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.
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