BPM - A new wave

Business-process management (BPM) is associated with a multitude of change-management practices. Organisations that adopted the concept in the early stages of its development in the mid-nineties focused on distinguishing between ‘process management’ and ‘process re-engineering’. The main theory behind BPM was that, to be successful, it was not always necessary for a company to formulate new or radical business processes. Instead, by rethinking and improving established processes, managers could optimise their spending, productivity and customer-satisfaction levels.

As ideas and technologies have evolved, BPM has become paramount to the success of the 21st century enterprise. And with industry analysts forecasting a new wave of the discipline, we felt it was a suitable time to canvass the opinions of directors and managers involved in BPM projects. With more than 400 responses, our survey threw up a number of interesting results (see p8 of the attached supplement).

Encouragingly, despite the trepidation of some, the general uptake of BPM tools and systems continue to go from strength to strength, and vendors seem to be realising that IT is not the sole basis for a successful BPM strategy.

I hope you enjoy this month’s issue. As always, if you have any comments, questions or suggestions, please do not hesitate to contact me at jschofield@ark-group.com.

Editor
Jason Schofield

Features

Workshop: Zen and the art of taxonomy maintenance Free
A four-part workshop covering the creation, implementation and maintenance of taxonomies in a corporate context. Part one: what you need to think about before you start. By Jan Wyllie

Workshop: Understanding real user needs Free
The first in a two-part series, this article focuses on face-to-face interviewing techniques, highlighting the importance of social styles and human behaviour when analysing the needs of intranet users. Part 1. By Richard Miller

Workshop: Services: Build, buy or re-purpose? Free
In an SOA world, it isn’t sufficient for companies to make point decisions about the services they build, buy or repurpose. Such decisions must be capable of evolving as the business changes. By Ronald Schmelzer

Workshop: The human side of intranets: Part 1 Free
When it comes to intranet development, the relationship between content owners and developers is often fraught with tension. But with a little common sense and a healthy dose of interpersonal skills, the differences between the two should not be irreconcilable. By Paul Chin

Case study: Boehringer Ingelheim Free
For companies operating in a tightly regulated industry, sophisticated document-management systems are essential. By Jörg Werner

Making electronic documents legally valid Free
After several years of struggling to comply with a slew of regulatory and legal mandates, most companies now recognise the importance of securing the confidentiality, integrity and availability of their electronic documents as part of a corporate-wide records-management strategy – even if they don’t yet practice it with the stringency required of them.

Regulars

The last word: Identity management Free
Security in many companies is failing to keep pace with the scale and complexity of safeguarding highly interconnected systems, with the result that as much as 75 per cent of all security breaches are internal; the result of breakdowns in basic precautions such as deleting out-of-date accounts.

Trend tracker: The EII challenge Free
Is enterprise-information integration (EII) the new paradigm? By Gary Eastwood

Topic maps revisited Free
A few months ago I wrote about topic maps and how online classification techniques and technologies are enjoying significant uptake by organisations. In case you missed that article, topic maps are an open standard for capturing knowledge in the form of topics (people, places, projects, companies etc), the connections between these topics (associations) and the relationship these topics have to pieces of information, such as web pages, documents etc.

Opinion: Surveying the opposition Free
You may not realise it, particularly if you’re enduring a grim day, but you have an advantage over me. It’s likely that you have an advantage over the British Government also, since, as is probable, you’ll be reading this after the British election on May 5. If so, you’ll know how the election panned out, and who the winners and losers were. It’s information that many, from a pre-election vantage point, would give good money for. What were the issues that really concerned voters? What was important to them, and how did it influence their decisions?