I recently was asked by a customer if I know of any free process modeling and automation tools. This got me thinking of how many vendors provide a free edition of their software for unlimited use i.e. no trial basis or try before you buy editions. After some research I came up with the following short list:

 Free BPM and Process Modeling Tools:

• BizAgi Process Modeler
• Questetra BPM Suite
• Tibco Business Studio
• Aris Express (soon to be released)
• Process Maker
• Open ModelSphere
• Visual Paradigm – Smart Development Environment (Community Edition)
• Visual Paradigm for UML (Community Edition)

I have not evaluated each application so could not comment on their strengths and weaknesses but would be interested to hear about other free BPM and/or Enterprise Architecture tools so I can add them to my resource list. 

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As someone who works with customers to deliver business value through BPM, I have definitely noticed an increased interest from organisations exploiting existing BPM investments as well as those that are new to BPM trying to determine its potential.

Lombardi Software recently released this 15 min (more like 30 but who’s counting) introduction to BPM. Thought it may be informative for those of you trying to understand the value of BPM.

Quoting Lombardi marketing:

…let us help you share the BPM vision with your co-workers. ‘How To Explain BPM To Your Co-workers In 15 Minutes or Less’ is an informative webinar to help you discover what to present and how to answer the most frequently asked questions.

To view, click here.

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The Innovation Value Institute (IVI) at the National University of Ireland (NUI) has launched the IT Capability Maturity Framework (IT-CMF). 

It is said to provide a concise management roadmap to optimize business value derived from IT investments. This framework is postioned as a tool that can be used to deliver greater business value from IT while reducing the complexity of IT choices for CIOs.

According to IVI, the IT-CMF provides a management roadmap to optimize business value derived from IT investments. IT-CMF provides an integrated roadmap that:

• Leverages the power of existing best practices
• Open Innovation: is being developed by a diverse consortium of academic and business leaders
• Is being tested in the real world at every stage of development
• An actionable approach that helps IT design, deliver and manage for business value

The IT-CMF consists of a five-stage maturity model used to organize and structure a framework for mapping IT improvement efforts. The holistic approach of the IT-CMF is reflected by its four foundational macro processes:

• Managing IT like a Business – shifting the focus from technology and production to a focus on customers and services 
• Managing the IT Budget – investing in innovative IT solutions that deliver better value and performance
• Managing the IT Capability – managing IT assets throughout the value chain and developing core competencies
• Managing IT for Business Value – linking IT investments to overall business benefits

In total, the IT-CMF identifies 36 core processes and categorizes them under these four dimensions to cover all activities in an IT department. An assessment of an IT organization’s maturity across these 36 processes, together with comparisons to industry benchmarks and best practices, will highlight a company’s key maturity gaps and value-creation opportunities.

IVI is a consortium of leading industry, consulting, not-for-profit, and academic organizations that has been quietly developing and testing new ways to more align IT investments with business results. Originally formed through a strong link between NUI Maynooth and Intel, the consortium’s more than 30 members are among the world’s leading companies such as The Boston Consulting Group, Microsoft, Chevron, SAP, Northrop Grumman, British Petroleum (BP), and Ernst & Young.

To learn more, follow these links to a webcast or a sample assessment.

Further opinions can be found here:

• CIO Magazine
• siliconrepublic.com

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I attended an online conference at which some of the leading BPM vendors presented their BPM vision and capabilities. Very sales focussed so may not be worth the effort if you are familiar with BPM and the products.

The list of vendors who attended are:

• IBM
• TIBCO
• Lombardi Software
• Pegasystems
• IDS Scheer
• Software AG

Webcasts and slides can be accessed here (registration required)

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User Experience Design is a concept that is fundamental to how we experience information and services in an electonic age.

User experience is a term used to describe the overall experience and satisfaction a user has when using a product or system. It most commonly refers to a combination of software and business topics, such as selling over the web, but it applies to any result of interaction design - Wikipedia

I will not attempt to explain all the facets of this concept but further information can be found at:

• What Is User Experience Design?
• User Experience Design

What I did want to share was a very informative resource I found that focuses on helping product teams who are creating new or iteratively improving applications for thinking work.

Working through Screens was written for use during early, formative conversations, it provides teams with a broad range of considerations for setting the overall direction and priorities for their onscreen tools. With hundreds of envisioning questions and fictional examples from clinical research, financial trading, and architecture, this volume can help definers and designers to explore innovative new directions for their products. Working through Screens is also freely available in printable .pdf book and summarized .pdf “Idea Card” formats as well as on the web.

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Towards the end of 2008, Dave Linthicum issued his predictions for the year ahead in service oriented architecture. They are summarised below:

• The interest in cloud computing (or WOA, Web 2.0, or insert current Webby buzzword here) will drive many enterprises toward SOA
• The explosion in PaaS (platform as a service) will leave many enterprise architects and CIOs scratching their heads
• The economy will recover, but most enterprises out there will focus on cost reduction
• There will be a larger focus on inter-domain SOA technology
• Jig will be up for poor SOA governance solutions out there
• Most failed SOA projects will be traced to unqualified SOA architects
• SOA the buzzword will become a bit less relevant and will begin to morph with concepts, such as enterprise architecture and cloud computing

So where are we?

Forrester has conducted a survey and published a report in which they found that while the global economy is in a trough, 75% of IT executives and technology decision-makers at Global 2000 organisations said they will be using SOA by the end of 2009. Of the  more than 2000 IT executives surveyed, only one percent of current SOA adopters say they have received little or no benefit from the methodology, sixty percent said they have seen some benefits.

60% of current SOA users are expanding their use of SOA and it appears there been very few disappointments with a service-oriented approach. About 24% of current SOA users say that it has “delivered most or all of the benefits they expected,” and 36% say that it has “delivered enough of what they expected to justify expanding their SOA adoption.”

This seems to indicate that SOA has moved well beyond the hype phase. This and other research seems to be finding that SOA is beginning to be a part of IT, which is where you would expect to find it. The expansion of SOA into the  heart of an organisations architecture will be largely organic in the short term and it will start to become just something you do as a best practice.

I Predict…

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) will cross the chasm in 2009 to gain broad-based acceptance. It will be replaced by Business Process Management (BPM), as the need to drive operational efficiency replaces technology richness.

The waterfall method will quickly join the ranks of legacy methods, and agile will be the word of the day. By mid-year, every third sentence from IT will contain these two words: cloud computing.

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IBM have made some interesting announcements related to BPM during their recent annual conference. The BPM specific ones are:

• Business Space
• BPM BlueWorks
• Cloud Burst

This announcement seems to have found traction with analysts and according to Forrester, IBM has now moved from being the “Goliath” to the “David” of the BPM industry. I have posted some excerpts from a post on Forrester BPM Blog explaining their postion:

…I have to admit, the functionality and depth presented by IBM underwhelmed the federal customer – they literally shook their heads with disappointment.  At that time, IBM was force fitting the WPS product to be a human-centric BPM platform.  I described it as a “headless horseman” – nice integration functionality under the covers, but missing the required interface for users to interact with their tasks and workflow.I have to admit, the functionality and depth presented by IBM underwhelmed the federal customer – they literally shook their heads with disappointment. 

At that time, IBM was force fitting the WPS product to be a human-centric BPM platform.  I described it as a “headless horseman” – nice integration functionality under the covers, but missing the required interface for users to interact with their tasks and workflow.

….Fast forward three years later…

IBM is placing very large bets on WPS leading them to the BPM promised land and has invested heavily to make the platform more business-friendly and accessible.

IBM has upped its game in BPM and is becoming a stronger human-centric BPM contender.  Business Space and BPM BlueWorks paint a new face on IBM that will attract more business-oriented customers that we’re frightened by the previous generation of tech-heavy IBM BPM offerings.

Read the Forrester post here.

 
Not everybody seems to agree..

Further comments on IBM and their focus on process in the “Cloud” can be found here. Some observations I found interesting include:

IBM’s Smarter Planet campaign is hardly anything new. It builds on Metcalfe’s law, which posits that the value of a network is the square of the numbers of new users that join it….

…In actuality, what IBM described is a throwback to common practices established in highly automated industrial process facilities, where closed-loop process control has been standard practice for decades…

…So at base, a Smarter Planet is hardly a radical idea; it seeks to emulate what has been standard practice in industrial process control going back at least 30 years.

What is your opinion?

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The Insurance Industry, as with all other industries, are under pressure to reprioritise their business plans and initiatives as a result of the current economic climate (see previous post). They are reassessing thier positions and evaluating where and when to invest in new IT initiatives and equally importantly, where to cut back.  

Reading a recent article it became clear that various insurance companies have opposing views to what the future holds and how they will be moving forward in the short to medium term.

As far as the insurance industry is concerned, there was no such thing as a finalized IT budget for 2009. Most CIOs had their budgets in hand in January, but none knew just how far the economy would fall, how their organizations would fare or how technology spending would be affected as a result.

But while the overall economic picture remains in flux, insurers’ IT budgets seem to be falling into two key categories: those with a view toward the future and the strategic deployment of technology, and those that are taking a more tactical approach to technology in an effort to realize short-terms goals and ride out the recession.

Mike Sciole, CIO of Burlington, N.C.-based Burlington Insurance Group and Hartford-based Guilford Specialty Group said:

“Some companies are opting to execute tactical projects they believe will provide a short-term boost, and they’ve abandoned their long-term strategic objectives. Then there are other companies that are staying the course, being patient and very methodical about executing their [long-term] strategy.”

In the current environment, however, those companies that have been hardest hit simply don’t have the luxury to be so disciplined. Many in the life insurance industry, which by and large was harder hit than the property and casualty sector, simply cannot afford to sacrifice short-term savings and premium growth goals for a larger scale strategic vision.

The recent Novarica survey showed that nearly two-thirds of life insurers were somewhat or drastically cutting the IT budgets they set at the beginning of the year and a number of life insurers have postponed major policy administration projects.

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But even those companies that are not slashing budgets have difficult choices to make in the down market. Celent senior analyst Donald Light acknowledges that, with few exceptions, there has not been dramatic changes in individual insurance carrier IT spend for 2009, but that doesn’t man the industry as a whole won’t see a decline. “One thing we are seeing is a slowdown of the decision cycle for new projects and ‘OK’-ing the next phases in large projects,” Light details. “If it takes longer to make a decision, the amount of spending in any given year goes down.”

The complete report can be bought here.

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I am continually faced with Organisational and IT related complexity of customers I work with on a daily basis.

As most readers would know, the fundamental purpose of an EA Framework (and associated method(s)) is to manage complexity through visibility, abstraction and governanace and therefore it is important that the framework and method are not overly complex.  

Following up on from a previous post about the new Pragmatic Enterprise Aritecture Framework (PeaF), I thought that interested readers would find the survey results comparing Togaf v9, Zachman and PeaF enlightening.

The founders of PeaF have published the results of how TOGAF v9, Zachman and PeaF compare and the highlevel results are reflected in the graph below.  The data does not say how many contributors were surveyed or what their demographics were but according to the published results on the website, PeaF is smaller and less complex, whilst being easier to use and covering more of the scope of EA.

Underpinning these results is a data table (shown below).

Click to Enlarge

I would be intereseted to hear how much adoption PeaF is getting in the market compared to other frameworks. Case studies would definetly be of interest.
More information on PeaF and how it can be applied can be found at http://www.pragmaticea.com/

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 If you have not yet heard of this website, I recommend you check it out. It is really worth a look.

TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from those three worlds. Since then its scope has become ever broader.

The annual conference now brings together the world’s most fascinating thinkers and doers, who are challenged to give the talk of their lives (in 18 minutes). This site makes the best talks and performances from TED available to the public, for free. More than 200 talks from our archive are now available, with more added each week.

This demo — from Pattie Maes’ lab at MIT, spearheaded by Pranav Mistry — was the buzz of TED. It’s a wearable device with a projector that paves the way for profound interaction with our environment. Imagine “Minority Report” and then some.

I have listed some of my personal favourites here.

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