We are now moving from the out of the early adopter stage and into the early majority stage of the Software as a Service (SaaS) technology adoption cycle.  An exploding number of organizations are considering SaaS to take advantage of the lower up-front costs, lower total ownership costs, and faster implementation when compared with traditional licensed software.  While evaluations of traditionally licensed software by organization is a well understood activity, the relative youth of the SaaS market means many organizations are still developing their evaluation methodologies, while others have suffered through SaaS horror stories. (more…)

The recent announcement by Apple that it has sold over one million iPads in just 28 days has developers chomping at the bit to create apps for the iPhone OS.  However, for many of these App Store success story hopefuls, there are at least two problems that they face before writing even a single line of code.

If one would like to develop a native app for the iPhone OS, they must either take a time machine back to 1988 and learn the nasty, archaic language known as Objective-C, or they must take a leap of faith and hope that Apple’s recent Developer Agreement changes don’t apply to Adobe and other vendors offering tools that translate various languages into native iPhone code. (more…)

Foreword: The following post has been adapted from a post I wrote few years ago and for those interested in some of the more theoretical aspects, they can be found here.

I have worked in many diverse organisations in my career but over the past year I have been in some interesting organisational situations that has highlighted the fact that the human species has a very interesting way of adapting (or not) to Change.

I am reminded of a post that I wrote some time ago about how critical it is to consider the affects the introduction of Change (technological solution e.g. BPM or other) will have on the ‘status quo’ (real or perceived) of people in an organisation. In my experience, I have found that companies that are open to Change does not always mean they react well to it when it is imposed on them. Often this is due to type of culture in the organisation, in other cases it is just due to complacency. (more…)

Earlier, I wrote about common questions organizations have when beginning with BPM.  Challenges, however, do not end once a project is begun.  Gartner predicts that more than 50% of BPM programs will fail by 2011. This is not an exaggeration. Our experience validates that as you move into the implementation phase, the biggest challenges will be around stakeholder alignment, requirements prioritization and scope definition. Sometimes this phase can take 3-6 months leading to a loss of confidence in BPM as a transformation tool. Knowledge and experience around leveraging a chosen BPM technology for its out-of-box capabilities can be crucial in reducing the time to market as well as meeting business expectations. (more…)

While much has been written about Enterprise Content Management (ECM) trends that have come to fruition, not much is talked about those hyped technologies that ‘just passed by’. Even though some of them flopped, they may have manifested themselves in other forms and are still gaining success. I think it’s worth understanding how the underlying concepts still survived and are very much thriving through other means. (more…)

Virtusa has participated in quite a few conferences lately.  At each one, I noticed a pending mash up of whatever core technology was covered with all things social.  Right now, social looks like the Blob consuming everything in its path.

On the one hand, social is terrifying to many IT professionals.  It reeks of teenage ADD, wasted time, no defined ROI, inappropriate behavior and disclosure and all things bad on the web.  End users are going out and doing it on their own signing up for services with their credit cards without IT’s knowledge.  At one conference a presenter admonished “give up, you cannot control it”. (more…)

Context is a critical foundation for BPM success.  It is for everything, right?  But how do we set it.  We assume with the wide range of technology, depth of understanding and innovative solutions, there is no need to set context as it is already there.  Or we assume that we can just paint a quick picture and folks are on board.  Better yet, we just rely on others to get it done and for that matter, folks just get it.  BPM is more than just putting in a technology or point solutions.

BPM is where people, process and technology come together in a new context to orchestrate business execution.   Silos are to be broken down, broader technology integrations are to be implemented and a new set of methodologies and tools are to be deployed to create seamless flow(s) of operations.  I find that when the right context is set and the ‘ah-ha’ moment is reached, BPM adoption accelerates and greater operational efficiencies are achieved. (more…)