Our devices are going to coach us

Adidas announced at GigaOM’s Mobilize 2013 Conference that they’re creating a smartwatch that can provide location, speed, heart rate and serve music during workouts. That’s interesting, sure, but there’s something remarkable they’re adding: coaching. An athlete wearing the Adidas smartwatch will provide coaching through the watch’s screen or headphones. This is certainly a glimpse of what’s […]

Taking a look at Business Process Management: The Next Wave

These are crazy times for change, threatening to disrupt so much of what we’ve worked so hard to achieve over the past decades of information technology and business process. The toughest part of disruption is knowing that what took so much energy to figure out can be so quickly plowed under by something smarter, faster […]

Process is data and data is process

We’re a funny lot. For years we’ve been talking about data and process as though they were two different things. Guess what…they’re not. Process involves the activities of getting work done and data both describes process and is also the beginning and end points of work. We consume data in processes and we produce data […]

The case for a BPM jack of all trades, master of…one…or two

When a good friend and I exchanged a few tweets back and forth the other day, it began like the usual exchange of views over some of those typical news items that the #bpm timeline throws up once in a frequent while. But the ‘twonversation’ with my twitter counterpart – a venerable thinker in technology, […]

Don’t should all over your next BPM project

Recent research has shown that there is a simple method to vastly improve the chance that people will do what you want. For the moment I’ll hold off on what that is, because the story starts way before this. To get a BPM project right, a few things need to happen. Challenge 1: Capture and […]

I am a weirdo. I don’t belong here.

…that’s right. I don’t belong here. In fact, what the hell am I doing here? Before you jump to the wrong conclusions, those aren’t my words. You’ll know whose words they are in just a minute. But before that, I want to spend a moment to talk about something that seems to be (but probably […]

Is it even possible to design intelligent process?

Earlier today, I read something that made me snort on my afternoon coffee. Not just because it was funny, but because, to me it had some additional insight that I thought was worth sharing with you, especially when you think about Intelligent Processes and how they can be crafted for a BPM initiative. Here it […]

How could anyone confuse BPM and event processing?

I know, right? How could anyone make that mistake? The fact is that more than a few corners of the marketplace know very little about the difference between BPM (business process management) and what’s typically called CEP (complex event processing). These two concepts are very different and understanding those differences in today’s business climate will […]

Anti-fragile business has intelligent processes

Everywhere you look, the tech world is buzzing about cloud, social, mobile, Big Data, wearables, and more. Each, on its own, represents a challenge to today’s organizations. In combination, they become a daunting mix of architecture land mines and confusing hype—and in many cases, they’re ominous signs of looming disruption. Organizations that aren’t concerned are […]

The peanut butter and chocolate that will change your world

The following was co-written with Successful Workplace editor Chris Taylor.  Last week former Gartner über analyst Jim Sinur published a blog that quietly introduced perhaps the biggest sea change coming in technology: the blending of business events (data about what’s happening in real-time) with highly dynamic business process engines to create very, very fast sense […]

6 warning signs that your technology is headed south

A recent blog talked about how technology is creating a sharper divide between the haves and have-nots in an increasingly global, increasingly data-focused economy. For some companies, the cloud, social, mobile and big data are bringing the best of times. For those trapped on the wrong side of change, it will be the worst of […]

The irony, cost and process hell of Software as a Service

Woe unto you if you don’t think through your decisions to buy and use Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). That’s right…woe unto you. As more and more organizations use SaaS applications (in 2011, Forrester projected 18 by 2013 and said we were at 9.6 by Fall 2012), the complexity of integrating all of those silo’d applications is rising […]

Don’t punish me for using your process

I just had a 2 and a half hour hole blown in what had started out as a massively productive day. Indeed, I’m so frustrated as I write that I’m going to grab a quick bite and try to squeeze in a run during lunch hour.  Here’s the story and here’s why it matters for […]

Be much more efficient by defining your org’s work habits

How often do we think about the way we usually operate at work? Whether we’re performing an informal five-step process for evaluating a new proposal, or setting priorities for managing our time, how often do we think about consistency and efficiency? Our ability to improve the ways we do things depends on defining and shaping […]

Shifting sands — BPM’s business outcome versus its sales pitch

Over the years a constant theme is that the ROI of a BPMS implementation or BPM approach is one of the trickiest to pin down and prove. Whilst you can calculate hard efficiency and headcount benefits (which is always the wrong way to solely measure and plan for BPM success) there are a myriad of intangible benefits […]

A different type of shark encounter

If you have been bitten by the process bug, like me, then you always see parallels between business, process, and everyday life. It drives my wife, mother, and friends crazy, but I always see them, and it is usually in the context of how I can make the process better at the airport, church, restaurant, […]