Architect Consultant blog

Yesterday i visited the OpenText Innovation Days in Eindhoven. This event was held in the Evoluon, which in the early days was an exhibition hall for future products. This was the first place where i ever listened to a CD. Nowadays it is a nice conference place. The event was all about data / content / information in other words Enterprise Information Management ( EIM ). This is understandable because there is where OpenText is at its best, but due to some recent acquisitions they have a nice complete portfolio now to help customers innovate and be agile. Project RedOxygen OpenText has done a lot of acquisitions lately and the project RedOxygen is integrating all these produkts, so that consistent and integrated suites are developed. This leads to the fact that all suites will have the same look-and-feel eventually. The suites can integrate easier with each other. For example with the AppWorks  component suites are accessible through a RESTfull API.  Suites ...

I see it in a lot of projects but also I see that it is handled just like testing in the beginning: "oh we estimate some extra days and we also go Mobile !" Of course this is not the case, it can be a project on its own. There are a lot of choices to be made, some of them are: Which mobile platforms do we have to support? What are the performance requirements? Do we want to develop once, run anywhere? Do we want to use native functions of the mobile OS? What I also see, is that more and more BPM/Integration platforms are going to support it. But then again the Mobile experience is somewhat different than the Browser (and Desktop) experience. So depending on the requirements of the Mobile App, the platform can suffice or not. I will shortly describe some platform examples. OpenText Assure This is a BPM platform that supports Mobile. However the UIs are running within the browser app of the mobile device. The advantage is that it is developed once, and...

OpenText has bought Cordys. Some links: http://www.cordys.com/opentext http://www.opentext.com/2/global/company/news/press-releases/press-release-details.htm?id=66B58B6F88534A9CA41B4E14A6018C6A http://www.cmswire.com/cms/information-management/opentext-buys-cordys-offers-integrated-bpm-information-management-022146.php From these articles we can conclude for now that: OpenText wants to expand on BPM and Case Management OpenText want to become leader within Cloud and PaaS marketplace Cordys will be referred as OpenText Cordys  As a certified Cordys Solution Architect I wonder: What will remain of the Cordys produkts? How will current clients be supported by OpenText? What will be used of the strong Cordys Cloud proposition with its multi-tenant concept? Will the user interfaces of Cordys be adapted, so a uniform interface will be used on multiple process engines? How will Cordys be integrated within the current BPM offerings of OpenText Will Cordys get ...

On Friday morning I left Geldrop for the Conference " Trends in BPM " in the picturesque town Hoevelaken. The theme this year was "Samenwerken in de keten: mens, methodes en impact" (Collaboration within the chain: people, methods and impact). It was held in the Koninginnestraat 1 at Intres. It was a very long street and each traffic sign said "1 straight ahead", but in the end the street ended and no nr 1 was found. Also not Intres. When I drove the whoel street for the third time and asked three people for Intres and nr 1, i finally parked my car at Euretco. I went inside to the reception and asked where i could find Intres. It appeared that the name Intres was renamed to Euretco, so in fact i was at the correct place! Maybe a hint to write the correct name on the invitations !? So I went inside and soon noticed that i was a little bit underdressed. This was my own fault, because most of the times these conferences are packed with suits. But ne...

Introduction Oracle announced its new BPM 11.1.1.7 produkt. I found it interested that also (Adaptive) Case Management was added and i was curious what the difference is between the Oracle and Cordys approach w.r.t. Case Management. In this Blog item i will discuss some of the the differences and resemblance. Adapative Case Management Both Cordys and Oracle agree on the fact that there are processes that are not defined ahead and a knowledge worker can define the path as the case progresses. So that's good news. Also both in Oracle and Cordys the case management and normal BPMN processes can be mixed. Case Modelling  Oracle Users can define a Case and associate it with a set of Case Activities. In addition to Case activities, the Case definition consists of case data, case documents, case rules, case events, case milestones, case stakeholders, and case outcomes. The progression of a case is indicated via case milestones. A case milestone signifies completion ...

Like to pose some  misunderstandings about BPM. Maybe some BPM tool vendors will disagree and also some BPM consultancy firms, but then again this is my own humble opinion. Feel free to react, add your own, discuss. Lets begin with a delicate one. BPM makes my organisation flexible A lot of people will say that BPM makes your organization flexible. It can be the case but then there must hold a couple of pre-conditions: You must know where you want flexibility In this case you have to know the future and you do not know it. You must have a good IT SOA architecture This is needed to be flexible to define your processes. Using Services will enable reuse and consistency throughout the architecture It is only design time flexibility The statement that the business can change the process on the fly is mostly false. I have not seen it yet and is probably only a couple of configurations that can be changed so that parameters within the process are changed. This way you can steer...

Monitoring Within an enterprise and on your processes you want monitoring. Monitoring is used to for example: View the number of ongoing processes and its status If certain KPI's are met Triggering other processes when a certain event takes place Cordys supports this in the form of BAM and uses certain constructs for this. In this Blog i will describe a small example on how to set up BAM and how to create Dashboards. It gives an idea on how this can be done in Cordys. I use the following picture in which the created Cordys artifacts are displayed. Step 1 - Create a webservice This step is not described here, but a webservice can be generated from a BPM, database or an external service can be used for example. Next i will use this webservice to create a Business Measure artifact. Step 2 - Create a Business Measure A Business Measure helps in measuring a particular aspect of a business process or any external data. The Business Measure provides a view on the...

Previous week I got my Cordys Fundamentals Certification and I will explain how to prepare for this exam. Of course it depends on the number of years/months experience you already have with the produkt. In my case i have done several projects already and i have almost three years experience. The certification has three parts: Multiple choice questions Handson Interview The most difficult part is the Multiple choice questions. This requires some study and this can be found on the Wiki. This gives a good overview of the questions you can expect. In the handson part you get a couple of questions which you must make. You have 5 days for the questions and these are relatively easy. I suggest you do the Fundamentals training online which is available on the Wiki. In case you already have project experience then even this is not needed. Within the interview you need to explain your solution of the handson and this is also easy if you made the questions yourself of course. Th...

This year's Cordial was held on the 9th and 10th October in Putten. The yearly event is getting more popular because it was packed. Some of the highlights for me: A couple of very entertaining presentations with content. Must see: Freek Vermeulen  on why organisations find it so difficult to change. Magnus Lindkvist  on the present and future trends Meeting a lot of interesting people in the BPM field Partner dinner with excellent food Nice to hear that integration and BPM skills are still very much needed in the future :-) See the CEO of Cordys in person Presentation of CIZ of a project with Cordys Case Management. With  Ciber  i also participated within that project. So it was nice to hear of the succes The partnership of Cordys and Aquima . A business rule engine that can be used seeming less with Cordys And of course more can be found on  http://www.cordys.com/resources Looking forward to it again next year!

Business process management  (BPM)  is a  management approach  focused on aligning all aspects of an organization with the wants and needs of clients. It is a holistic  management approach  that promotes  business  effectiveness and efficiency while striving for innovation, flexibility, and integration with  technology .  Business process management  attempts to improve  processes  continuously. It could therefore be described as a “ process  optimization  process .” It is argued that BPM enables organizations to be more efficient, more effective and more capable of change than a functionally focused, traditional hierarchical  management   approach . Overview A  business   process  is a “series or network of value-added activities, performed by their relevant roles or collaborators, to purposefully achieve the common  business  goal.” These  processes  are critic...

In a lot of projects i have done for customers there are a few misunderstandings i often see with BPM or Business Process Management.  1) You are not doing BPM when using a BPM tool It is often called already BPM because it is hot, but the business is not process oriented at all. This is because a BPM tool is introduced bottom up, but the organization is not process oriented at all. In fact the business is process oriented (by default there is of course always a process), but this is not analysed or controlled.  2) Flexibility comes not for free This is maybe in theory but in practice i have rarely seen this. Making a solution flexible requires a lot of future knowledge which is often very difficult of course. You can only make your BPM solutions flexible where you know you need the flexibility.  3) BPM does not solve it all As with all new hypes, this is the next magic tool that solves it all. Of course this is not the case and it requires a lot of good thinkin...

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You can test a decision table with the test tool of Cordys (see  Here ). However sometimes you want to automate tests with for example soapUI. In this case it is advised to generate a webservice from the Decision Table. This is nicely described  here . However I ran into a problem that the prefix of namespaces must be entered when the Decision Table was selected. After a while I found the problem. You use Schema files for the input of a Decision Table. Go to the definition of the Schema and double click it: The you should check the Namespace Prefix in this namespace. This prefix must NOT be empy. When I filled in the prefix I was able to generate the webservice on the Decision Table again.

Overview Licencing Modeling tools and Users Business/Enterprise Architect Business Strategy Implement Business Architecture Process Analysis/documentation Business User Understands the business High level business processes Process Analyst BPMN 2.0 expert (business view) Understands the details of the business Make implementation decisions Process Developer BPMN 2.0 expert (technical view) WebServices, XML Enterprise Apps Implement processes and UIs Collaborative Design BPM Studio Process Analytics Social BPM SOA Platform End-to-End instance and Flow checking due to integrated platform. BPMN 2.0 support Change with BPMN 1.1 : Model execution Models are interchangeable XPDL and BPEL were used to interchange and execute Interactive task and workflow BPM Studio supports Simulation . BPM Studio Business Indicators Snapshots of business indicators must be added to the workflow and this is a little awkward because it blurs the process model. Good integrati...