I recently had the opportunity to speak with Peter Apathy, Systems Transformation Project Manager at the SouthEast Alaska Regional Health Consortium (SEARHC), about their successful implementation of Blueprint.  He said “Blueprint is the first place I go when I want to document or  analyze a process.” SEARHC is a consortium of 18 remote Alaska Native communities, many of which can only be reached by plane or boat.  Blueprint gives SEARHC the ability to unify the workflow processes across these regions.

In February of 2009 SEARHC launched the ALERT Emergency Department Information System, becoming one of the first and largest tribal health organizations in the country to begin implementing this comprehensive electronic medical record (EMR) system.  The ALERT EMR is interconnected to ancillary systems (Novarad for diagnostic imaging, Mediware for pharmacy, Orchard for laboratory, etc) using the Health Level  Seven (HL7) messaging protocol.  HL7 facilitates a standard language between systems, but SEARHC recognized the need for process mapping and documentation in the messaging methodology since every vendor accepted and passed along data such as x-ray orders, lab reports and billing information in slightly different ways.

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The October ‘09 update is now available on blueprint.lombardi.com! This release has some exciting enhancements that I think will make Blueprint an even more valuable tool for discovering and sharing your processes. We’ve added a new process analysis mode, several new properties to the Blueprint documentation template, email notifications for changes happening to your processes, and a many more improvements based upon your feedback.

Let’s take a look the enhancements in detail:

• Enhanced Process Analysis: We’ve introduced a new analysis mode in today’s release that allows you to instantly highlight the areas of your process that need attention and improvement. When you switch to analysis mode, Blueprint heat maps both the discovery map and process diagram with the data you’ve entered in the details for each activity. This allows you to instantly see which parts of your process have problems, excessive cost or cycle time, or that are risk points. It substantially increases the visibility you have into all of your processes, and is an excellent tool to help you make a business case for improvements.

  You can find the Analyze button in the toolbar whenever you’re viewing a process. Give it a try and let us know what you think!

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This morning, the August ‘09 update went live on blueprint.lombardi.com! The team has been hard at work over the past month and I think you’ll be very happy with the latest improvements. We’ve improved the portability of your processes with the first shipping implementation of the BPMN 2.0 export format, added full text search across all of your process data, and made substantial usability improvements to Blueprint’s activity feeds based upon your feedback.

Let’s take a look the enhancements in detail:

• BPMN 2.0 Exports: We’re committed to ensuring that you can use your processes in whatever way you’d like with whichever system that works best for you. To that end, we’re delivering the first shipping implementation of the BPMN 2.0 export format. We expect BPMN 2.0 to quickly become the de facto standard for exchanging process diagrams among modeling tools. The BPMN 2.0 specification just reached beta status, and as Bruce Silver pointed out there are areas where it still could be improved. We hope that our implementation can help further the discussion and serve as a reference for others in the industry. We think that well designed and supported standards are hugely beneficial for our customers and we’re committed to making BPMN 2.0 just that.

  And don’t forget: Blueprint also supports XPDL 2.1 to give you the maximum flexibility with your models today.

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In the spirit of our “How To”  blog, I found a very useful article that Kristen Caretta from SearchCIO Midmarket wrote that discusses some of the steps that organizations can take to evaluate BPM vendors!

“Evaluating a Business Process Management solutions vendor: What to ask” offers suggestions from analysts at Forrester and Gartner about what questions people need to ask BPM vendors up front to ensure we are providing a good technology fit for them. 

The article recommends that people check into the vendor’s industry experience, understand their service and technology offerings and provides a number of other useful tips.

We especially appreciate the suggestion for companies to use cloud-based collaboration tools like Blueprint to help with strategic mapping and planning, as well as to help them build their business case for BPM.  In fact, we have a series of whitepapers that further explain how to get started quickly with your process documentation and prioritization, as well as what to do next. You can access them here

Recently the Foreign Currency Exchange Corp. (FCE) recorded a webinar with TechTarget discussing the experiences that they have had with BPM.

FCE, which is a subsidiary of the Bank of Ireland Group, provides a broad range of currency conversion products and services to wide range of industries and uses both Blueprint and Teamworks as an alternative to traditional application development. Using BPM lets them deliver projects an eye-popping 50% faster than traditional  approaches.

Some important take-aways discussed in the webinar include:

• How they became self sufficient after their very first project
• How they gather business requirements in a much more collaborative way
• How they recevied valuable feedback during development, not waiting until after it’s 80% built
• How to engage the business to take ownership in their business applications

To listen to the FCE webinar, go here (you will need to register) or alternately you can listen to a podcast version of the interview here.

I’m pleased to announce that the Blueprint July ‘09 Update is now available on blueprint.lombardi.com! This release has addressed some of the top requests we’ve heard from you. We’ve expanded the ways you can leverage the models you create in Blueprint, given you additional ways to secure and control access to your account, and tackled several other improvements that you suggested in the Blueprint Forums.

Let’s take a look the enhancements in detail:

• Model Portability With XPDL: We’re committed to ensuring that you can leverage the processes you create in Blueprint in anyway you like. That includes giving you the ability to seamlessly execute the processes in Lombardi Teamworks, but also any other tool that you choose. To that end, we’re committed to supporting the BPMN 2.0 specification when it is released. However, we know that you need a way to use your models today, so we’ve introduced the ability to export your processes to XPDL 2.1 format in this release. You never need to feel “locked in” when using Blueprint — you can get your information out in any format you’d like, whether that be as a PowerPoint presentation, Word document, or in XPDL.

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Last week, UK analyst firm Butler Group published their latest Technology Audit report on Lombardi. In it, analyst Mike Thompson reviewed the capabilities of Teamworks 7 as they relate to Butler’s product assessment methodology in the areas of building, optimizing and managing processes faster and smarter in this Technology Audit.

It’s a good report for you to send to those colleagues in your company who are interested in 3rd party takes on BPM technology.

The bottom line – excerpted from the report:

“Teamworks 7 is a full-featured BPM solution, with all the functionality expected of a market-leading solution. It really differentiates itself from its competitors in two distinct areas, one technical and one non-technical. By using a shared-model architecture, Teamworks ensures that the process model is always up to date, regardless of where and when changes to the model are made. Thus, changes to a running process instance can be reflected back to the high-level model. From a non-technical point of view the major focus has been on ensuring ease of use for any and all of the participants of process lifecycle management. This ensures that the people involved in the process are able to help in optimising the process, which makes far more sense than handing off the task to a ‘process expert’.

Allied to Teamworks is the Blueprint solution which creates a collaboration and communication environment that further empowers the process participants in all aspects of process management. A final factor worth highlighting is the graphical nature of the product – not just in process design terms, but in having the ability to graphically represent KPI and/or SLA non-compliance on the process map.”

We couldn’t agree more!

Butler customers can access the full Technology Audit report here, or you can also get it compliments of Lombardi here (if you have not registered with us before, you will be asked to do so).

Last week, eWeek Magazine recorded a podcast with Lombardi’s President, Phil Gilbert. The interview discusses our strategy for the next decade of BPM, as well as explains why the next generation of enterprise application software is going to be defined by business process integration and management.

eWeek Logo

The twenty minute podcast, hosted by eWeek executive editor Michael Vizard, is entitled “Tying IT to the Business Process.” As always, it is filled with great anecdotes from Phil. I encourage each of you to listen in!

Michael’s interview with Phil (19:41) Listen (Mp3)

I’m excited to announce that the Blueprint Spring ‘09 release is now live on blueprint.lombardi.com! This update moves Blueprint from being a great modeling tool to be the place for everyone in your organization to go for business improvement conversations. We’ve leveraged social networking concepts to facilitate the discussion about how each person can make their job better. Everyone can see and be notified about changes that are relevant to their work, discover relationships between what they do and the rest of the organization, and contribute feedback and suggestions to the community.

Let’s take a look the new features in detail:

• See Changes and Discover Relationships: Social networking sites like Facebook and LinkedIn can tell you when a colleague switches jobs or a long lost friend gets married. It’s news you wouldn’t have heard otherwise, or perhaps even known to ask about. Blueprint now does the same for process in your enterprise. The new Activity Feeds show you changes happening to your processes and helps you discover relationships between what you do and the rest of the company. Now you’ll know when something changes two steps upstream from you that will affect your job, or that the person in the next building over does something similar that you leverage.

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Yesterday was the culmination of hundreds of man years of effort and understanding here at Lombardi. Yesterday marked the end of what I call “the first decade of BPM” and sets the industry on what I think is going to be an all-new course, or more accurately, a much broader and valuable course. And so out of pride, but also because I think that the BPM industry shifted today, I want to write about it a bit more.

Lombardi announced major advances in all three areas that determine success or failure in BPM:

1. The need to communicate — you have to make business improvement personal
2. The need to automate — you have to drive productivity and re-use
3. The need for talent — you need to be able to assess risk, plan, and lead

Forget about simplistic approaches to driving transformational change based solely on whether your BPMS (or “BPP” or “PAAS”) has a given feature. The so-called “Business Process Platform” as a sole-sourced technological salvation is a hoax. It’s a solipsistic approach by technologists to once again say “if I have a better tool, I won’t be as big a fool.” Go on, stare at your image in the water and try to pawn all this off on simply another development tool or architecture. Instead, you need to take to heart what Toby Redshaw, CIO of Aviva, said a couple of weeks ago (paraphrasing here): “If you’re in IT and not doing BPM, three years from now you won’t have a job.”

He wasn’t talking about a tool. He was talking about change and changing everything: how we relate IT to the business, how we use tools, and how we manage, nay, lead, change in our businesses through the use of BPM tools and methods.

Yesterday Lombardi re-defined what a BPM platform needs to be; three specific vehicles: Blueprint (Spring ‘09), Teamworks 7, and Lombardi University.

Together, these 3 pillars — communication, automation and leadership — combine to form the basis for the platform for BPM’s second decade. Lombardi is that platform.

Editor’s note: The above is excerpted from Phil’s personal blog. Follow this link to read the full post, including a discussion of each of Lombardi’s new products.