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All interactions are crucial steps in any business process. Yet, in most process descriptions, interactions are just endpoints. Once we get there, the process reaches completion and everything is OK. There are no further consequences. Unfortunately, this is incorrect.

BPM (Business Process Management) has been a hot item over the past years. Still, most of the basic concepts of BPM have their roots in production and supply chain environments where repetitive, standardised processes prevail. Unfortunately, today's business environment has evolved towards a networked knowledge economy where processes exhibit far greater complexity and variability. This briefing is a pleading for a more interaction-focused BPM approach.

""…we talk about technology and get excited about it, but changing processes is the only way to get productivity … so I think you've got to align with people who can help you with process and cultural change because those will trip you up or prevent you from getting the technology benefits"."

Business process management in open environments remains a stubborn and important challenge. In open environments, autonomous organizations having heterogeneous information systems interact in an ever-evolving manner. The nature of the contractual relationships among such organizations has a significant bearing on the modeling of the business processes in which they participate. Conventional approaches are not suitable for open environments because (1) they lack support for modeling and management of contracts among organizations, (2) the modeling abstractions they offer do not afford crucial software engineering desiderata such as reuse, refinement, aggregation, and verification, and (3) they fail to provide the designers with guidelines on adapting the models should the underlying requirements change.\n\nWe propose a novel approach for engineering interorganizational business interactions. Contractual relationships are modeled via commitments and the interactions for enacting the contracts are captured via the modular abstraction of protocols. Relative to how organizations value the various terms of the contracts and how the contracts are played out via protocols, safety and benefit of the contracts are reasoned about. A protocol specifies rules that govern the interactions among the organizations. Protocols can be published to a repository, shared, reused, refined, and aggregated. We propose a methodology-Amoeba-that guides software designers in the face of evolving requirements on how the protocols and contracts can be adapted.

Let's talk efficiency, let's talk simplicity and leave the big words to others. Bottom line, from all the available pieces of technology on my laptop, nothing -- and I mean nothing -- compares to e-mail. We can reach anyone around the world in a split second, send any file, share ideas and get feedback. E-mail is our way to communicate and work together daily that is always tied to a business process being carried out in the organization. But in all actuality, e-mail is a problem. Basex Research recently estimated that businesses lose $650 billion annually in productivity due to unnecessary e-mail interruptions and overload.

The "real" Enterprise 2.0 is not a technology or marketing plan, but the reinvention of the enterprise itself. It's a rethinking of the structure, process, culture and even, in some cases, the very purpose of the enterprise. With technology erasing barriers to participation and communication, we're seeing a change in the nature of how we go about running an organization.

Over the past years, the customer has moved to pole position. Customers are no longer passive participants in the sales process but now dictate the rules. Experience creation is the associated buzzword. However, there are also other needs...

Business is about process, typically starting with a customer calling, then proceeding through a sequence of tasks and activities ending with the delivery of some value.

In this white paper, we introduce the concept of Business Interaction Management (BIM). We explore the reasons that make that there is a need for a better understanding and mastering of such expertise and we position it against better-known disciplines such as Business Process Management (BPM).

It goes without saying that no matter how much talent a company might have, there are many more talented people working outside its boundaries. Yet all too many companies focus solely on acquiring talent, on bringing talent inside the firm. Why not access talent wherever it resides?

BPM is hot, but has some limitations and deficiencies. In this presentation, we explore the need for a more interaction-focused approach that we call Business Interaction Management (BIM)

In our last post, we discussed talent development as an operational challenge. This time around we'll explore how the organization itself needs to change so that it develops a talent edge.