow tasks and receiving output from the tools built into CRM, Call Center and other software.
Of course your 'Entperprise BPM' suite need not be from the same supplier as your ECMS, as long as your systems leverage BPEL and other standards, but the main point is, if your process deal with, contain, move about information in any form then the marriage of the two can only be a good thing.
Spotted this topical presentation on SlideShare:
Business Process Management - From Market Consolidation to Process Innovation
From: mzurmuehlen, 4 days ago
Keynote held at JAX 2007 Conference, November 8th, 2007 - Munich, Germany.
SlideShare Link
If you want to improve your knowledge of Business Process Management check out the AIIM training courses, I am studying the online version of the BPM Practioner progamme at the moment, and its good, well presented and interesting.
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