Which came first the data or the process? In most large enterprises today, business process and data management professionals tactfully ignore one another. Business process professionals — primarily business subject matter experts representing functional groups or business units — focus on the business problem and the human-centric dependencies, such as defining roles and responsibilities for getting processes done and facilitating organizational change management. Alternatively, data management remains an IT-driven competency and focuses on technical solutions with an unrealistic “If we build it, they will come” mentality regarding business adoption.

In reality, business processes based on the invalid assumption that trustworthy, insightful data will magically be made available are at risk of breakdown — causing significant employee inefficiencies, poor customer experiences, and increased operational risks. And data management solutions, like data warehousing, business intelligence, and master data management, always face the truism of “Put garbage in, get garbage out” — meaning that if the processes that capture and update the raw data feeding these systems generate untrustworthy data, no amount of technology investment will be able to clean it all.

Some business process professionals get it. Forrester recently talked with 28 business process pros, many with substantial BPM expertise, and a number of them voiced awareness that MDM and BPM should be aligned, process modeling and data modeling should be interrelated, and data governance and process governance should be on similar, integrated tracks.

For the full article from Forrester's Rob Karel visit the IRM UK website: http://bit.ly/b8dJnh

Working more collaboratively across departments may be an alien concept in some organisations. However it’s a quick and cost effective way of maximising customer value and satisfaction.

This whitepaper by SAGE explains how departments can work together as one to achieve a better understanding of the customer.

Download the Whitepaper here at MyCustomer: http://bit.ly/cZ8R0Y

The current regulatory environment for investment banks and other financial institutions is increasingly focusing on risk mitigation and more stringent risk assessment. In the UK the FSA, in its Arrow Audits, is increasingly asking firms not only to document their core business processes, but also to evidence the controls they have against those activities. If like most UK financial services organizations you're having to spend more effort on FSA audit preparation and compliance, take part in this 3 minute poll – before Feb 26th 2010 - to find out where you stand compared to your peers. Respondents will be sent a summary of the results, which will be entirely anonymous.

Take part in the survey through Nimbus Partners and receive a copy of the results.

http://www.nimbuspartners.com/page/benchmark-your-controls-effectiveness

Traditionally, conceptual modelling of business processes involves the use of visual grammars for the representation of, amongst other things, activities, choices and events. These grammars, while very useful for experts, are difficult to understand by naive stakeholders. Annotations of such process models have been developed to assist in understanding aspects of these grammars via map-based approaches, and further work has looked at forms of 3D conceptual models. However, no one has sought to embed the conceptual models into a fully featured 3D world, using the spatial annotations to explicate the underlying model clearly.

In this paper, we present an approach to conceptual process model visualisation that enhances a 3D virtual world with annotations representing process constructs, facilitating insight into the developed model. We then present a prototype implementation of a 3D Virtual BPMN Editor that embeds BPMN process models into a 3D world. We show how this gives extra support for tasks performed by the conceptual modeller, providing better process model communication to stakeholders.

Download the Whitepaper here. 

Author Bio

Ross Brown is a Senior Lecturer with the Faculty of Science and Technology, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, where he is the Software Technologies Coordinator for the Bachelor of Games and Interactive Entertainment .  He is also a member of the Business Process Management (BPM) Research Cluster, an internationally  leading research group in the BPM domain.

Ross has strong links with many Australian and International game and game technology companies, such as Sony and THQ, amongst others.  Ross also has an ongoing teaching and research relationship with Microsoft Research Asia, having received funding from them in the areas of game technology research and curriculum development.  He presents talks at Microsoft Tech Ed conferences.

More information on Ross’s work can be found at: www.bpmve.org.