SuccessfulWorkplace

Big Data has become an overloaded term that gets applied to everything that has anything to do with data, big or small, fast or slow, similar or varied. Like the crescendo of a classical music piece, Big Data hype has been getting louder and building up to…hmmm…that’s the question exactly: what comes next? Is it […]

The following is Part 3 of BPM…go big or go home. Trying to keep your business edge in today’s change prone world is a constant challenge. In order for organizations to flourish, there is a premium on becoming a digital tech savvy organization. Organizations that have started business transformation efforts are turning to business processes to […]

The following is Part 2 of BPM…go big or go home. We are in an era of big change driven by an emerging new business climate and the need to be digitally strong to swim the business current. The good news is that budgets for technology investments are going up and leveraging the cloud can free […]

The stock markets have been expecting a brighter future for finances for a while now, the unemployment rate is pegging for the new normal of around 7% for healthy employment and there is a sense of optimism that is growing. The future is bright, so businesses are taking on a more assertive approach to revenue […]

Process is about action. When we talk about processes, we’re talking about everything an organization does in its ongoing operations. And so, it makes sense that in order to improve operational performance, many organizations use process improvement techniques such as process mapping to get a handle on all the actions that make up their process flow. The problem is, […]

Probably my favourite tool in the arsenal of analyst techniques has to be decomposition. Whether it’s functional or process decomposition there is nothing like it for arranging problems into the big picture. Then breaking that picture down into its component parts so that you can start to make sense of it. And yet hierarchy, in […]

When people think of inside out they usually mean a perspective from the inside of something to the outside, as opposed to outside in — the view of a customer, business partner, or any third party. Inside out is considered the way of the past, as “outside in” has become a design mantra and a […]

BPM is a globally-themed concept that has remarkable similarities from country to country. In line with that, the following is a guest blog by Janne Eriksson of Sweden, a business process management professional who works in the Nordic Countries: I recently read an article by Swedish researcher Anna Rylander (University of Gothenburg) about Design Thinking. […]

A customer doesn’t see your technology when they interact with you, they see your process. They don’t know or care that you’re using Ruby or PHP, and they don’t know your compliance requirements. Customers see and feel the pleasure or pain of your business process management abilities. BPM’s two forks But there’s a dissonance in BPM […]

How do you improve the whole organization, not just parts of it? The über challenge for process improvement in organizations has always been to successfully make improvements across functions. But have any sizable organizations assigned people to manage their major end-to-end processes — and actually been successful? I got this question from a process leader at […]

Just today the Wall Street Journal reported that Avon is halting the rollout of an SAP upgrade that ultimately will cost them up to $125 million. This is a messy story that isn’t unique in the market. From the WSJ: Avon began using the new order management software system in Canada in the second quarter. […]

When, during a vendor presentation, the PowerPoint section separator mentions ‘Key Case Studies’ or something like that, you do one of the following – Lean forward in your chair and listen intently to see parallels to your own situation Yawn involuntarily. Or voluntarily, depending on who is running the slides. Pay great attention to the section […]

In his brand-new book, You Think You Are Doing Well? Become a Winner with Customer-centric Process Leadership, Janne Ohtonen has created what may well be the best primer on BPM to date. The book is written as a 52-week series of chapters that cover a broad range of business process management topics. Each is meant to be digestible […]

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 […]