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Six Sigma: So Yesterday?

I guess I missed it when this article first published in June. Here's a quote from the BusinessWeek article - it's quite telling and resonates with a lot of us.

" But as its popularity endures, the notion of Six Sigma as a corporate cure-all is subsiding. Once a company has done the requisite belt-tightening, "the strategic needs of a business change," says Robert Carter, a consultant at defense contractor Raytheon (RTN ). Kick-starting the top line becomes paramount; the best way there apart from an acquisition is innovation. At Raytheon, Carter is leading a Six Sigma effort to promote innovation. But while "most Six Sigma practitioners are very strong on the left brain, innovation very much starts in the right hemisphere," says Carter. Even he, a Six Sigma expert, acknowledges the "define, measure, analyze, improve, control" mind-set doesn't entirely gel with the fuzzy front-end of invention. When an idea starts germinating, Carter says, "you don't want to overanalyze it," which can happen in a traditional DMAIC framework."

Six Sigma also has a lot of overlap with Business Process Improvement efforts in Enterprises. However, I truly believe that unless Enterprises start looking at BPMS as an enabler for process and business innovation as opposed to process efficiencies, they will be using only half the potential.

The Role of Business Process Management in SOA

The Role of Business Process Management in SOA

A good article by Sandy Carter of IBM that addresses the relationship between BPM and SOA - both of which are top of the mind for CIO's and IT managers today. Sandy talks about the complimentary relationship between BPM and SOA - "BPM is growing in popularity and is complementary to SOA due to its ability to help make business processes more efficient and effective while enabling an organization to more easily adapt to changing business requirements. BPM based on SOA is technology's response to the growing demand for a flexible business environment that is not hindered by application silos."

This is quite helpful to vendors like us as it clearly identifies the relationship between BPM and SOA as being complimentary. Lot of people use BPM and SOA interchangeably which creates a lot of confusion and unrealistic expectations.

Another quotation on note here is this one that equates SOA to speed and agility of the IT organization for implementing and integrating process automation components, while BPM helps business analysts achieve speed and agility in designing the process.

"For BPM to be successful and valuable to the enterprise, the speed and agility of IT organizations implementing and integrating the process automation components must match the speed and agility of business analysts redesigning the process.

Just as BPM capabilities needed to evolve over time to add flexibility to process design, so too do application integration systems need to evolve to automate the new flexibility processes in the real world. This integration evolution requires the ability to create independence between process and service implementation, and to remove the tight coupling between a specific integration technology and individual business applications. This is where SOA comes in because it provides the technical ability to create that process implementation independence."

A good case study on the interrelationship between BPM and SOA can be found on my company's website http://www.newgensoft.com/images/cs_emea9.pdf.

If you are looking at implementing BPM+SOA initiatives in your organization, be sure to put Newgen Software on your list of vendors that can help you achieve the often promised yet rarely delivered speed and agility.

ECM Vendors - and then there was one less left standing

The ECM marketplace consolidation juggernaut continues. Today Mobius Management Systems announced it was being acquired by Allen Systems Group. One wonders who's gonna be the next one on the block - there aren't that many left out there. Vignette, Interwoven, Hyland Software and Laserfiche are the ones that look likely. Woodrow probably sums it up best in his blog here.