BPMI.org

[lfischer]

Education Task Group
BPM Think Tank,
March 3, 2005

At this meeting, 12 BPM experts gathered to make a set of recommendations to BPMI in order to help educate and inform the market about BPM. The emphasis is on education of the market, so that customers, analysts, and vendors have a common set of terms and concepts in order to promote discussion about BPM and related products.

Here are the recommendations:

• BPMI should propose a marketecture for BPM that includes
o glossary of terms, including comparison to others like WfMC
o a reference architecture and its relation to other architectures (information architecture)
o in relation to an overall enterprise
o relationship to standards bodies (WfMC, OASIS, OMG, W3C)
o relationship to analysts descriptions

• BPMI should develop guidelines
o implementation best practices and guidelines (methodology)
o relationship to other best practice advocacy groups (Academia, BPMG, BP Trends, BPM Institute)

• Provide communications recommendations to clean up the web site. Confusing articles need to be removed or modified.
Other discussions and specific recommendations (which expand upon the above) included:

• BPMI should start with the WfMC glossary as an existing set of terminology. This glossary should be reviewed, and proposals for modifications should be made and run through the process with the goal of an agreed upon glossary of terms. Other sources of glossaries should also be consulted.

• BPMI should NOT approach this task with the goal of "selling" BPM. There was general consensus that there is a slippery slope. While BPMI must not evangelize a particular approach to BPM, it is useful to the marketplace to promote BPM concepts and value.

The role of BPMI should be one of providing a common set of term and concepts so that customers, users, analysts, and vendors can discuss the relative merits of the different approaches.

• BPMI should develop tools for explaining the concepts of BPM to
o CEO
o Line of business executive
o Business process owners
o CIO
o IT people

• BPMI should NOT discuss and promote BP as a job and career goal. Instead we should form relationships with other organizations that are doing this.

• BPMI should illustrate and discuss how BPM separates the management of processes, policies, and practices as an independent unit.

• BPMI should discuss business process both as products and as a way of life. Processes are assets.

• BPMI should fix the problems with the BPMI.org web site. The general consensus was that the document library that currently exists is very confusing to the market. Many of the documents will need to be removed or amended.

• BPMI should create a set of guidelines, (methodologies, best practices) for evaluating the various methodologies for developing process oriented systems.


Posted on behalf of Keith Swenson, Task Group Leader
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Executive Director
BPMI.org