BPM in Action

The wait is over. Now, the wait can begin.

There is a standard known as Web Services Business Process Execution Language, or WS-BPEL. It's promulgated by the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information (OASIS), a broadly supported and widely respected international consortium. WS-BPEL is now at version 2.0. It's very good at providing a framework for orchestrating so-called "composite applications," ideally composed from multiple already-written applications or application elements. WS-BPEL is not very good at providing a framework for human workflows – and those human workflows often have significant, yet difficult-to-predict effects on business processes, as well as application and services workflows.

After a bunch of work for a bunch of time, there is now BPEL4People, a Web Services specification that describes ways to model human workflows. Initial supporting vendors include Active Endpoints (provider of BPEL support tools for SOA developers and architects), Adobe Systems, Inc., BEA Systems, Inc., IBM Corp., Oracle Corp., and SAP AG.

An element of BPEL4People, Web Services Human Task, intends to depict human actions as activities that can be "consumed" by applications and services. This could, then, bridge and significantly narrow the gap between service-oriented architectures (SOAs) and the humans attempting to use the services to do work that makes the business go.

BPEL4People, in essence, intends to help integrate the management of processes that describe and govern the behavior of applications, services, and systems with that of those processes that describe and govern human behaviors. For those of us who have been yammering about and clamoring for human-centric BPM – or "business knowledge management," or "people process management," or whatever you want to call it – this is great news.

But it is only a beginning. Because now, the vendors supporting BPEL4People have to do three things, and they have to do them quickly, transparently, and well. First, they have to attract more vendor support and endorsement of the specification, especially among their software-developing partners. Second, they have to deliver products that make real the promise of the specification. Third, they have to get the specification transmogrified by OASIS into a formal industry standard. Preferably before too many "early implementations" and "enhancements" make interoperability too slippery a slope for too many prospective developers and users.

You can read more about BPEL4People here at ebizQ, and in the Oracle news release. You might then want to contact your top three incumbent and/or prospective IT and BPM solution providers, and find out their plans for support of BPEL4People. I intend to do some of that myself. Let me know what you find out, and I'll share and compare findings in future outings here. Could be good; it's just a question of when, and how good…

Posted by mdortch in BPM • Business Knowledge Management • Current Events • IBM  |  Permalink  | Comments (1)  | TrackBacks (0)

In previous outings in the space, I've written about a framework for strategic IT decision-making and initiatives based on what we at RFG calls the Seven Ps. These are, alphabetically, people, planning, platforms, processes, products, projects, and portfolios. I've already discussed people, processes, and platforms as they relate to BPM. This time, four at once – planning, projects, products, and portfolios.

Planning is so essential, it should be unnecessary to say much about it. But I will say this. As my sainted mother used to say, "If you fail to plan, you must be planning to fail." So how best to plan for BPM initiatives, especially when the ultimate goal is to render BPM details and specifics invisible to most users most of the time?

Here's one way. Plan each significant IT project as if the goal is to produce one or more products or services. This means that each is to be provided to some set of users and supported and serviced, just like any other IT product or service, from inside or outside the company. As part of this effort, incorporate BPM features and support into each project and planned resulting product and/or service. As projects and products proliferate, group them into logical portfolios, by type, by user group, or some other sensible criteria. Establish metrics for performance and success, and use these to refine plans, products, projects, and portfolios, as well as their management. Repeat as necessary.

Of course, some assembly is, as they say, required. But the real take-away point here is that you must address the seven Ps in a consistent, holistic, and integrated way if you hope to have a chance of approaching BPM – or any other strategically important IT initiative – in a consistent, holistic, integrated way. Which is a critical success factor in deriving business benefits from such efforts.

The Seven Ps are not the only way to achieve this goal. However, your plan should be based on a consistent, holistic, integrated framework, whether developed by or at your enterprise or imported from elsewhere and adapted to fit. And whatever framework you choose, it must include elements for assessment, management, and re-alignment as needed of the underlying processes that define, enable, and support the framework itself.

I'm sure some level of BPM success can be achieved with no such planning or framework. After all, when most timepieces had hands, it was said that even one that was broken showed the right time as often as twice a day. However, if your goal is to build an effective, repeatable, and scalable architecture for BPM today and tomorrow, I'd recommend a different approach. One that is – say it with me now! – more consistent, holistic, and integrated.

There are several RFG Research Notes offering more on this and closely related subjects in the RFG section of the ebizQ Analyst Corner. Check them out, use what you can, and let me know how it's going.

Posted by mdortch in BPM • Business Knowledge Management  |  Permalink  | Comments (0)  | TrackBacks (0)

According to a recent story published and posted online by the San Francisco Chronicle, 400 Cathay Pacific Airways passengers sat on a flight for more than seven hours – before the flight was canceled. Several passengers reportedly said that they received no information for at least three of those seven hours, and that when the flight was finally scrapped, there were no airline representatives to help disembarking passengers with rebooking. In contrast, the airline, according to the article, "described the evening as something akin to a well-stocked slumber party while the crew scurried to find a part to fix a mechanical problem."

Well. A slight difference in perception there, eh? Some process alignment might be in order here.

In a similar vein, on June 13, the U.S. Consumer Products Safety Commission (CPSC) announced that RC2 Corp. had begun a "voluntary" recall of 1.5 million wooden "Thomas the Tank Engine" toys that had somehow been decorated with toxic lead-based paints. RC2 – providers of "compelling passionate parenting and play for all ages," according to its Web site – is an Illinois-based company with manufacturing facilities in China, where the tainted toys were reportedly made. (Just today, National Public Radio (NPR)'s "All Things Considered" program reported that an inspection by China's General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine had discovered 23,000 cases of bad food and closed 180 factories.

On June 24, the Chicago Tribune reported that a complaint about lead paint on some of the company's metal Thomas toys had been filed in 2006. The person who filed the complaint with the CPSC never heard from that agency, and RC2 says CPSC never notified the company about the complaint, as required by law. Other than that, and saying that it had "reviewed all relevant manufacturing procedures" and found no other products that exceeded safe lead levels, RC2 has basically stonewalled.

My question is, has none of the leaders of either Cathay Pacific or RC2 ever heard about the Tylenol poisoning scandal that made worldwide news in 1982? Cyanide-laced Tylenol capsules killed seven people, but the company recovered. How? New technology – tamper-proof packaging – and big-time, public apologies and active leadership by senior executives.

So what can we learn about BPM from these incidents?

1. Bad processes and bad process management create significant risks – financial, operational, and reputational. Reputational risk is the hardest to quantify, but can be the most significant and damaging overall.

2. Every business process and process management initiative affects one or more constituencies. Those constituencies deserve and require clear, direct communication about what's happening and why, what's expected of them, and what they can expect. This is in addition to any "marketing" and/or "sales" necessary to win support for the initiative.

3. If you break something – or if something breaks on your watch, even if it's not your fault – apologize. Then explain what you can, and take responsibility for fixing it, getting it fixed, and/or communicating frequently about progress toward resolution.

4. Ensure that all BPM efforts include and support goals of accessibility of decision-makers, clear, consistent communication, and transparency. Your life will only be easier as a result. And if things go really well, such practices will find their way into other aspects of your company, if they aren't there already.

Posted by mdortch in BPM • Business Knowledge Management • Current Events  |  Permalink  | Comments (0)  | TrackBacks (0)

It has been said many times – particularly in regard to designing, engineering, and manufacturing things like cars – that "the French copy no one, and no one copies the French." Well, after today, we'll just have to see.

News reports today indicate that French government officials have recommended banning BlackBerry devices from government offices and ministries, supposedly including the prime minister's office and the presidential palace. The worry is that since e-mail sent from the devices passes through servers located in the United States and Great Britain, e-mails containing proprietary or sensitive information could end up in the hands of the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA).

Research in Motion, Ltd., (RIM) makers of BlackBerry devices and supporting systems, claims that such intrusions are all but impossible. The company said in a statement that its e-mails are more heavily encrypted than Web sites used for online banking, reports said. The BlackBerry Enterprise Solution has been certified as acceptable by security agencies in Austria, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the U.S., with certification under way in Germany and the Netherlands, RIM added in its statement.

Nonetheless, France seems intent on banning the devices. Other reports indicate that unnamed French officials are already using the devices in secret, having found proposed alternatives lacking. Still others indicate that the French are not the first to express this concern. U.S. representatives at the recent G-8 summit in Germany were advised not to bring along their wireless handhelds, to avoid eavesdropping by our friends, the Russians, those reports said.

What are the BPM-related lessons here?

1. Protection of intellectual property (IP) always, always, always trumps the convenience of near-instant communication.

2. Technologies that do not meet an organization's security and/or IP protection requirements should be proactively banned, or removed from the environment as soon as possible once critical shortcomings are discovered.

3. Of course, the most important element of such a strategy is a careful, comprehensive assessment and prioritization of those critical IP protection and security requirements – ideally, before any potentially non-compliant solutions are considered, let alone purchased and deployed.

4. As I've said repeatedly after hearing it years ago from an IT decision-maker at a large financial services firm, "culture eats process for lunch every day." This means that once users find a solution useful, it's going to be difficult if not impossible to ban that solution completely. Which is why early assessment and understanding of critical criteria, and avoidance of candidate solutions that don't meet them, is so very important. Even to and in France. And, possibly, your enterprise as well.

Posted by mdortch in BPM • Business Knowledge Management • Security  |  Permalink  | Comments (1)  | TrackBacks (0)

In eager anticipation of Wednesday's ebizQ "BI in Action" Virtual Conference, I wrote yesterday here about why BPM needs BI (and about why BI needs BPM at the "BI in Action" blog). (Feel free to go and read or re-read either or both, after you register for Wednesday's event!) Today, in equally eager anticipation of a panel discussion to be featured at the Conference, I want to ruminate a bit on how best to achieve maximum business benefit by the combination of BPM and BI.

The panel discussion is "The Role of BI in BPM and SOA," and is being moderated by my ebizQ colleague and blogmate, ebizQ VP of strategic services, and SOA maven extraordinaire Beth Gold-Bernstein. And of course, one of the most obvious and popular answers to the question "how best to combine/leverage/take advantage of BPM and BI?" is some variant on the "with an SOA" theme.

However, despite all the wonderfully useful information promulgated about SOAs at ebizQ and elsewhere, there is no automatic connecting of the BI, BPM, and SOA dots, at least/especially not for most businesspeople. And in fact, how obvious do you want something called an "architecture" to be to users? When I'm in a building, I notice the architecture, but don't really care about how it was executed; I just want the building to remain standing, especially while I'm in it.

So I'm going to take a slightly different view. I offer the observation that SOAs (and related technologies, such as enterprise service buses, or ESBs) are critically important to technological integration of BI and BPM "on the back end." However, users, especially business-focused users, no more want nor need to see most elements of an SOA than they want or need to see explicit elements of BI or BPM solutions or architectures. What they want and need to see are the usable results of these behind-the-scenes elements and efforts.

So what's needed are dashboards and software-based services, including desktop widgets, that present to users information they can assimilate and act upon with minimal to no additional technical knowledge or help. These must be easily customized to meet the needs and expectations of multiple types of users, from senior executives to business and IT architects and strategists. They must be easily modified as needs and user types change. And they must be totally non-disruptive to business and IT operations. (That means desired or needed changes can be made without fork lifts or automatic weapons, and that all interfaces are driven by the same set of secure, up-to-date, and verified data.)

Achievement of these goals requires a fair amount of heavy lifting in that aforementioned behind-the-scenes area. Whatever BI and BPM solutions are chosen must be connected via seamless, flexible interfaces, to one another and to the presentation methods and tools of choice. And those presentation methods and tools must be easily combined, mixed, and matched. Depending on environmental particulars, this could mean integration with one or more types of application, portal, service, and/or Web browser software and/or service.

Fortunately, standards for such integrations, and tools supporting those standards – up to and including ESBs and SOAs – are beginning to improve, multiply, and take root effectively in many sizes and types of enterprises. And you can learn about many of these during the "BI in Action" Virtual Conference, and elsewhere across ebizQ. However, these solutions and standards are still evolving, as business needs and goals always are. This means that comprehensive and sufficiently fluid and flexible integration and presentation can still be challenging, even with an ESB and an SOA.

So, what's really needed to integrate BPM and BI most effectively is a combination of carefully crafted, deployed, and enforced business processes, supported by the best available business intelligence. In other words, a holistic, proactive approach to what I and others sometimes refer to as business knowledge management (BKM).

You might want to download and read a Research Note I wrote on BPM, BI, and BKM in preparation for the Virtual Conference, and keep some of this in mind during the panel discussion. And I'd be very interested in hearing about your own experiences with attempting to combine BPM with BI to better serve your business. But make sure to register for and attend Wednesday's event, before getting distracted writing to me…

Posted by mdortch in BPM • Business Knowledge Management  |  Permalink  | Comments (1)  | TrackBacks (0)

This Wednesday is the ebizQ "BI in Action" Virtual Conference (for which you should register now, if you have not done so already). In the run-up to that event, I thought I would take on in this space and the "BI in Action" blog some of what I consider the "big issues" regarding to and relating BPM and BI. Herewith, one of those – why BPM needs BI to deliver maximum business benefit and value. (My thoughts on why BI needs BPM, conveniently enough, can be found along with the musings of some of my learned ebizQ BI blogmates at the aforementioned "BI in Action" blog.)

There are several key elements in the "life cycle" management of business processes. These include, but need not be limited to, capture, definition, development, management, prioritization, refinement/revision, and retirement. Success with each of these elements requires decisions based upon comprehensive, focused, and timely information about the business – in other words, effective, timely BI.

BPM also needs BI to know what to do next. That is to say, beyond the elements listed above, those responsible for BPM should always be looking forward a bit further than the nearest, hottest fire. BI is similarly intended to help business decision-makers to address both immediate and longer-term situations and opportunities. If BPM is to become and remain both responsive and proactive, it needs ways to become informed by and about any significant ripples or shifts on the BI front. (For example, if there should be changes in the information streams and/or processes supporting BI efforts, those changes may require and/or instigate changes in how other business processes are managed, organized, and/or used.)

Perhaps most crucial, though, is BPM's need for BI to provide meaningful context for BPM. BPM is both an end in and of itself, and a means to an end. The self-referential end for BPM is to optimize the ability to manage processes across their life cycles. But what good is that, beyond providing some limited kind of validation and/or gratification, if it doesn't serve the larger goals of the business? I'll take that one myself: no good at all.

BI, ideally, provides the context within which BPM takes on meaning and business value. At some enterprises, in fact, the BPM-BI relationship has become bi-directional. Input and feedback from BPM efforts are considered part of the BI information stream, just as BI increasingly informs BPM decisions and processes. (I'm resisting strongly the temptation to refer to BPM-focused processes as "meta-processes," but I'm sure you'll let me know if I should or should not continue said resistance.)

It is therefore incumbent upon everyone focused primarily on BPM to expand that focus to include BI. Ideally, that focus-expansion effort has already begun. Whether it has or not, this Wednesday's BI in Action Virtual Conference provides an ideal opportunity to step up your efforts to maximize the business value of every investment you make in BPM and in BI. Start by registering, and make sure to attend the keynote Webinar, "Business Intelligence: Driving Business Performance," as well as the follow-up presentation, "The Current State of the Business Intelligence Market." These will prepare you to intensify your BPM and BI efforts – and for the sure-to-be-lively panel discussion, "The Role of BI in BPM and SOA." I'll have more to say about that panel tomorrow, in my discussions of the other big issue relating BPM and BI – how best to link and integrate them. Meanwhile, though, make sure you register for and attend Wednesday's "BI in Action" Virtual Conference!

Posted by mdortch in BPM • Business Knowledge Management  |  Permalink  | Comments (0)  | TrackBacks (0)

As you may already be aware, there's a Webinar coming up at ebizQ on June 20, on the subject of "The Role of BI in BPM and SOA." (It's part of the upcoming "BI in Action" Virtual Conference.) Whether you were aware of it or not, you should definitely register and plan on attending. It will be a panel discussion hosted by my ebizQ colleague Beth Gold-Bernstein, which would be reason enough to attend. However, there are other good reasons as well.

There should be little remaining doubt that business process management (BPM) and business intelligence (BI) are and will remain for some time principal applications, if not outright "killer apps," driving SOA adoption. Of course, a company can and should have good BPM and BI without an SOA. But for an SOA to deliver maximum immediate and sustained business benefit, a company must equip and support that SOA with strong, coherent, and integrated BPM – which almost by necessity and definition these days must include BI as well.

As I see it, BI and BPM drive and support one another. BI is essential to make the best possible decisions about business process creation, orchestration, prioritization, refinement, and structure. Effective BPM, meanwhile, is essential to achieve and derive maximum business benefit from BI. Together, they form the foundation for what I've referred to repeatedly here as human-centric business knowledge management (BKM).

Now, for BI, BKM, and BPM to be of any real business value, they must pervade the entire enterprise – every element of the business and IT architectures and infrastructures. They must also be invisible to users doing their primary jobs. Which means the sensible place to park the features and resources that enable BI, BKM, and BPM is within an SOA, where an SOA exists. (Where an SOA does not exist, I think the most sensible place is within the applications and services those users use to do those primary jobs, but that's not the subject of this outing. It is the subject of previous rants in this space, however, in case you have way too much free time…)

You can read all about BI, BPM, and SOA justifications, obstacles, and strategies right here at ebizQ, and about BKM, BI, and related issues, among other subjects, in the RFG section of the ebizQ Analyst Corner. But make no mistake – at many enterprises, including quite possibly yours or your client's or clients', BI, BKM, and BPM are going to be critical drivers and justifications for SOA efforts, today and for the foreseeable future. I expect the Webinar on June 20 will echo and delve deeply into these subjects, and urge you to register and participate. Meanwhile, you can expect to read more about how all of this stuff comes together – or not – here (as well as at my BI blog)…especially if you care to contribute any of your own experiences, opinions, and thoughts…

Posted by mdortch in BPM • Business Knowledge Management  |  Permalink  | Comments (1)  | TrackBacks (0)

My local paper, the Santa Rosa Press Democrat, picked up a story from The Washington Post today. (The link to the story in the previous sentence is to the Press Democrat version, in case you're interested; you'll need to register at the Washington Post Web site to read it there.) Based on that story and a bit of additional research, here's what we know so far.

1. A recent study indicates that dogs will imitate the same behavior in different ways, depending upon context. For example, dogs prefer to move things with their mouths, keeping all four paws underneath them. They only move things with a paw if their mouths are full. This study found that dogs will make the mouth-vs.-paw decision in response to what another dog does, AND whether or not that other dog's mouth is already busy (holding a ball, in the case of the study).

2. This context-sensitive decision-making process was recently discovered in human infants, research that inspired the study Above-mentioned dog study.

3. Dog advocates cite the dog study results as further evidence of the greater intellectual and emotional depth of our canine companions. Skeptics point out rightly that this all could be going on with no conscious, reasoned action on the dog's part.

After reading this, I came to two immediate conclusions.

1. However it got there, the apparently innate presence of this context-sensitive decision-making process, in dogs and human infants, demonstrates just how fundamental to survival and success process can be. (In basic behavioral research terms, if you don't figure out how to press the right button at the right time, you never get your treat.)

2. Every business process architecture must be agile and flexible enough to allow the context-sensitive fine-tuning of at least strategic and/or business-critical processes. This minimizes the negative effects of the "one size fits all" stricture that hobbles many BPM efforts. (Not to mention access control and security efforts, resource provisioning efforts, and other strategic and tactical IT efforts that require agile, flexible, context-sensitive, business-driven processes to succeed. So I won't.) But this "mass customization" approach enables businesses to adapt and refocus processes in rapid response to new opportunities or requirements presented by customers, partners, and/or prospects.

Of course, one would need both good processes and good technologies to achieve the above goals. And there would be many potentially valid approaches toward said goals, based largely on, well, context. But you probably already knew or suspected that. Your comments, experiences, reactions, and recommendations welcome.

(Oh, there was actually one more conclusion that occurred to me in response to the dog study mentioned herein. Who in the heck trained the border collie they used to model the behaviors to which the subject dogs were responding? I mean, I know border collies are smart, but...well, if you read the article and/or the study, you'll know what I mean.)

Posted by mdortch in BPM  |  Permalink  | Comments (0)  | TrackBacks (0)

If you have not yet done so, please go read the full transcript of the fine Keynote Ken Vollmer of Forrester Research delivered during the ebizQ BPM in Action Virtual Conference held in March. You might even want to save a copy, for inspiration (with appropriate attribution, of course!) as you craft your own BPM plans. The Webinar featuring Ken's presentation is also available for your dining and dancing pleasure, but you may find the transcript more immediately useful or easy to assimilate into your own evolving plans.

As you may or may not know or suspect, industry analysts have almost as much trouble saying they agree with one another as competing vendors do when sharing the same stage. (My ebizQ blogmate Sandy Kemsley knows this well.) Nonetheless, I find myself largely agreeing with my learned industry colleague Mr. Vollmer. I think he got the critical success factors right, although I might quibble with the order of some of them. (I do agree that technology comes last, however.) I also agree with his assessment of best practices. You may notice as you read through his remarks some resonance with past diatribes you may have experienced in this space.

However, I am concerned about the distinction Mr. Vollmer and Forrester have chosen to make between human-centric and integration-centric BPM. To me, this is verbiage that violates some of Mr. Vollmer's own recommendations, as it really focuses on the technologies underlying various competing solutions, and not the business goals being addressed. So I guess I'm casting my lot on the side of human-centric (albeit business-driven) BPM, another view of what I've referred to here previously as "business knowledge management" (BKM).

I believe there are processes and workflows used by people, and processes and workflows used by systems and resources, especially in a service-oriented architecture (SOA).However, I also believe there is no real BPM until and unless these processes, and the interactions and processes that link them to one another, are treated in an integrated, holistic way. I further believe the processes necessary to achieve this admittedly elusive and slippery goal will vary from organization to organization, depending largely upon the cultural issues, people, processes, and technologies in place and in play.

In this regard, you may also find useful some of the comments and observations made by Phil Gilbert, CTO at BPM solution provider Lombardi Software. Mr. Gilbert, responding to a spirited discussion moderated by Ms. Kemsley during the BPM in Action event, argues that business agility, visibility, and better conversations among decision-makers are more important than digressions about human- vs. integration-centric BPM. He argues further that BPM is coming into the enterprise from a variety of sources, including enterprise applications and software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions. You may recall largely positive rants about these issues within previous outings in this space as well.

My point here is that when you see overlap, if not violent agreement, among multiple allegedly expert observers and practitioners, the common ground is likely worth your time and attention. And I think the common ground here is that BPM works best when it is supported by consistent, well-thought-out, business-driven processes. These must include a fair (if not unfair) amount of discovery, documentation, mapping, and measuring of what's going on now. You can't get anyplace good until you have a good idea of your starting circumstances – or, perhaps more bluntly, you shouldn't start running until you're clear about the specific directions of "away" and "toward." As always, your comments and responses welcome.

Posted by mdortch in BPM • Business Knowledge Management • Software as a Service  |  Permalink  | Comments (0)  | TrackBacks (0)

The upcoming ebizQ Webinar "Extend and Enhance the Power of BPM with Workflow and Business Rules" promises to help attendees understand how to enable and improve business decisions with rules-based business logic and workflow automation. The Webinar's promising agenda reminds me of a recent conversation I had with the chief executive of a company best known in Europe. The company is building up its presence in the United States, in part by focusing on integrated, process-enabled IT asset and service management. The company is PS'Soft, and it takes a very interesting view of asset and service management. Its decision-makers believe BPM is a powerful way of integrating asset, infrastructure, and service management into enterprise IT architectures.

One key area of focus: software license management. PS'Soft solutions help companies to drive payback on investment in those solutions of three to six months, simply by overseeing management and reduction of software licenses.

PS'Soft solutions also rely on an integrated configuration management database (CMDB). The PS'Soft CMDB includes features for data relationship management not available in other vendors' CMDB offerings. The company believes, as do I, that it will be a long time, if ever, before we get to a single giant CMDB managing everything. Such a CMDB will also be ungainly and hard to manage, if and when we do achieve it. In the interim, federation of and integration with multiple CMDB options is the logical way to go, and was a design goal of the PS'Soft architecture from the beginning.

PS'Soft also believes strongly in self-service and BPM integration. The former eliminates the need for armies of clerks and technicians to develop and manage catalogues of IT services and asset adds, moves, and changes. The latter combines workflow approvals and software integration with asset and license records, to automate provisioning of software based on business and user requirements. The company also sees BPM as a critical element of compliance with and leverage of resources such as the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL). As I interpret PS'Soft's strategy, the company sees BPM as a pathway between the "what" elements of the ITIL recommendations and the "how" elements necessary to translate those into real-life business benefits.

The company is also focused on enabling what one of its investors calls "the revenge of the CFO," according to president and CEO Paul Rochester. IT opacity, coupled with growing requirements for regulatory compliance and governance transparency, has led to increasing dominance of the CFO over IT costs and accountability at many enterprises. A prime indicator: growing numbers of CIOs now report to CFOs and not directly to CEOs. In short, PS'Soft focuses on helping CIOs to have better conversations and relationships with their CFOs and CEOs. A large part of this is business-driven process enablement of asset and service management and related applications and tasks.

I fervently believe that integration of business-driven, human-centric process management into the management of applications and IT infrastructures is a helpful step toward the pervasiveness and invisibility BPM needs to succeed. From that perspective, I applaud PS'Soft's focus, and will be watching the company closely as it seeks to expand it presence in the U.S. You might want to do the same.

Posted by mdortch in BPM • IT Infrastructure Management  |  Permalink  | Comments (0)  | TrackBacks (0)