Over the past few days a very timely discussion has been sloshing to and fro on ebizQ, based around the question: “Is it a mistake to think a BPMS will improve your processes?”

Our experience is that driving success with BPM techniques and technologies requires a holistic approach to capability improvement – you have to work on skills, culture, management orientation and a host of other things, as well as being prepared to invest in technology.

It’s easy to say this, of course – but it can be hard to do. Building momentum to make wide-ranging changes to an organisation can be difficult: the “silver bullet” approach to technology procurement (or the ‘Field of Dreams Fallacy‘, as David Brakoniecki puts it) is very seductive. In other words: it’s much easier to concentrate on buying a cool tool than it is to get down and wrestle with some of the wider issues.

So – to help organisations with interest in BPM understand their maturity or readiness and help them build the case for more substantive change, we’ve developed what we think is a pretty damn cool online BPM Capability Benchmark and Planning tool. You can start using it, now, for free, by visiting our tools pages.

Here’s a quick run-down of how it works.

1. Go to the online BPM Capability Benchmark and Planning tool. (You’ll need to have a free Guest Pass account to use the tool. It only takes a minute to sign up and verify your account.)
2. Complete the online self-assessment survey. It’s split into five dimensions: lifecycle, organisation, architecture and technology.
3. Save your work at any time and come back to it whenever you like to add more responses or make changes (the assessment is pretty thorough, so you might want to consult with colleagues/get more information/have a think about it and then return to complete it when you’re ready.)
4. At the end of the assessment, select to calculate your competence levels – and get your high level results immediately.Your results are saved so you can return to the tool at any time; this makes it easy to re-run the calculation as you make progress and as more benchmark data is added.

For more detailed benchmarking information (providing a breakdown for your geography, industry and company size) and a personalised action plan that highlights ‘next steps’ you should think about taking to improve your capability, you can elect to generate a really nice, professional-looking personalised BPM Action Plan report (this costs just Ł49). Once you’ve purchased the report, it’s available to you indefinitely: each time you run the report from our site, it’ll be re-generated to take account of any updates you’ve made to your assessment and also to update your benchmarks against your peer group.

One of our testers, Sebastiaan Van den Wingaert  – BPM Manager within a large shipping company actively involved in a major BPM programme – gave us a great quote:

“This is a really easy-to-use tool that gets straight to the point. The assessment confirmed that we’re heading in the right direction, but also prompted me to put additional management focus in some areas. The recommendations in our report are actually a great representation of what we have to focus on next, and are written in a way that all our stakeholders can understand.”

This is the first release in what will grow to be a bigger set of online tools over the next few months, and we’re really excited about this development. We’ve tried to ensure that anyone involved in a BPM project or programme will find the tool useful as a way to orient themselves and identify priorities for development.

So – have at it! And please do let us know of any feedback you might have.

The new MWD online shop has opened its doors! Customers can now buy all premium reports in just a few clicks: simply browse or search our research library, add reports to your basket, check out and pay. Your purchases can be downloaded as PDF documents immediately. They’re also stored on your personalised ‘my MWD’ page so you can access and download them whenever you’re logged in. No licensing hassles, just quick access, when YOU need it.

Purchasing from our online shop is easy, fast and safe. We accept payments via a range of credit and debit cards via our secure payment processor, WorldPay, a global leader in payment processing, operating in over 40 countries. All processing and storage of cardholder data is carried out by WorldPay, which has been certified PCI DSS compliant, so you can be sure your transaction is safe.

We’ve been publishing our reports digitally since MWD first began back in 2005. Indeed, our advisory clients have been able to download premium reports on-demand for several years – that’s our de facto delivery mechanism for subscription customers. In the last couple of years though, demand to purchase our reports individually has grown steadily. Until today that’s been largely a manual ‘back office’ process. But with customers based all over the world, we needed a 24/7 solution. Although prices on our site are quoted in sterling, you can convert prices to your own preferred currency at checkout, so you can pay in any currency from  the Argentian Peso to the Vietnamese Dong (and pretty much everything in between, including good ol’ US dollars of course).

We’re really pleased that customers can now purchase reports online. So pleased in fact that we want to offer all our customers a whopping 10% off ALL our premium reports purchased online. Buy reports such as Helena Schwenk’s detailed analysis of SAP’s next generation BI & IM platform: BusinessObjects 4.0 … or find out how Oxford Archaeology cut its email costs by 50% in this collaboration case study report by Angela Ashenden … or Neil Ward-Dutton’s independent review of how IBM has discovered its BPM mojo with Business Process Manager.

And that’s not all, we’re also offering 20% off report bundles for our ‘Process Intelligence’ and ‘Future of email’ reports. We’ll be offering discounts like this from time to time going forward, so make sure you’re registered for a free Guest Pass account to receive news and updates about future offers.

Finally, we’re very proud of our research and work hard to make sure we’re delivering relevant, insightful, independent, actionable advice. If you want a taster of the type of reports we publish, you can access a range of free reports by registering for a Guest Pass account (it’s free). But if you’d like to take the plunge and try out one of our premium reports you can do so with security of our satisfaction promise: if you’re not completely satisfied with the quality and relevance of the items you’ve purchased from us, let us know within 7 days of your purchase – quoting your invoice number to help us find the relevant order – and we’ll refund you in full. We can’t say fairer than that.

MWD Advisors is a relatively small company in the big scheme of things. We’re proud to provide our research and advisory services to customers around the world. We thank you for your on-going support.

We’re delighted to welcome Helena Schwenk to the MWD analyst team!

Helena joins us as Principal Analyst and will be leading our Information Management practice. Helena combines six years of expertise as a former data warehousing practitioner with ten years as an industry analyst (with analyst firm Ovum), and has a wealth of experience providing authoritative research and advice to enterprises and technology vendors.

Over the coming days and weeks Helena will be developing the Information Management research programme, but she already has a clear idea about the types of topics she’ll be covering, including:

• – Leveraging the power of advanced analytics
• – Disruptive deployment models including Cloud and Saas
• – Open source and plug-and-play appliances
• – High performance BI, analytics and data warehousing
• – The role of packaged analytic applications
• – Data management fundamentals

If there are any topics that you’d like us to look at – or if you have any priorities from the above list – please let us know.

There’s a clear link between the role of Information Management and the other competencies covered by MWD, namely Business Process Management and Collaboration. Expect to hear more from the analyst team soon as they put together a cohesive picture of how all these areas tie together to support IT-business alignment objectives.

If you’d like to keep up to date with Helena’s research and analysis there are various ways you can do that. Firstly, why not follow Helena on Twitter for live updates and insights. Secondly, you can follow her blog posts by subscribing to the MWD blog feed. Thirdly, you can also subscribe to the MWD Research Update feed to find out when new reports are published.

To access Helena’s reports, you can download any Guest Pass reports free of charge with a free subscription to our research library – simply register here. Premium reports can be purchased individually – just drop our account manager Denise Bradley an email about these, as well as to find out how to engage with Helena on an advisory or consulting basis.

If you’re an Information Management or Business Intelligence vendor and would like to update Helena on your products and/or services, please contact Denise Bradley in the first instance and she’ll share our briefing process with you. You might also want to register to receive our research calendar so you can see what reports are upcoming – just let Denise know. In addition to product updates, we’re always interested in great customer case studies for our Best Practice Insight reports.

So as Helena finds her way around the MWD virtual office and starts developing her research programme I’ll end this blog post for now. But do watch out for updates over the coming weeks. As always, if you’d like to get in touch you can reach me at beth@mwdadvisors.com.

We’ve just posted five new podcasts to the MWD podcast library. Led by MWD Research Director Neil Ward-Dutton, each podcast features an in-depth discussion with a pioneering organisation about how they’re using BPM to improve their customers’ experiences.

We carried out the interviews for an online event we launched at the end of June called Reinventing customer experiences with BPM. You can find the event here and access all the content (including a keynote presentation by Neil Ward-Dutton and the case study interviews) for FREE – all you need to do is ensure you’ve signed up for a free Guest Pass account which gives you access not only to this content, but also to MWD’s entire library of Guest Pass research and other events.

If you access the interviews through the event site you’ll be able to view some helpful supporting slides as you listen. But if you just want to dive straight in or listen to the interviews on the move, you can now download each interview as an MP3 file.

You can visit our podcast library here, or click on the links below to go straight to an introduction to each podcast. To listen to a podcast via your computer or download it to put on your MP3 player, simply click on the ‘direct download’ link at the bottom of the podcast description.

Learn from:

– Chris Jones, Head of Business Operations at technology retailer Carphone Warehouse

– Paul Swinson, Programme Manager, and Niki Quick, IT BPM Manager at mortgage servicing provider HML

– Paul O’Neill, Head of IT and New Developments at financial services provider Irish Life Corporate Business

– Adrian Blair, Head of Professional Services and ICT at business process outsourcing provider Vangent who speaks about their work with local government authority London Borough of Southwark

– Matt Brook, Head of Infrastructure at welfare-to-work services provider Pinnacle People

If you enjoyed the interviews, I encourage you to listen to Neil’s keynote presentation which ties all the interviews together and will give you some really practical insight and advice into how you can get started with a BPM initiative in your own organisation, including how to make the business case for investment, drive best practices and avoid key risks.

As always, let us know what you think: feedback@mwdadvisors.com

Finally, we wouldn’t be able to bring you this for free without the support of our sponsors. Please take a moment to check out an introduction to their offerings and a selection of information and educational resources on the event site. Our platinum sponsor is Pegasystems, and our gold sponsors are Appian, Global 360 and Nimbus Partners. Our thanks again to them for their support.

• Process Simplicity | ActionBase Blog – Thoughts on Collaboration Process Management Unstructured Compliance and Audit
  Via BP3's Scott Francis – thought-provoking stuff.
  (tags: bpm collaboration simplicity socialsoftware)
• Got Social Processes?
  Nice to see Gartner's Jim Sinur has picked up on our analysis of Social Processes ;-)
  (tags: bpm collaboration socialsoftware)

Following a significant amount of effort ove rmany months, Angela Ashenden (our Principal Analyst focused on Collaboration) and I have finally finished what I think is a landmark report looking at the phenomena of Social BPM and Social Processes.

In the new MWD Strategic Insights report (which you can find here) we explain in detail how aspects of collaborative and social software can add value to BPM – to what is, at its heart, an inherently collaborative activity – to make BPM more open and inclusive. We also show how collaboration technology is being woven into the operational platforms that come with many BPM toolsets, enabling operating process instances themselves to unfold in more collaborative, dynamic ways (we call these ‘Social Processes’).

Lastly, we look at how many of the capabilities that BPM platforms deliver – for example the ability to audit and monitor activity as it unfolds – are adding value to scenarios where formal processes and BPM platforms aren’t the best fit as the ‘front end’ to be used by workers, where less formal collaboration technologies hold sway.

There’s no doubt in my mind that the historically separate technology stovepipes that grew up around interpersonal collaboration and process management / workflow are merging, and the result is actually very positive for both ‘sides’. We’re seeing organisations take advantage of the blurring of technology boundaries to deliver more concrete results more quickly.

As I said over at CIO UK (As BPM goes mainstream, so the bazaar overtakes the cathedral):

“To me, the biggest value of the former [BPM] philosophy [one which favours openness and inclusivity over formality] over the latter [one which is very structured and scientific] is the way that where the latter approach to process change tends to focus everyone’s minds on the quality of the design of an improvement, the natural outcome of the former philosophy is improved quality of the ultimate outcome – that is, the acceptance of the change or improvement by those people it impacts on a day-to-day basis. A beautifully-designed process improvement is one thing, but if it’s not accepted then you’re screwed. And in knowledge work and service improvement scenarios, where people are the product, acceptance is all.”

If you follow MWD in the blogosphere on a fairly regular basis, you might have noticed a few oddities in our feeds and our blogs over the past couple of days – apologies if it’s inconvenienced you. We’ve made a couple of changes to make it easier to follow what we’re doing from one place.

A couple of years ago, when we launched two advisory services (focused on BPM and Collaboration) we set up specific blogs for each service, in addition to our “general” blog (this one). It seemed to make sense at the time… we’d use each blog to talk about new research and also highlight other related items of interest. However as time has gone on and as we’ve moved over to Wordpress for all our blogs, it became obvious that having analysis and commentary fragmented over multiple blogs was a bit of a silly idea. For one thing, we were finding that many people had interests across multiple topics, but weren’t aware of all the blogging we were doing.

So over the past couple of days we’ve consolidated our three active blogs into this one – and we’ve used categories to highlight entries that are related to BPM, Collaboration, General research / industry thoughts or MWD (that is, the corporate stuff).

All the blog feeds are still present – they’ve just been redirected – so any feeds you had set up in a feed reader will still work.

As a reminder, though:

• If you’d like to subscribe to everything published in this blog, use this feed.
• If you’re only interested in Collaboration entries, use this feed.
• If you’re only interested in BPM entries, use this feed.

Last but not least: we also publish a feed direct from our research library – it auto updates every time we publish a new report. Here’s our MWD research update feed.

Enjoy – and please continue to let us know what you think of our analysis and commentary! Blogging is an important part of how we share our work, and it’s fantastic when we can get conversations going.

The title says it all, really!

After a challenging 2009, 2010 is shaping up to be a great year for MWD Advisors. The first calendar quarter of 2010 was our largest ever in terms of sales – and in fact our sales total in that quarter was higher than our total sales for the whole of our first year (2005).

Now we’re looking to expand our team further – we’re looking for senior IT industry analysts to join our company. Are you interested?

You’ll be a great fit for MWD if:

• You have real understanding of software technologies, deployment best practice and the capabilities of the main suppliers in one of the following areas of the IT industry: information management (business intelligence/analytics, master data management, search, information lifecycle management, information integration); collaboration management (portals, messaging, unified communications, “groupware”, and emerging social computing environments); software delivery (application development, testing, dev/ops, application integration, SOA); or IT systems and service management (think ITIL plus some more business-focused management competencies).
• You have a love of learning, and of sharing what you learn with other people.
• You have real commercial awareness, and can prove that you can promote your expertise and yourself as an industry/technology/market expert.
• You have excellent communication skills – being able to demonstrate significant experience of both writing and presenting in English for a variety of technical and (very importantly) non-technical audiences.
• You have experience as a consultant – ideally to both adopters of IT, and IT suppliers.
• You’re a dynamic individual with strong organisational skills, who can thrive in a small but fast-growing team and who can manage their own time and prioritise their work effectively in a demanding environment.
• You’re passionate about IT and its value to business, and you’re the kind of person who enjoys being challenged about their ideas, as well as challenging those of others.

Ideally we want people who have at least three years or so of experience as an IT industry analyst, and who are based in Europe.

Why would you want to work with a very small company like ours? The answer is that we have a lot of ambition, skills, experience, expertise and influence in our area. We’re passionate about what we do and we have fun doing it.

What’s more we have a lot of opportunity for growth. People who come to MWD will have the opportunity to grow with us – and will be rewarded accordingly. We’re small today, but we are growing (despite the challenging conditions last year we still managed to grow revenue 32%) and our expectation is that business will continue to grow that quickly, or even more so, in the coming years.

If you, or someone you know, looks like they might have the kind of skills and experience that would fit our needs, naturally align with our philosophy and principles, and would be up to the challenge – please send us a CV/resume. A good starting point might be to register for Guest Pass access and check out some of our research, too.

• EPC vs. BPMN – the perfect flamewar | ARIS BPM Community
  Via Sandy Kemsley – great thought-provoking piece contrasting merits of EPC and BPMN
  (tags: process_improvement bpm bpmn epc aris)

• Can Technical Debt Constitute a Breach of Implied Warranties? « The Agile Executive
  More fascinating stuff on the topic of technical debt in software development. If you refuse to do unit testing are you negligent, and could you become contractually liable?
  (tags: development technical_debt quality contract)
• elemental links: Cloud Computing Environments, Events Event Clouds: Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS)
  Great overview of Amazon's new SNS
  (tags: amazon cloud_computing pubsub event_processing)