Resources in Business Process Management (BPM)

A few years ago, when I was heading up the telecommunications industry group for a Fortune 500 software company, we had a saying, “There’s no such thing as a standard price quote.” Virtually every deal called for special pricing relative to the particular needs of the customer, whether scope of deployment, customization or a host of other factors. So rather than closing business based on pre-set pricing guidelines, the salespeople had to literally walk every deal through a fairly onerous approvals routine, involving lots of phone calls, emails, faxes and spreadsheets.

Attendees at the 2004 Business Process Management conferences held in Chicago and San Francisco indicated their company’s desire to transform themselves into process-centric organizations and considered this transformation to be critical to the company’s future success.

Ken Orr, President and Founder, The Ken Orr Institute

Process modeling is a method of showing the processes of an organization in graphical form to simplify the work of understanding those processes. Ken Orr uses a number of different models to cut through the IT process maze and overcome the organizational bias the always runs against process reform. Working with the Kansas Department of Transportation, (KDOT) Orr was able to greatly improve and streamline their business processes.

Ken Orr is an internationally recognized expert on business process reengineering, technology transfer, software engineering, data warehousing, and knowledge management. He is the founder and Principal Researcher of The Ken Orr Institute, a business technology research organization.

Featuring: Tom Dwyer, Principal, Beagle Research Group, Application Software Infrastructure