Theo Priestley

The BPM world is a divided one with many camps. We have methodology on one side and software on the other. But even the software camp is sub-divided further into those which offer repositories and process analysis capabilities and the other which automate and drive work. Admittedly its a simplistic view of the market but we are entering a tipping point in which some vendors will be left well and truly in the dust.

I came across a customer example recently where they had spent a significant amount of effort in years documenting their processes to create a global process repository, in essence a prime example of a knowledge management system rather than a BPMS. It’s cross-referenced, generates...

One of the items from the keynote yesterday was the introduction to what Pega is referring to as Stage-Based Case Management. As part of the rewrite for Pega 7 it ushers in a new era of DCO (Direct Capture of Objectives), that piece of PRPC that’s aimed squarely at the business users.

Apart from the massive UI changes which look a hell of a lot better than v6 (ie it’s like moving from iPhone iOS6 to iOS7), SBCM captures the ‘business vision’ for the process and works down from there. Whereas before in previous versions of Pega 6 you would capture goals, requirements, process, integration points etc in the Application Profile (something which looked akin to IBM’s Blueworks) and then ran...

There have been numerous quotes about the fate of Fortune 500 companies and their disappearing lifespan. In fact, Peggy Noonan wrote an article on Forbes about it in 2011 stating:

Fifty years ago, “milking the cash cow” could go on for many decades. What’s different today is that globalization and the shift in power in the marketplace from buyer to seller is dramatically shortening the life expectancy of firms that are merely milking their cash cows. Half a century ago, the life expectancy of a firm in the Fortune 500 was around 75 years. Now it’s less than 15 years and declining even further.

But this raises an interesting set of questions, not about the life expectancy of a business but the half-life of customer loyalty.

Why should a customer pledge allegiance to the corporate flag when it’s...

As the NSA PRISM debacle continues to unfold and spreads across continents it’s probably good to stop and think about the technology and philosophy behind it all. Because this is big data and analytics in its most potent and controversial form and it’s certainly not the last time we’ll see this hit the headlines.

The NSA built Accumulo, which is a database design based on Google Big Table. Written in Java, the NSA contributed Accumulo to the Apache Foundation and in 2012 it was promoted from incubation to a top level project. Right now the Agency is harvesting petabytes of data in Accumulo, a staggering amount that grows daily. But the cleverest part of all of this is in the analytics, Accumulo was built and extended the Big Table concept to analyze trillions of points in data in order to create intelligence that can detect the connections between those points and the strength of those connections....