BPM Quotes of the week

On BPM and Documentation – Jacob Ukelson

To be honest I haven’t found to many people discussing the issues of documentation that must be provided with any application created by a BPMS. I guess there is an underlying hope that the resulting application will be so intuitive that it won’t need documentation or that the model is also the documentation (maybe that is why I am seeing more focus on user experience in applications created using a BPMS)

On BPM and Simplicity – Chris Taylor

I suggest it isn’t because our attention has been on automation and the typical end user didn’t need to know the details. IT was trusted to figure out how to do it and just deliver a result. I believe many of today’s BPM systems reflect a legacy of that barrier between people and their processes. To make matters worse, IT is being told, “know the business better than the business”. Great theory for job security, but how does that really work?

On BPM and Simplicity – Marco Brambilla

The discussion basically start from this simple question: Why do we think that we should have simple processes? Chaos and turbulence are there, both at the macroscopic physical level (thus challenging the Newtonian thinking) and at the atomic level (Quantum thinking). Why shouldn’t they be there within an organization made up of complex human beings interacting?

On Organisational Processes – Thomas J. Olbrich

No matter what methodology one might choose to employ to inventory, count or discover processes, in the end a relatively few number of high level processes will likely yield a much higher level of supporting sub processes, tasks, activities or business functions (or whatever it is your methodology calls them).

On Business and Business People – John Reynolds

I am a huge fan of enabling Business folks to build their own software solutions, but the fact remains that most people prefer to pay others rather than build things for themselves. No matter how “business friendly” our tools become, most businesses will bring in builders when they need them

On BPM and Lessons Learnt – Mike Gammage

1. Automation has to follow after process standardization and optimization
2. Never under-estimate the value of collaboration and investment in change management; never make the mistake of thinking ‘this is an IT project’
3. There has to be one process – integrated across the enterprise and down to the task level – and a shared understanding by all the stakeholders
4. Governance is breakfast, lunch and dinner – especially with respective to policing process variants.