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Articles by Ben Farrell

Riding the Tide of Mobile Knowledge Management

Knowledge is like water; it wants to flow. Today's bring-your-own-device/bring-your-own-app (BYOD/BYOA) work environments are more porous than ever. Knowledge now has more outlets, more fissures in the enterprise landscape through which to seep. If you can effectively ride the tide to manage the flow of information across these new tributaries—making the right information ubiquitously accessible to the right people, in a context of business action—you can effectively "raise the IQ" of your entire organization. . . .

Adaptive Case Management in a Worksocial World

The concept of "social business" is gaining attention because it promises to create a more open, fluid and responsive business environment. The problem is that the much-hyped "enterprise social platforms" such as Yammer, Jive and Salesforce Chatter are incapable of delivering on this vision because they are wholly disconnected from a work context. Enterprise social tools may increase communication, but communication about what? They create yet another siloed platform, cut off from broad enterprise processes, systems and data. This deficiency is particularly apparent in adaptive case management (ACM) work patterns. ACM requires a combination of structured process and unstructured collaboration, but the two must both be firmly grounded in the events, data and enterprise systems relevant to a given case. . . .

Inspire Your Business and Your Customers

Enterprise mobility, cloud computing and social technologies are rapidly gaining momentum in the enterprise because they open new worlds of opportunity to transform operations and engage with customers. At the same time, strategic process improvement, reduced technology costs and better alignment of IT with business goals are all crucial in today's fiscal and competitive environments. By combining process improvement with native mobility, cloud delivery and social business collaboration, an advanced business process management (BPM) software platform drives new efficiencies and growth opportunities, increases profit margins and deepens customer loyalty. Smart enterprises are seeking a single platform from which enterprises can tap the power of mobile, cloud and social technologies. . . .

The Tempo of Process Innovation

Innovation. Collaboration. Mobility. Cloud. These are the hallmarks of next-generation business process solutions—and the business process management (BPM) software that will enable them. It is no longer sufficient to drive benefits at the edges; BPM must drive fundamental change and growth across the organization. Select involvement in process improvement will not radically transform a business; all employees at all levels (both on-site and in the field) must "be part of the process" in active collaboration. Finally, the cost and scalability benefits of BPM SaaS (software as a service) must be fully realized.

In short, business process management software must leverage the latest advances in social technologies and application delivery to increase an organization's tempo in responding to change and growing the business.

BPM today does some things very well. It automates repetitive processes to improve throughput and capacity. It increases efficiencies. . . .

Accelerating ROI with BPM

New research from Aberdeen Group validates what many business and IT leaders have discovered for themselves: accelerating process improvement efforts through business process management (BPM) is yielding significant returns as organizations continue to grapple with the unstable global economy. The new report, called BPM Accelerated: Slashing Cost and Time with Agile Business Processes, shows that "companies that have developed the organizational maturity and are leveraging the right tools..."