Lombardi had a couple of interesting announcements during the week of April 7 so I hooked up with its Director of Marketing, Wayne Snell, to get the background and to find out how the two announcements work together.
First Lombardi announced that its 1-year-old Blueprint service is now into its ’08 release. Lombardi believes that someone within an organization is probably thinking about a business process management (BPM) project for a year or more before the organization gets serious. Blueprint is an enabler for that person, a sort of Dr. Phil for BPM and it’s free (not open source but free). Blueprint puts the Lombardi name in front of at least one person within the organization during that year.
At a little higher level, a fee-based professional edition of Blueprint lets a group of analysts and end users talk to together about BPM before a project begins while being able to import from Visio and export to the Business Process Management Notation (BPMN) format. Either way, users can simply point their browser at the Blueprint URL, log in, and start “discovering” and documenting business process sets without training and without even having to download or install anything.
A second April 8 announcement takes the process to a third step, bringing professional BPM services into the conversation. This is the new news for the week of April 7. Lombardi BPM services called Lombardi Process Definition packages combine Blueprint and other Lombardi BPM technology with Lombardi experts. They are fixed-price 1-, 2- or 3-week offerings with templates to help the enterprise find and agree on such important BPM project factors as metrics, “as is” and “to be” process maps, a detailed process optimization roadmap, service-level agreements (SLA) and a business case detailing potential return.
When the BPM talking stops and the doing BPM starts, Lombardi hopes you’ll chose their technology but even if you don’t, you’ll have the process maps (if you use the free service), the maps and the BPMN notation, and so forth (if you use the professional edition of Blueprint), and/or all the rest of the deliverables if you go the package route.
The Lombardi BPM technology, called Teamworks for those not aware of the company, consists of an execution and analytical core product (which is a Java application that runs on JBoss or other JEE application server), a front-end authoring environment for modeling (which is an Eclipse plug-in for BPMN models—see my article on BPM standards here--you have to join the ebizQ Gold Club but there is no charge). One version of the front end is designed for process analysts another for what Lombardi calls an integration analyst. There is also a selection of end-user-oriented plugins
• for Microsoft Office
• for Microsoft Sharepoint
• for organization management, which enables “virtual matrix optimization” of matrix managed business process
If you are a Lombardi Teamworks user, drop me a line at dennis@ebizq.net and let me know what you think.
-- Dennis Byron
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.
