Supply chain + process means standardize AND differentiate

The following is a guest blog by Tom Molyneux. Many posts on this blog discuss the value that frameworks, such as APQC, bring to BPM.  But what about the value that having solid, understandable BPM brings to frameworks?  I’ll argue that to get value out of virtually any framework, it is foundational to have a […]

Why ERP needs BPM…a view from the BPM Summit

I had the fortune of sitting in on one of the early sessions at the 2011 Gartner Business Process Summit here in Baltimore today.  It was Bill Swanton, a VP at Gartner talking about “Peaceful and Productive Co-Existence of Enterprise Applications and BPM”. Bill started off with what some might call the obvious…that ERP’s have inflexible, programmed […]

The view from the Summit…the Gartner BPM Summit

The 2011 Gartner BPM Summit in Baltimore, MD is about to begin. I see the usual healthy mix of banks, insurance companies, pharmaceuticals and, of course, lots of government. The split between business owners and IT seems to be about 50/50. I’m looking forward less to the presentations and more to the conversations that I’ll […]

Leather boots and other acquisitions

We love hiking in the mountains near our home in Southern California.  We hike on vacation, and we even hike when we can on business trips.  Even so, when we made the decision to go to the World’s most renowned trails (Nepal, land of Everest, Annapurna and much more), we knew we needed to step up our […]

All you’ve ever wanted to know about frameworks…APQC Study sneak preview

Why this study? APQC knew that their Process Classification Framework (PCF) is widely used in business, fairly evident from 100,000 downloads from their website over twenty years.  They were also aware that it has been translated into Japanese, Mandarin, Spanish, Polish and Portuguese.  What they didn’t know, however, were the individual uses of the PCF […]

Frameworks and getting REAL work done

Cisco, UPS, ThyssenKrupp, Pitney Bowes, Williams Exploration, Sandvik, ING Life…these are enormous enterprises with something fundamental in common…they use frameworks to get real work done.  A recent study by the APQC organization focused on those companies to find out how and why.  As technical champions, Accenture, Nimbus, and Northrop Grumman provided their BPM expertise to seed the […]

Its the simple things in life

A long stopover in Tokyo on the way to Nepal and the Himalayas.  Lots of jet-lagged time to think about what I look forward to finding and all that was left behind in the States.   Quite a study in contrasts as I leave the complexity of modern Southern California for a place that in some ways is centuries behind us.  Simplicity.  […]

Do we need guide dogs for business process?

Guide dogs for business process? We’re visual people and the changes the Web brings make this more the case.  So when it comes to business process, we love our pretty pictures, but to what end?  There are many ways to capture the visual representation of what we do, from PowerPoint or Visio to the most […]