Application Development Tools

Do you know your business processes well enough to outsource them?

If you read the Daily Telegraph you might have come across the Media  Planet supplement “Sourcing” last Tuesday (March 17th); it had the strap line “Utilising sourcing as part of your business strategy”.

Of course we are all pretty familiar with the now standard model of outsourcing, or off-shoring software development. There are numerous destinations for this, Eastern Europe and India being most common, butalso far eastern countries like China and the Philippines.

Also, we are pretty familiar with outsourcing departments, like Customer Services and Back Office.

But what about outsourcing Business Processes ?

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Easing the ‘complexity’ of BPMN

As a consultant with a business and systems modeling tool vendor, the conversations I have involving business analysts invariably seem to turn to the perceived complexity of the business process modeling notation (BPMN).

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Why? Identifying the purpose of business systems

Those familiar with the Zachman framework will recognise the need for identifying the ‘Why?’, and certainly I’ve come across many projects where without a clear indicator of the business reasoning behind development of new systems, those systems have, not surprisingly, failed to fully meet the business needs. Read the rest of this entry »

One man’s goal is another man’s objective

In my travels in recent weeks, talking to clients about the business motivation model, I’ve been struck by the number of folks who have welcomed the BMM simply because it provides a definition and context for business planning terms like goal and objective. While many have tried to communicate their business plan to a wider internal audience, it seems that too much time is often spent simply agreeing the meaning of the vocabulary in use. The application of a defined meta-model for business strategy should allow them to move more quickly beyond the semantics and into the plan itself. Read the rest of this entry »