It is tempting to go on and on about the relationship between business and IT. Here at Lombardi we like to instead talk about effective cross-functional teams that can build the end-to-end process together. And we practice what we preach - this is why we have BPM Analysts, Consultants and Developers on our delivery teams. Note this does not mean companies have to fundamentally re-organize, but they do need to be able to create dedicated cross-functional teams if they are going to be successful.

That being said, I think that user interfaces are key to how these cross-functional teams can work together effectively. This is something that I touched on briefly in my previous post about Web2.0 and “making BPM cool again.”

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I’ve been seeing a bit of blog postings lately on the reality of SaaS on Demand or SaaS BPM.

Last week, Jason Stamper at CBR included some commentary on a beta product that he had heard about through the Process Factory. And couple of weeks ago, Jack van Hoof - who writes on SOA and EDA, posted a well thought-out blog entry about the marriage of BPM and SaaS, including the possibilities and the complexities at hand.

I love seeing this kind of dialogue on the Web because SaaS BPM is extremely popular with our customers right now. However, despite the aspiration of many developers, SaaS and BPM is NOT an easy combination. Nor is it likely that the two will ever be completely married in the traditional integrated form.

We launched Lombardi Blueprint a little over a year ago. It’s a SaaS-based modeling tool that integrates with Lombardi Teamworks, which operates behind the firewall. What worked so well in this case was that anyone in an organization could access the modeling tool to help shape a BPM project during the discovery stage. It doesn’t need to be integrated into legacy systems and it doesn’t require IT to deliver company data to the hosted model outside the firewall.

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