MSFT/BPM/SOA Session 4

The fourth session I attended was titled "BPM Best of Breed: Accenture, Avanade, IDS Scheer, and Microsoft - Delivering Closed Loop BPM and was presented by Brian Wilkinson (Accenture), Altan Enginaleve (IDS Scheer) and Dana Kaufman (Microsoft).

The objective of this session was to do a "deep-dive" into the demo that these same folks presented during the keynote earlier that day (which was very interesting).  What I had feared was the case, worked out to be, in fact, reality - the demo was a bit more duct-tapped together than I had hoped. The intent of the project was to illustrate to us and their customers what could be done ("paint the picture" if you will).

I have to admit that the ARIS platform was very intuitive and interesting, although I found myself a little turned off by the extensive use of Java and JDBC connections (I know, I know, but I bleed blue...). As with many of the sessions, the speakers made some general comments/points that I thought were interesting...

• Many organizations have very well documented business processes, however, those rarely reflect reality (no direct impact on execution)
• They (as consultants and based on their experience) encourage people to avoid "as-is" process modeling and focus more on "target" process modeling. In their experience, it is not uncommon to find that upwards of 80% of the "process" that existed was not tied to true requirements, but rather historical, or "just because that's how we do it" reasons. Simply focusing on what *really* needs to happen (almost ignoring for a little while how it is currently being done) can be a great source of improvement to efficiency.
• As often is the case, the starting point is processes - processes can be documented, metrics can be understood - this is not a technology problem. These (both processes and the metrics that you want to collect about those processes) must be worked out prior to any "silver technology bullet" "fixing" things.

Think Big, Start Small, Scale Fast.