Firstly – many thanks to all the Singularity Partners and Microsoft folks I met at the MS Partner Conference in Houston, TX. Every year there are a couple of key topics which come up in the keynotes, and I really liked the way the later sessions then went into more detail. The whole Software as a Service (SaaS) discussion is one topic we’ll cover in more detail in a later blog entry. I want to focus on another highlighted area today – namely Unified Messaging (UM). Microsoft has been putting increased emphasis on this over the past few years, and it was prominently featured at this year’s conference.

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I was exposed to the Singularity Process Platform for the first time back in 2004, while working on a project for one of the world’s largest banks. As with most BPM projects, we were implementing a solution that coordinated both system-to-system processes, system-to-human processes and human-to-human processes. For any of the processes that required human interaction, you obviously had to provide some way for humans to interface – generally through web-based screens.

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What is meant by the term ‘Case Management’? It seems to mean different things to different people, so I thought I’d try to clarify the term based on my own experience working on public sector projects. I think perhaps the best way to define it is by example – by showing the type of problems that it can solve, writes Paul O’Neill.

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Having attended several Public Sector events lately I noticed a number of recurring themes – improving the level of service provided, ‘joining-up’ these services more effectively and, in the UK, meeting the Efficiency Agenda by reducing costs.

Several keynote presenters spoke about the steps required to achieve these goals and one element that was continually highlighted was the need for government departments to both streamline and improve their processes.

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The start of summer normally heralds the arrival of poor weather, crowded airports and rain delays at Wimbledon. It’s good to see that we’re comfortably on track for another great summer here in Ireland. Within the Microsoft community the first half of July means thousands will be making the long trip to the annual World Wide Partner Conference. This is the annual get together for the partner community, and is attended by sales, marketing and technical representatives from the huge Microsoft Partner community.

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The words agile and agility crop-up more and more frequently in the business and technology press. Agile delivery techniques combined with BPM enable you to obtain working solutions faster, and these solutions are more closely aligned with business priorities. Through an iterative approach you get value delivered early and often. Singularity is a big believer in the power of combining agile techniques with the disciplines and technology of BPM. We’ve developed a specific methodology, called ASAP, that combines the best elements of agile techniques along with some BPM-specific elements, and to this we’ve added competitive ‘hot housing’ to drive out new and innovative approaches to business problems. At the recent Gartner BPM summit in London we gave a presentation on agility and BPM, in which we provided an introduction to the ‘Agile’ movement and its relevance to Business Process Management – to learn more, please click here.

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European financial markets seem to be getting flattened, in more ways than one. For a long time most people thought the whole world was flat. Then 2,500 years ago Pythagoras proved that the world is spherical. Rediscovering flatness of a kind, 44 years ago Marshall McLuhan introduced the term “global village”, recognising that technology was unlocking the doors between people and nations. More recently, Thomas Friedman declared 4 years ago that “The World is Flat” in his best-selling book of that name, quoting one of the drivers and benefactors of this new “flat” earth, Infosys CEO Nandan Nilekani.

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