As a short break from my emerging, multi-entry rant about the seven pillars of enterprise transformation, I thought I'd take a shot at answering a question I received from an attendee of a recent BPM Webinar conducted by my employer, Robert Frances Group (RFG). The question, from an educator, asked if I knew of any BPM textbooks worth recommending.
Frankly, where IT and related subjects are concerned I don't look at textbooks very often any more. First of all, there are all those college-day flashbacks. Second, I worry that the fast pace of IT and BPM evolution makes it difficult, if not impossible, for most textbook publishers to keep up. So I offered some alternative suggestions.
Of course, any or all of the blogs here at ebizQ that address BPM, business intelligence (BI), business knowledge management (BKM), and related subjects can be helpful and interesting. "Helpful" and "interesting" are, in my experience, two hallmark characteristics of the best textbooks. In any case, if anyone interested in the above subjects can head for the ebizQ blog list, scan it for relevant recent entries, read a selection of them, and not learn something helpful or interesting, I'd be very, very surprised. (By the way, in case you haven't seen it yet, ebizQ's "BI in Action" Web site is live, featuring blogs by Joe McKendrick and yours truly.)
Among other blogs, I'm a big fan of Ismael Ghalimi, co-founder of Intalio. Intalio makes one of the only enterprise-class, open source business process management solutions, and offers its process modeling software for free. Ismael, is also a deep thinker about BPM, among other subjects, so his blogs (some of which have appeared at ebizQ, in fact) should offer much food for thought. They also offer lots of links to other blogs and similarly worthwhile textbook substitutes and adjuncts.
I'm also a fan of what I've found at the Web site for Role Modellers, whose founder, Keith Harrison-Broninski, is a founding thinker about human interaction management (and another ebizQ "blogmate"). He describes it as "human-driven" process management, not just what Forrester Research and others call "human-centric."
As I think I understand it, a key difference is that so-called human-centric processes can still be boringly similar and repeatable, while human-driven processes almost always involve variations and the unexpected. But I'm still trying to figure out what I do and don't understand about all of this, as you will doubtless read here soon and often. Meanwhile, Keith's Web site at www.human-interaction-management.info also offers some great textbook-like content.
I believe IT in general, and BPM in particular, represent subjects where the timeliness, as well as the diversity of opinions and viewpoints, all make online resources superior to textbooks. (Yes, I understand that it's possible to publish perfectly good textbooks more quickly now, thanks largely to advances in IT. But there's still a significant delay. Not to mention having to kill all those trees. Or buy all that recycled paper. Or figure out how to get electronic substitutes into the hands of schools that can't even always afford current textbooks. But I digress.) After all, if all of this stuff is really moving at "Internet speed," whatever that means, information, opinion, and intended guidance about it should, too…
Having said all of that, read any good books about BPM and/or IT lately? Please let me know…
Michael Dortch has been an analyst, 'information entrepreneur,' speaker, and writer about IT and 'the real world" for the past 30 years. After almost 10 years at the Robert Frances Group (RFG), Michael begins a new position with Aberdeen Group in September.
Dennis Byron is an analyst with ebizQ, focusing on Open Source Software as well as Business Process Management technologies.
