Justifying the IT Budget: the Cost of Not Spending

“Competitive and ever-increasingly sophisticated in the marketplace[1]” describes a company positioned for long term business survival. Complacency takes the business nowhere but into irrelevance-land, which I think we can all agree is not where most business owners wish to end up… it makes selling the company slightly more challenging. Even in markets which were once firmly held to be localized are now open to new – and new kinds of – competitors, due in most part to advancements the development of information technology (IT) as well as how it is applied. These days, competition is globally facilitated rather than locally, and it’s becoming the standard approach. Welcome to the cloud.

DIY Business Process Applications: Wish vs. Reality

BPM systems are highly demanding in terms of scalability, traceability, serviceability and security. This results in a plethora of technical questions and requirements which simply ask too much of a typical business division. Why should a business user concern himself in detail with these sorts of questions, given that solving the problems they raise frequently extends far beyond his area of influence?

Analysis of Business Processes

For the sake of this discussion, I will lump a Business Process Management [BPM] project into 4 categories – Analysis, Design, Construction and Implementation.

It has been my experience that the analysis and design categories usually take up about 75% of the project time. When expressing this opinion, most people will agree

Intuition of Things – The future of BPM in the Digital Economy

In the digital future, enabling the customer is not a choice rather a survival imperative. The ability to steer the decision making by offering non-obtrusive and peer recommended options are the best suited modes of operation. Customers are more likely to prefer organizations (and driving routes) where they believe they are in charge and are not being manipulated. Organizations are better off letting the customers decide the best process to follow since that is exactly what brings in customer centricity.

Data Democracy vs. Data Anarchy: Governed Data Discovery

Successful business intelligence has always been about negotiating the right tradeoffs between the needs of individual business people and the needs of the organization as a whole. In 2001, Bernard Liautaud, founder of self-service BI pioneer BusinessObjects  wrote a book called eBusiness Intelligence: Turning Information Into Knowledge Into Profit that discussed these tradeoffs. He drew the analogy with systems…