State of the BPM Market white paper

...from BEA. Well, this was a post on Column2, by Sandy Kemsley. She has worked on this white paper with BEA and it can be downloaded here. Of course you need to go through the whole BEA process, and even if you have an account (I used to download white papers from them that I never had enough time to read...) it should go smooth and easy. The content: strategic positioning of BPM, the situation of the vendor market and trends in the domain. I have not had time to read it but I certainly will, sometime soon. Oh and this other post again by Sandy Kemsley makes a summary of the talk held by BEA (Jay Simons) about the results from their BPM Market state survey.

Marwane El Kharbili.

Gartner BPM and Process Design Patterns

In this post by Sandy kemsley, where she reports about the Gartner BPM summit I have found some interesting ideas upon which I would like to react. She speaks about the talk by Janelle Hil at Gartner's BPM summit, where Janelle Hill reminds why BPM is different from workflow and business process reengineering techniques that existed before. She also discusses when the use of a BPMS becomes necessary. What I found most intriguing is that she speaks about policies on the level of BPMS (I guess she means generally also modelling and analysis frameworks) , and I am convinced of the necessity of managing policies at the same level of managing process, organizational, and system information. Policies can also influence the business by making it do what is expected from it, having influence on its quality, performance or security among others. So policies represent an asset for the enterprise in the same way processes do.

Another interesting thing to note is that Gartner just changed their definition of BPMS so the new quadrant looks different. the final and most interestingthing in the post to me was discussin process design patterns. Sandy kemsley says that the approach she uses with clients is trying to identify what kinds of process patterns they have in order to decide for the best BPMS for them. "three most common patterns that they see with BPMS are case management, form-driven workflow, and participant-driven workflow". Janelle Hill has listed 6 of them, which I would be curious to know.

Marwane El Kharbili.

What is the difference between SOA, EA, BPM, Enterprise 2.0...?!

Such questions may be asked to you if you work in these fields and are often speaking to people about "revolutionary" technologies. Whether you are evangelizing SOA, selling BPM, conducting EA inventory projects or communicating on Enterprise 2.0 internally, you have surely encoutered many lost eyes looking to locate themselves in this armada of new buzz-words. And not being at ease whan trying to answer the question: "What is the difference between X and Y" may not be a very good sign to give to your client/collaborators.

This post by Joe McKendrick emphasizes this and reminds us of the actual goal all these technologies are longing for: make processes more efficient, shorten time to market, increase ROI on IT, etc... Everything that would allow your client to achieve their business goals following their selected strategy. One thing Joe notes aside is the obvious misunderstanding of what BPM is (well he relevates that many people are confusing BPM and SOA and seeing them as being to 90% the same thing) by confusing it with SOA. this is something I can confirm through my experience and what I hear and read in the community about BPM. vendors, consulting companies and consultants sell BPM as being the technology, not the business discipline. This of course applies if you have a workflow engine that you sell as a BPM engine, but you ain't doing no BPM really. I won't diverge in a troll about BPM Vs. BPM (for the moment :D).

Enjoy the post by Joe McKendrick.

Marwane El Kharbili

New Google R&D center in zürich

I have had a look at the new facilities of Google's new R&D center in Zurich. It is the eight R&D center of Google in the EMEA zone and quite frankly looks tremendous! I have looked at 31 shots of the new acilities and really is astonishing what a company like google can do to get the most out of their zooglers (Google engineers). I won't even say anything about all that you can find there. The least I can say, is that if one works there, I'm pretty sure one would do a hell of a lot of additional hours... :D

Hala Gorani, Snow and Syria

Do you know Hala gorani? She is one of CNN's top journalists, always travellig around the world, making shock documentations, doing the news, and quite honestly I know she looks like a swede but is an arab (both her parents are Syrian, her name is a classical arabic name meaning "halo"), I still don't know where she lives. I got to know of Hala Gorani for the first time during the Israel-Hezbollah war in 2006. She covered it the whole summer.

Among other things, Hala Gorani has a program on CNN called inside the middle east.
This time, Hala Gorani was reporting on record snow falls in syria with meters of snow piled and a completely white city. This reminded me of the record snow falls in morocco two winters ago, where mountain roads were even closed for days.Well, this high-edge CNN journalist was taken as a target by passants with huge snow balls. During the outtakes at the end of the program, we could see that it took her quite some tries to get the introduction of one of the reports on film, because she was each time interrupted with snow balls arriving at light speed on her. The least I could say is that she got humour and she kept laughing at her spectators, eventually pursuing them herself. That was a very funny thing to see I can tell you :D

Marwane El Kharbili

After Mentos and Coke now... Pork and Coke

I've been hearing about a lot of videos on the net showing what comes out of pork meat when coked is poured on it...I couldn't believe the title when I saw that video....It is utterly disgusting. Of course the video itself in so proof, but I'm sure ain't testing it just to see those maggots coming out. Watch the video and tell me what you think...



...ewwwww...
Marwane El Kharbili

Trends in Biz Apps by Yvonne Genovese

A shortie again. On this post on sandy Kemsley's blog, she noted some very interesting reported notes on the talk by Yvonne Genovese on the morning's technology keynote at Gartner's BPM summit 2008. Yvonne Genovese listed 9 big trends in business applications from her point of view. Most remarquable, numbers 1, 2 and 3 (logically), here the citation:

1. "Applications shift from pre-canned logic to dynamic assemblies, something that we’re already seeing with large packaged applications (such as SAP) opening up their internal functionality as services, allowing those functions to be consumed — along with any number of other web services — as part of a composite application or business process.
2. Convergence of business processes, people and information: applications that provide business value will consider all of these.
3. Focus on performance management evolution from reporting and monitoring to predictive planning and closed-loop optimization."

My pick is number 6 (citation):

1. The role of the ERP suite will change, since they typically provide a low degree of innovation; they will tend to be services consumed by other more agile applications.

Which to me is in strong correlation with point number 1. Read the post it's short and informative.

Marwane El Kharbili

Doing Business Internationally: How to act in each country

I was reading one very interesting article on Journal du Net about the different customs in countries around the world, till I stumbled upon two countries that were very interesting to me: Germany and Morocco. For those of you who don't know it, I'm Moroccan, I have traveled a bit around the world for my studies and I am currently working in Germany. All right so let's get to the point here and read what about Germans:

• Germans are rigorous, and this makes them very appreciated in the business world. meetings always start on time, being late is very negative. Meetings also always end up on time. The use of titles such as Dr. and Prof. is very important and one should know with whom one speaks, in order to avoid looking very impolite.

Well. I can speak as I see this from an outsider's perspective, the description given by the french is really not far at all from truth, and it takes some time to get used to all this. But overall, such properties make the Germans the people I like to work with most, because of their seriousness and their rigor, even though they don't always understand my jokes :D

Now what about the Moroccans:

• Don't be surprised if moroccans get very tactile and show much familiarity towards your person, moroccans don't like barriers and calling you by your surname, using the second person of the singular ("Tu" in French and "Du" in German, it doesn't exist in English), and even kissing you is totally normal and is a sign of their appreciation. they will often invite over at home to have meal or dinner, this is where you can discover all the richness of Moroccan culture and hospitality. And this is where some well chosen compliments won't do your business no harm at all...

I can only agree 100%. This is well hit. I'm sorry to tell you that due to my "internatiolaization" and heavy work on my person after living so long in Europe in different countries...I don't kiss people :D

If you want to read the whole story, and see what is important in other countries, go here: http://www.journaldunet.com/management/dossiers/0708201-coutumes-etranger/. Ahemm...It's in French...

Marwane El Kharbili

Get your PhD Blog on the web!

I have just registered for an account on PhDWeblogs.net. As the name says it, this website acts as a registry of all PhD blogs there is on the web, at least those that registered. You can scroll blogs by topic. Currently there are 500 of them. I will report on it if I get to get any special advantages from being on the site. For the moment the only things I learned is that Marlene Charlotte Larsen from Aalborg University in Denmark found out that 31% of all danish internet users between the age of 12 and 18 spend 2 hours or more per day on the internet... :D

Marwane El Kharbili

OMG Information days

The OMG Information days are going to be organized in three venues in three consecutive days.
Title this time is "Enterprise SOA - Planung and Management". The event's language is German.
Check out the website of the events here. In Frankfurt, Düsseldorf and Stuttgart, experts are going to tell about their professional experience in topics such as SOA's Business Case, SOA-based IT modernisation strategies, SOA's development lifecycles and SOA governance.

Marwane El Kharbili