“No one would have believed, in the last years of the nineteenth century, that human affairs were being watched from the timeless worlds of space. No one could have dreamed that we were being scrutinized as someone with a microscope studies creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. And yet, across the gulf of space, minds immeasurably superior to ours regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely, they drew their plans against us.”
As the alien ship landed, all the employees gathered around in fear…
“I heard they had gobbled up Skelta and Savvion” said one.
“Don’t forget IDS Scheer and Lombardi” said another.
Panic struck the crowd as they saw the carcass of Metastorm hanging from the cargo door.
The door slowly opened with a hiss, and the Head Alien of Company Acquisitions stepped out from the spaceship.
“Welcome to Earth” said the CEO. “it’s nice that you could pop in to see us”.
Yes, said the alien. I’ve come to see the latest company that we’ve just bought.
“Good choice” said the CEO. Buying a BPM company is always a smart move. It will be a great addition to your portfolio.
Hmmm, there is quite a hype lately with BPM. As I understand it can do wonders….
“Quite so, Quite so” said the CEO.
“Ok, my time is short. I have other companies to buy out before lunch” snorted the alien, “Beam the software onto my ship”.
“Ah…well… you see it’s not that simple” stuttered the CEO. Installation can take a couple of hours, sometime even a couple of days. It depends if there are any snags on the way… You do have windows 2008 installed with the latest service update”
“What!” snorted the alien. “No one told me anything about prerequisites”. My spaceship runs on Unix”.
“Might be a problem there” said the CEO. “What I can do is give you the installation set to take back to your planet. I can show your technical team how to install it after their training ”
“What training?!” snorted the alien. “I was told it was simple and intuitive.”
“Ah.. yes.. about that..” replied the CEO. “It is simple once you have learnt BPMN, Lean, C#, Java, and development methodologies”. “It does become quite intuitive after you’ve used it for a couple of months..”
“But I was given information that we could get a BPM solution up and running in a month.” snorted the alien in alarm.
“Ah.. yes.. about that..” replied the CEO. “I do apologize. It’s a typo. It’s meant to read ‘months’, instead of ‘month’. My apologies”.
So let me get this right” said the alien, turning a shade of bright red, “what you are actually saying is that I can’t assimilate BPM into my existing solution offering and will need your professional services forever and ever..”
“You don’t have to worry. While we were talking, I got one of my developers to change your spaceship’s procedures to support BPM” smiled the CEO.
“What!!” yelled the alien in fear. “All my procedures were around ECM. Change it back!! Quick!”
But it was too late. The damage was done. Spaceship after spaceship started dropping from the sky…
Earth was saved.
Adam Deane 
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