Talk:Business Process Management

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This article should probably be merged with process management.

I would disagree, as this subject has far more specificity than process management while it is also increasing in scope and depth at a rapid pace. Also I disagree in that WORKFLOW software is a very specific thing, whereas Business Process is broad. If you have a business process of course you manage it, however BPR and CPI are facets of that management that may or may not include workflow software.

The first comment refers to the original article before it was rewritten. As I rewrote it, I agree, of course, that BPM is a more specifc topic than process management.

Under Process Monitoring I do not understand the paragraph "There is also a growing interest ... analysis that is typically not available.". Can anybody (the original author?) clarify what is meant here?

08.06.05 I have removed some vendors, who IMHO did not seem to really be BPM vendors. I am unsure about Virtuoso Universal Server which probably would be better situated in the service oriented architecure age.

15.June.05 - This article reads a bit like a vendor sales pitch, in that it is full of superlatives stating that the software is absolutely marvellous. I would suggest toning it down for a more NPOV. Also tie to the word workflow.

26.June.05 - I agree fully with the previous comment, this is more a sales pitch than a wikipedia article.

02 July 05 - Removed Fuji Xerox Australia from web resources. The web resources were intended to point a reader to sites with a (hopefully) neutral point of view. The products section was intended for vendors (and even here I’ve noticed that vendors creep in without any real relevance to the topic). This brings me on to the last two comments. When I rewrote the article I tried also to avoid a sales pitch. Do the authors of the previous two comments have any thing particular in mind which could be changed?

29 Nov 05 - Somebody out there has placed back the text concerning "relational data" pretty quickly after I have deleted it. My reason for deleting it was that I (and others) could not understand it (see previous entry here). Could the author maybe clarify what it means?

Contents 1 Trying not to have the article in limbo 2 Vendors?? 3 Visio link 4 Does this site worth to be mentioned? 5 Buzzword bingo

[edit] Trying not to have the article in limbo

There are systems out there which implement BPM very well. The article is presented almost as a constant comparison with the past, rather than presenting current advances. A history section may be appropriate for a short comparison with the past. It is also filled with Weasel words, which I would rather not be in an encyclopedic article. Ansell 01:30, 10 March 2006 (UTC)

I think the biggest problem with BPM is that there is still a big "disagreement" of what BPM encompases. Maybe the best thing todo is to add links to blogs of the current "thought leaders" in the space, like (Bruce Silver, Phil Gilbert, | Ismael Galimi, Sandy Kemsly and others). I'm just worried that vendors will fight over what the "current advances" are and this article will be ruined. -- Mortenmo 18:29, 25 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Vendors??

Is it usual to have list of commercial vendors on pages about processes? Are there any guidelines about this? Ansell 08:43, 29 March 2006 (UTC)

It is only usual because it is usual for commercial vendors to obsessively add their name and link to these pages :) They shouldn't be there unless they are vital to a discussion of the topic, and should always be removed. I have removed what I felt was every commercial vendor from this page, and left links that seemed helpful and not commercial (for example, many directory sites exist only for commercial purposes - these are not appropriate). -- Renesis13 18:22, 29 March 2006 (UTC)

Keeping this "clean" of commercial vendors is a tiresome effort. Maybe instead there can be another page for "BPMS Vendors" similar to the List_of_BPEL_engines and let the commercial vendors have their fun there? -- Mortenmo 18:21, 25 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Visio link

The inclusion of a link to Microsoft Visio, while I can see why it could be there, may not be the best example, as it does not produce system-readable models. It simply produces graphics. A better example would be a designer which can be translated into a system readable form. [1]

Ansell 12:07, 10 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Does this site worth to be mentioned?

Business Process Management Initiative (BPMI.org)

http://www.bpmi.org/

I have also found some of the product vendors for the subject. Would any gurus in this field please find time to review them?

http://www.fuego.com

http://www.lombardisoftware.com/bpm-resource-center.php

http://www.handysoft.com/

http://www.capterra.com/business-process-management-software

http://www.rossinc.com/

http://www.sageadonix.com/

My attitude with regards to external links is that they are not there to "promote" people. They are immediately relvant to the subject of the page in an encyclopedic sense, as opposed to an advertising sense. Which leads me to think that all of the links are going to be rejected for use on the main page. Ansell 07:32, 16 October 2006 (UTC)

The problem with mentioning vendors is who is going to decide which is out and which is in? There are over 200+ vendors that has some claim to this area and only a small fraction is probably legit. People just want to be on wikipedia pages to get higher google pagerank scores. It will fast turn into advertisement instead of informational. If there is some limit, who sets it? One can use Forrester Research BPM-Wave or Gartners BPMS magic quadrant leaders, but it will be hard to enforce. But this is just my opinion; it is better just to leave it out. -- Mortenmo 01:57, 17 October 2006 (UTC)

If I am not mistaken, linking to pages from here do not affect pagerank. There is an instruction to robots that tells them "'robots' content='noindex,nofollow'", and hence pagerank of links from the page is not affected. There is still the obvious advertisement quality as Wikipedia pages tend to be in the top ten more regularly than not for topics, and there is no restriction on people following links out after that. Ansell 05:10, 17 October 2006 (UTC)

In terms that who is in and who is out, the information providved by the Web of Science is more authentic and scientific than other commercial site, at far as I know.

If I was able to access to the WOS content, I would provide unbiased review as accurately as possible

I have access to WOS, what would you be looking for specifically. Note, you should be able to browse Abstracts without having a subscription, so you should know what you need to see. I actually think that IEEE and LNCS also have very good material btw, from my research in the area. Ansell 07:02, 18 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Buzzword bingo

I will be perfectly honest. I tend to think that many articles about business management are thinly veiled consultant spam, and written in such vaguely abstract terms as to be entirely devoid of worthwhile information. This one is another.

I've been asked what specific problems I have with the prose in this article, but in fact the article is so vaguely and abstractly phrased that it is hard to make any suggestion for concrete improvements. Passages like:

The activities which constitute business process management can be grouped into three categories: design, execution and monitoring.

remind me of Monty Python's theory about the brontosaurus, that it was thin on both ends and fat in the middle. This entirely a rhetorical tautology. It tells us in effect that any acts compassed in "business process management" involve either thinking them up, doing them, or watching them being done. Anyone given with sufficient leisure and a vocabulary of vaguely abstract words can think up this sort of bollocks. The sentence just contains no information.

This encompasses either the design or capture of existing processes. In addition the processes may be simulated in order to test them. The software support for these activities consists of graphical editors to document the processes and repositories to store the process models.

An emphasis on getting the design of the process right will logically lead to better results as the flow on effect of problems at the design stage logically affects a large number of parts in an integrated system.

This too is incredibly vague and abstract, all about "processes" and "systems." But all of a sudden a relatively concrete noun - software! - appears, even though nothing about the vague talk about systems and processes even suggests that software is needed. I suspect that all of the process and systems talk is an attempt to glorify the output of flowchart software, and to make vaguely grandiose claims about how more flowcharts will improve anything and everything about your business. - Smerdis of Tlön 14:52, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

I fear that the very statements which you claim are vacuous are the very ones which, if understood, would invalid your later remarks. The passage you assert as a rhetorical tautology actually states that BPM consists of three groups of activities, i.e. not one or two, but all three. The activities are explained later in the article. Understanding this means that flowcharting software alone is only part of business process management. The claim that the article is an “ … attempt to glorify the output of flowchart software ...” is therefore just simply missing the point.

Secondly you imply that the word “process” is too vague and abstract. Although process has not been defined in the article, a reference is made at the beginning to another Wikipedia article.

Thirdly, I find the use of the word “bollocks” rather offensive. Perhaps this has something to do with my origins and age (born in the UK in the middle 50s) - adoble 17:50, 6 December 2006 (CET) (This edit was made by 194.45.150.17)

I diagree with your notion of buzzwords. Processes and systems are concrete nouns. I just completed my honours thesis dealing with this area, and it was not dealing with buzzwords. Calling an academic discipline, and it most certainly is an academic discipline recognised by universities, and written up in journals, "bollocks" is not be the best reason for a tag such as the buzzwords tag.

The statement about the three area involved, which you think of as a tautology, is a simple description of the area. Feeling that the description is too simple should not imply that it does not contain content.

The python joke is misleading in this case. It implies that the whole area is so easy that anyone could actually do it using common-sense, where it is not actually that simple. I will remove the buzzwords tag unless someone has an academic reason why it should remain. Ansell 23:40, 7 December 2006 (UTC)