An alternative title could be ’spend a little more to save a lot of money’, and it’s very relevant now when everyone’s personal and business budget is being squeezed. It’s a piece of advice my father gave me about buying tools - don’t buy the cheapest offerings which are made to look like the quality brands, buy the real thing - and in my case I take it a little further and prefer to buy my quality tools at a specialist ‘mom and pop store’. It might cost a few more dollars, but that’s cheap compared to the advice you get in choosing the exact tool for the job, and more importantly the long-term relationship you build up with the store owner.

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A vital component to any BPM suite is the Builder. It’s often the first thing a potential client or partner looks to see, and its also the area which contains a number of the key components of any BPM suite:
- a method of building a process map,
- a method for integrating with existing systems,
- and a method of generating user screens.

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It must take a long time to make a Universe. To paraphrase Douglas Adams, you might think it takes a long time to powerwash the front drive, but that’s just *peanuts* to making a Universe. Douglas managed it with his Hitchhiker Universe, and its now difficult to imagine there was a time when we did not know that Vogon poetry was among the worst in the Universe, that the way to travel vast interstellar distances is by using an infinite improbability drive, and that the answer to the untimate question of life, the universe and everything is 42.

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I’ve always been a big fan of end of the world fiction. I think it goes back to me reading ‘War of the Worlds’ when I was a kid, and seeing an early BBC adaptation of ‘Day of the Triffids’. It was repeated on a cable channel a few months ago, and although the walking plants looked exactly like large wood and rubber models, some of the images of deserted London still struck home. It seems every disaster movie now has to have that iconic image of an empty city, abandoned transport and a fluttering newspaper with the revealing headline.

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During a recent car journey my wife posed me the following question

- ‘If you were to go back in time and give yourself one piece of advice, what would it be?’
It’s a great question - (especially after passing on future lottery numbers and racing tips had been out ruled), what personal decisions would you change, and more interestingly, what would then be the ripple effect on the rest of your life?

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Where I come from we use the word ‘tight’ to describe someone who is thrifty - the word is often used to poke gentle fun at friends or colleagues. Nowdays being careful with money has become sexy, with the weekend papers full of ways to beat the credit crunch, and 101 ways to survive a financial crisis. Suddenly managing the pennies is the new cool - well, maybe not cool, but certainly being aware of, and managing all the costs associated with your household or business is now a priority.

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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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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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View this video if you are in the Local Government. It’s a good example of how to use BPM software to improve your delivery of services to citizens.