Defining Document Management - Dec 2006

Here's a good one on defining Document Management or Enterprise Content Management. Looks like AIIM needs to do a better job of popularizing a common definition of these terms - these are hardly new technologies anymore, but the terms have been so broadly used for so many different things that confusion abounds in the market.

"What document management and workflow applications mean to your enterprise

By Maryse de la Giroday

Have you heard the story about the blindfolded people, each given a part of an elephant to touch and are then asked to describe the rest of the animal? The person at the tail describes a very different animal than the person at the ears or the one at the feet and so on. Well, except for the fact that we’re not wearing blindfolds, we’re in pretty much the same situation when it comes to discussing document management. All the questions you ask about document management and the answers you receive reflect yours or the vendor’s perspective.""

technorati tags: document+management, enterprise+content+management, ecm, dms, AIIM, EMC, Filenet, IBM, Documentum, Kofax, Newgen+Software, OmniDocs

DMS: the Indian angle - Express Computer

DMS: the Indian angle - Express Computer: "DMS: the Indian angle"

"New-found enthusiasm among government organisations to leverage IT as an enabler for their growth is propelling DMS adoption. Vendors foresee an opportunity in providing state-of-the-art products and solutions to Indian enterprises that are setting up offices abroad, as well as to MNCs coming to India. The rapid growth in telecom, manufacturing and retail has added fuel to this fire. The telecom sector expects to tap 500 million consumers by 2010. Forecasts Diwakar Nigam, MD, NewGen, “Greater storage capabilities and tools for automated management of data, increased demands of mobile users, integration of other enterprise applications with the DMS, superior workflow capabilities providing quick access to voluminous information such as high-quality video and pictorial data (in addition to the traditional documents flow), and last but not the least, compliance, will drive the market in India.”

Things are really hotting up in the Indian market - and Document Management is an idea whose time has really come. ‘‘Owing to the large number of public sector enterprises, which are still paper-based, there is considerable scope for DMS in India. Due to continuous geographical expansion and the launch of new operations, enterprises are demanding solutions to manage their massive amount of content, both structured and unstructured.’’ says Diwakar Nigam, Managing Director, Newgen Software.

technorati tags: ECM, Enterprise+Content+Management, Document+Management, Newgen+Software, Diwakar+Nigam

More on defining Business Process Management (BPM)

Here's quite a telling post on the WFMC (Workflow Management Coalition) bulletin board. It seems clear that the organizations promoting BPM have themselves been unable to come to grips with defining what exactly is BPM. Here's an excerpt "We have a definition for Workflow, and Business Process in the glossary. Now we need a definition of BPM that we all agree on. We need this urgently for the asia tour." Read the full post here.

The situation gets even more complicated as AIIM continues to treat BPM as part of the overall Enterprise Content Management(ECM) domain. Click here for more.

technorati tags: BPM, BPMS, Business+Process+Management, ECM, Enterprise+Content+Management, AIIM, WFMC

Defining BPM (Business Process Management)

An attempt to compile the various definitions of BPM floating around, on a rainy Bay area winter morning:

• The term Business Process Management (or BPM) refers to activities performed by businesses to optimize and adapt their processes. (Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_process_management)

• Business process management (BPM) is a systematic approach to improving an organization's business processes. BPM activities seek to make business processes more effective, more efficient, and more capable of adapting to an ever-changing environment. BPM is a subset of infrastructure management, the administrative area of concern dealing with maintenance and optimization of an organization's equipment and core operations. A business process is a set of coordinated tasks and activities, conducted by both people and equipment, that will lead to accomplishing a specific organizational goal. (from http://searchcio.techtarget.com/sDefinition/0,,sid19_gci1088464,00.html)

• Business Process Management it is a term that describes activities and (or) events which are performed to optimize a business process. These activities are aided by software tools. These types of software tools are also called BPM tools. (from http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/B/BPM.html)

• The BPM Group defines full cycle BPM as including:

• Discovery – the ability to reveal the current situation around the organisations business processes including people skills and aptitude, systems usage and usefulness for process integration, managements understanding and process maturity.
• Analysis – moving beyond ‘mapping’ of activities and tasks into aspects such as change capability within processes, ideas concerning business performance and the ways and means by which we understand our organisation and its objectives.
• Design – turning the Discovery, and knowledge acquired, with the Analysis, and understanding developed into a meaningful design. Again this must encompass not just the visible process flows and interaction but the supporting and managing frameworks, from management communication mechanisms to approaches to change etc.
• Validation – ensuring that what we are planning to do, what we actually do, and then how we learn and develop BPM further is logical and sound. At a simple level this may involve feedback loops, process audits, skills profiling and score-carding.
• Implement – moving from Design & Validation, which may be related into conceptual, logical and physical, into roll out of new ways of working. The implementation again goes beyond the technology and includes such aspects as people skills development, organisation shape and objectives and utilisation of best practice approaches to help achieve optimum implementation.
• Integration – one of the strengths of a full life cycle BPM approach is its ability to include and complement existing ways of working and at the same time migrate to powerful and compelling new ways of working. Contrast that with Process Re-engineering’s slash and burn approach with often disastrous consequences.
• Control – ensuring that all that is done is complete, effective and sustainable. Many solutions misunderstand this stage and implement report mechanisms and measurement processes that inadequately link to people issues, management objectives and organisation capability.
• Improvement – moving to a continuous and step change capable BPM Framework that allows and enables ongoing change and improving mastery of process.

More to follow...

Please feel free to add your definition(s)

technorati tags: BPM, BPMS, Business+Process+Management, Definition

Less coding, less outsourcing?

Less coding, less outsourcing?

Posted by Joe McKendrick @ 1:15 pm
http://blogs.zdnet.com/service-oriented/index.php?p=764

Will SOA take away a lot of outsourcers' business? Or will its impact be negligible?
Joe makes a good point here - technologies like SOA, and may I add BPM (Business Process Management), will have significant impact on the amount of coding going on in many large organizations. SOA's promise of reusable services and standard interfaces, combined with the revolutionary shift in way applications are developed using Business Process Management Suites will result in organizations becoming more and more adept at continuously modifying their information systems to keep in line with business requirements, without requiring down and dirty software coding.

However, in the short run it actually creates a lot of outsourcing potential as organizations rework legacy applications to bring them into the SOA framework. Also, there is a good chance that as SOA and BPM improve the agility of organizations in acting proactively or reacting to business needs, there will be considerably more work done in the future - and that would make up for any reduction in outsourcing. Outsourcing vendors are also keeping this in mind and upgrading their offerings from coding to business analysis, process consulting, etc.

Tags: BPM, BPMS, Business Process Management, Outsourcing, SOA, Service Oriented Architecture, Web Services, Legacy, Offshore

ECM consolidation - afterthought to my earlier post

I think SAP might beat HP to the next announcement - by OpenText's silence it looks like SAP buys OpenText is the next big announcement! Any betting men out there want to define the odds?

technorati tags: ECM, consolidation, stellent, oracle, opentext, hp, sap

Another one bites the dust - ECM Consolidation Juggernaut continues

Oracle announced its bid for acquiring Stellent yesterday - most people were expecting Oracle to be the likely suitor for Filenet a couple of months ago. Stellent is a poor cousin to Filenet - but then Oracle has a need to fill the ECM gap in their product portfolio and Stellent may just do that.

What it doesn't bring to Oracle is the strong business process management / workflow platform that they would have got from Filenet. But I guess they could make an interesting play combining their BPEL Server (the one they acquired from Collaxa and is now renamed to be part of their Fusion middleware) with Stellent's ECM.

Stellent itself was mostly a web content management company till a few years back when they acquired Optika - a Filenet wannabe with strong Imaging and Workflow solutions. It will be interesting how this mix and match portfolio will be integrated into Oracle's offerings.

I guess now that Oracle has played its hand, the speculation moves on the next big acquisition - HP and Microsoft are the likely ones to make such an announcement. My bet is on HP acquiring either Opentext, Interwoven or Vignette within the next quarter.

technorati tags: ecm, consolidation, acquisition, document+management, imaging, workflow, bpm, bpel, oracle, stellent, hp, opentext, microsoft, vignette, interwoven

Sarb-Ox Compliance: Five Lessons to Reduce Cost and Effort

Sarb-Ox Compliance: Five Lessons to Reduce Cost and Effort

The article correctly identifies the need for implementing financial compliance process management software. Newgen OmniCompliance - built on the award winning Newgen OmniFlow Business Process Management Suite offers out-of-the-box implementation of COSO framework along with an unparalleled process modeling interface to tweak and modify control and audit processes to individual enterprise requirements. Look up http://www.newgensoft.com/2005/products/omnicompliance.htm for more information

ECM Acquisitions: What's Going On? -- CMS Watch

ECM Acquisitions: What's Going On? -- CMS Watch: "ECM Acquisitions: What's Going On?"

Seriously, everyone saw it coming - I mean the sell-out of Filenet, but all were pointing to Oracle and HP as the potential suitors. I guess most people thought that IBM already had a very well rounded ECM and BPM product suite and they didn't need a high priced acquisition like Filenet. However, what's interesting to note is that IBM was coming in third in the rankings - behind Filenet and EMC and this firmly puts them back in the lead - by a considerable margin.

It will be interesting to see where IBM goes with this - already there is a lot of confusion in the IBM portfolio with BPM coming under there Websphere product group and Content Manager coming under their DB2 group. Are they gonna split up the Filenet products into ECM and BPM and have two different groups handle it?

technorati tags: bpm, bpms, business+process+management, filenet, ibm, hp, hewlett+packard, ecm, enterprise+content+management, acquisition, merger, consolidation,

David Ogren's BPM Blog - ebizQ

David Ogren on the difference begtween BPM and SOA - "The difference, fundamentally, is the direction at which SOA and BPM approach the problem. BPM starts with a business process and develops a solution from top down. SOA starts of an existing catalog of services and builds up. As a result, BPM projects tends to be tactical and SOA projects tends to be strategic."

Innovation through Co-Creation

SandHill.com | Management | Innovation through Co-Creation:

Dr. C.K. Prahalad has identified technology to atomate Business Processes as a key opportunity for IT vendors today and into the future in this article on SandHill.com

"Opportunities for Technology Vendors

At a time when personalization, flexibility and scalability are key considerations for enterprises, the entire IT industry must redirect its focus to the areas which matter most for businesses.

# Interoperability - Much attention is focused on open source. While many consider the greatest value of open source is that it is 'free,' the reality is that the main advantage of open source is its interoperability. Is the industry putting enough energy behind delivering on open source's potential for interoperability and transparency?

# Large Databases - Ten terabytes used to be considered a large database. Today, WalMart is working with approximately 500 terabytes-worth of data. There is a huge opportunity to increase the size and speed with which data is accessed. These systems must go beyond providing decision tools to providing more sophisticated analyses. They must perform data mining and understand behaviors through analytical models - both industry-oriented and strategy-oriented. There is a huge opportunity for application developers to be analytically focused.

# Simple Interfaces - Whether for an on-demand application, a database or a large network, there is a huge opportunity to improve user interfaces. Increasingly, people with less experience or lower-level skills will be using the systems. Software vendors must work to create less-complex user interfaces, ones not dependent on language skills, yet functional enough to deliver productivity to users with higher skill sets as well. Take OnStar. You press a button and hear a human voice. There is no training required.

# Business Processes - Dell can turn over its inventory 100-times during the same time that HP converts 10-15-times. UPS can handle packages so efficiently that it created a new industry called 'logistics.' FedEx invites customers into its operations to gather critical data. The common thread for these competitive advantages is that they are all driven by business processes. These companies have leveraged a deep understanding of their business operations and converted it into a competitive weapon. Technology to automate these areas will be critical in the coming years."

I think that as always Dr. Prahalad is right on the mark here. Processes are the main differentiator in today's economy focused on operational excellence. And software tools that automate, control, monitor and manage these processes are the key enablers for continuous process improvement.

technorati tags: BPM,, BPMS,, Dr+Prahalad

ECM - and then there were fewer left

The consolidation in ECM (Enterprise Content Management) industry seems to be unstoppable - no one seems to be able to buck the trend - it's an open question as to how long Filenet will survive as an independent company.

The latest one to bite the dust maybe Hummingbird http://www.hummingbird.com. After reports in May that they were selling out to Symphony Technology Services, OpenText today hiked the offer price by $1 over the Symphony Offer. OpenText and Hummingbird make sense from a geographical standpoint - two Canadian companies in the ECM space. From a product standpoint though, there is a lot of overlap - I guess only one set of products will survive eventually. OpenText does stand to double its installed base though if this merger goes through.

technorati tags: ECM, Enterprise, Content, Management, BPM, Document, Management, Canada, Acquisition, Merger, Consolidation,

Agile Outsourcing

"Communication barriers, time zone and cultural differences all hinder offshore development. But what if offshore titans learn to work with collaborative techniques?" By Scott W. Ambler

Scott has written an article very close to our hearts. My company and I have been involved in many large and small product development outsourcing projects over the last decade. We ourselves have seen the great difference made by collaboration tools over this period. When we started in mid 90's, Internet basically meant email only as far as enabling collaboration between far-flung members of a software development team. Then came Instant Messenger - and that was the first dramatic step. At a time when international telephony costs were astronomical (I remember at one time paying more than $1 per minute between USA and India), instant messengers really enabled team members to be always connected.

At that time online collaboration tools for project management were still not there - eRooms - that Documentum bought out later was one of the first major one. However, my company was building its own workflow and document management products at the time, and we came up with Newgen eWorkStyle - a web-based collaboration suite that provided project spaces, integrated document management, workflow, bulletin boards, messaging, group calendar and other tools. The product may have been a little ahead of time as far as the Asian markets were concerned, but we ourselves have been using it for our Outsourced Product Development business ever since.

Today, we have many projects where teams span 3 or 4 countries - e.g. R&D in Japan, Product Management in USA, Marketing inputs from USA and Europe, etc. Use of Newgen eWorkStyle and other collaborative tools like a secure, within the firewall implementation of Jabber instant messenger, GotoMeeting, GotoMyPC, etc. enables team members to be literally on the same page. Some time back we also started using Web 2.0 and Office 2.0 tools - Google Spreadsheet is an excellent example. Other tools we use are Open Office, Writely, Thumbstacks, Zoho, etc.

If you would like to have more information about Newgen's multi-shore Outsourced Product Development services and how we use collaboration tools to bring teams close together, write me an email at sanjay [at] newgen [dot] net.

You can read Scott's full article at Dr. Dobb's Portal

IT Redux - The 10 Flatteners

I attended a very interesting event this morning - arranged by Ismael Ghalimi, CEO of Intalio. Apart from being CEO of Intalio, Ismael is also a leading proponent of Office 2.0 and the convergence of SOA/BPM with simple, next generation front-end interfaces like those provided by Office 2.0 applications. Apart from my interest in the BPM space and outsourcing (both of which are my company's commercial offerings), it was the title of the event that tickled me into attending.

Ever since Tom Friedman's book came out, outsourcing has moved out from being discussed in only technology and business circles to being discussed in every social circle. Indeed, the impact of this book is so great, I sometimes call it the best brochureware for the Indian and other offshore outsourcing vendors. The case Friedman makes is both compelling and self evident. And Ismael did a good job of connecting Friedman's postulates with his own anecdotes and show a way for small technology companies to leverage this macro level global shift.

The event was co-sponsored by an outsourcing company called Lohika ("Logic" in Ukrainian) from Ukraine - seemed like an enthusiastic bunch of people and must be doing a great job for Intalio for Ismael to endorse them so publicly. Of course, Lohika gave a good pitch for why Ukraine and their company is a good outsourcing partner to small to mid-size product companies. However, the larger lesson is that all startups and small to mid-size companies need to have a very active outsourcing strategy as an integral part of their business plan if they want to succeed. And as Lohika's VP of Engineering put it very well, it's not just about cost anymore -of course cost is the key driving factor - we wouldn't be talking outsourcing today if it weren't for cost, but lower cost is a given with any offshore outsourcing plan. However, cost is not a determining factor when it comes to your choice of outsourcing partner. The points that Lohika made were:

- Partnership
- Innovation
- Requirement specification process

I may want to add to that and say that the key to finding a good partner is to find one that has a good track record in onboarding (bringing requisite skills on board), training and retention, ability to handle up and down movement in resource levels, and mature processes and quality standards.

On innovation, I must point out that if you are a product development company, hiring an IT services company will not work - you need a partner with a product development mindset. Commercial software products are developed keeping in mind the requirements of hundreds of thousands, if not millions of customers - very different from a custom application development project. The software engineering processes, the innovation mindset, the quality standards are all very different in case of product development outsourcing.

Of course finding such partners is no easy task - I might want to plug for my company here - apart from providing outsourced product development services to our partners, we are first and foremost a product development company ourselves. My company - Newgen Software (www.newgensoft.com) - is the leading provider of BPMS and ECM suites in India and Asia. We have translated our ability to develop and market software products into a winning service for our partners.

Well, running out of time - gotta rush for my post lunch meeting. However I will post some more later - specially on Ismael's points about the open source model and his company's unique approach to sales and marketing. There are some good pointers there for the way these things would be done in the future - but there are also things to be cautious about - it ain't as easy as it seems.

technorati tags: BPM, friedman, the+world+is+flat, outsourcing, offshore, product, development, software, office+2.0, web+2.0

Words of wisdom from Peter Drucker that BPM practitioners might want to pay heed to

So much of what we call management consists in making it difficult for people to work.
- Peter Drucker

technorati tags: peter+drucker, BPM, management

Gartner BPM Summit

I'm attending the Gartner BPM Summit for the first time this year. The location is great - Opryland in Nashville. While I have a passing interest in country music, my brother is somewhat of an authority on it - he finished a Master's program in ethno-musicology in another Tennessee university and went on to do a doctorate in the same. Anyway, it's a curious location - high-tech combined with old world tradition.

I hope to be blogging about my experiences at the Gartner summit - I don't know if Gartner is doing anything special for bloggers - if you know anything about it do let me know. Also, I'd like to meet other bloggers who are attending Gartner BPM summit. You can leave me a message on this blog and we can get together at conference venue.

BEA's acquisition of Fuego - and its impact on valuation of other BPM vendors

BEA bought Fuego for $87.5 million, almost 6-8 times Fuego's last year revenues which were in the $11-$14 million range. What does that say about the valuation of other BPM vendors? How about Ultimus - as per Deloitte and Touche Technology Fast 500, Ultimus had revenues of over $18 million in 2004. Given their excellent growth rate, they must have done anywhere between $30-$35 million in 2005. So are we looking at a possible $200 million plus buyout for Ultimus? I'm sure Rashid must be running these figures in his mind right now :-)

As BPM becomes more mainstream, a consolidation is bound to occur and some of these companies make excellent targets for big players like Microsoft and others who are still rounding up their portfolios.

Compliance and the CIO - Express Computer

Compliance is becoming top priority for CIO's - not only in USA but also in India as Indian companies increasingly become an integral part of the global supply chain. “Compliance is moving away from being seen as a cost-oriented process forced upon organisations to being an absolute imperative for smooth business operations, although limited to large organisations where IT is mission-critical,” says Diwakar Nigam, Chairman and CEO of India's leading provider of BPM and ECM solutions. Newgen's Compliance Manager - built on the class leading Newgen OmniFlow platform is providing Indian companies and excellent tool to get their compliance projects up to speed.

Check out more details here.

BEA Buys Fuego for $87.5M

BPM is headed for prime time - IBM has always been a big player, TIBCO bought Staffware a coupleo years back, last year Oracle made some big moves and bought Collaxa, Microsoft with its BizTalk suite has been dabbling for some time - an now BEA makes a big commitment shelling out almost a 100 million dollars to buy Fuego. I wonder what this would mean for the remaining independent pure plays in the market - Ultimus, Handysoft, Intalio, Savvion, etc.

IT|Redux � The World is Flat

Here's a great piece relating the 10 flatteners from Tom Friedman's "the World is Flat" and the rise of BPM.

IT|Redux � The World is Flat

technorati tags: BPM, SAAS, SOA, The+World+is+Flat, Thomas, Friedman, Intalio, Business+Process+Management

Active Journal of Business Process Management

Here's another good blog on BPM that I came across recently. They have a nice collection of articles on BPM and some product reviews. Look it up at

technorati tags: bpm, business, process, management, him, human, interaction, management

HIM - Human Interaction Management

There's a new buzzword in the BPM space - HIM (Human Interactions Management

Human Interaction Management: "There are a number of collaborative activities that go beyond workflow and knowledge management, which I call human interaction management, and that is going to be the next envelope pushed in the whole BPM space." - Peter Fingar

While I appreciate the new focus on the human side of processes, I am not sure that this is entirely new. Wasn't Workflow and then BPM supposed to be able to take care of both machine to machine and machine to human interactions in a process? Maybe I am missing something here. Please feel free to share your thoughts...

technorati tags: HIM, human, interaction, management, business, process, management, bpm

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Five Reasons to Invest in Process Management

Intelligent Enterprise Magazine: Analysis: Five Reasons to Invest in Process Management: "BPM is both a management philosophy and a software tool. As a management philosophy, it calls for organizations to document, analyze and measure their business activities not in terms of discrete functions such as marketing, sales, manufacturing and customer service but in terms of end-to-end business processes that cross functional boundaries."

Very precise article by Bruce Silver - he does a great job of capturing the essence of BPM solutions and articulating the benefits in simple, yet powerful terms.

CIOs strive to improve business processes | InfoWorld | News | 2006-01-23 | By Elizabeth Montalbano, IDG News Service

While the top business priority is improving business processes, top technology priority is business intelligence applications.

Although I can appreciate how business intelligence applications may help in improving business processes, I am kind of surprised that BPM suites do not get a mention in this survey - or maybe I am missing something here. Would appreciate any comments from readers who have access to the full survey.

Survey: CIOs strive to improve business processes | InfoWorld | News | 2006-01-23 | By Elizabeth Montalbano, IDG News Service: "A recent survey of global chief information officers (CIOs) found that using IT to make improvements to a company's business processes is the top priority for them in 2006, according to Gartner Inc."

Business Standard - Serious Developer - Profile of Mr. Diwakar Nigam

Business Standard is profiling some of the luminaries of the Indian IT industry. This one features Mr. Diwakar Nigam - often regarded as the original software product leader in India. While most other Indian IT companies focused on delivering IT services, Diwakar carried the torch in terms of building his own intellectual property and delivering products and solutions that were truly "Made in India".

ICE World

Let the Good Times Roll by Guy Kawasaki: The Top Ten Lies of Entrepreneurs

Let the Good Times Roll by Guy Kawasaki: The Top Ten Lies of Entrepreneurs: "Blogger. n. Someone with nothing to say writing for someone with nothing to do."

Newgen Software helps SEC, Philippines improve access to company information

Newgen Software - India's leading provider of Business Process Management and Document Management solutions recently assisted Philippines' Securities and Exchange Commission launch an Internet-based service that aims to ease and hasten access to information on companies.

This is just one in a long string of successes that New Delhi based Newgen Software Technologies has achieved in the last few years after it started leveraging its leadership position in BPM and EDMS in the Indian market. Today Newgen is perhaps the leading provider of such solutions in much of Asia, Middle East, even Africa.

Companies like Newgen have a lot to offer to Enterprise and Government customers in Asia - their focus on end-to-end solution delivery, leverage of their own IPR (intellectual property rights), offshore resource base and pricing, understanding of application requirements attained over almost 15 years of experience in these markets give them an edge over US based majors in these areas.

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