Finally it comes.. VISIO 2010 is going to come with the BPMN support. Can't wait to try my hands on it. The biggest thing last time(Visio 2007) was the support for cool data visualizations. They seemed to have waited too long to get onto the BPMN league. But here they come. Take a look at some of the screen-shots from the MS site. I hope to get a copy today. There will be more on it soon.

http://blogs.msdn.com/visio/archive/2009/12/03/bpmn-support-in-visio-2010.aspx

Precriptive or Adaptive??

Last weeken I managed catch up with a workshop by Steve Towers. As a part of the 4th Wave one of the paradigm changes expected is of course the customer centric approach, but one of the things that Steve said stuck to my mind.

The Shift from from being Prescriptive to Adaptive..

Quite the cornerstone of BPM philosophy. What I would like to share is how important it is for the entire IT departments and delivery teams to make this change of mindset.

I work as a consultant, nvolved in an effort to define processes and requirements for a ambitious future looking project. The internal IT department seems to keen on delivery of something the users can use.

I have been having pitched battles with the solution architects and system analysts regarding what should be the nature of the system that will automate the future process. The general understanding about most people about the processes seems to be that, they just need to automate it as in a workflow. The result is absolute neglect the core functionality of the solution in question. Anticipating and delivering future requirements is something that seems to make the technical team really wary.

Several features are debated and scorned as too fancy, difficult to deliver. They hold the view that the right way is to ensure, you deliver only what the business user can handle. The problem with this approach is that you tend to become very subjective about what you think the business can handle.

If you consider the CEM Method, each touchpoint with your customer, spawns breakpoints and business rules. The easiest way to simplify the process is to eliminate these. You can tweak around with the processes and make the required organisational changes but IT is going to play a vital role in enabling the whole process.

So IT should never be in a Prescriptive mode. If they do, they would inevitably end up as the roadblock instead of being the enabler to agile business needs.

Heirarchy for Process in an enterprise

This is the simple heirarchy I am using in my current project to depict and manage the process landscape..Has been working fine for most practical purposes but I need to think how to detail this model further.

Process Loops

Here is an excellent article on the representation of Process loops by Rick Geneva. Nice simple diagrams to drive home a few points about the power of BPMN to represent scenarios.

Here goes the link.. http://www.rickgeneva.com/wp/pages/107