The KIT ─ Knowledge & Information Technology
No. 117 - 1 April 2014
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In This Issue
BPM for Dummies... is for Dummies
OMG Meeting Highlights
Oil & Gas Process and Information Integration
Security and the IoT
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"Business Process Management for Dummies" -- an Epic Fail
Who is IBM trying to fool with its thin book, "Business Process Management for Dummies," written by Brian Underdahl, with the iconic yellow cartoonish cover of the well known (and otherwise respectable) series by Wiley, and the extra tease of the subtitle "2nd IBM Limited Edition"? Do they really think that people who are interested in BPM and don't know much about it are, well, dummies? It would seem so when you scan through this 64-page commercial for IBM solutions, especially BlueWorks Live. Once you remove the fluff (generalities stretched very thin) and the IBM commercials, there is practically nothing left.

To add bad form to lack of substance, the author doesn't seem to know that we're in the 21st century: the "book" contains, hold on to your seats, not a single diagram, figure, or table, and a single cursory mention of BPMN on page 34.

The book is free, as it should be, but in fact IBM should be giving the readers money to repay them for the time they might waste trying to find anything of value in this shameless piece of inferior promotional gibberish.

Now, do you want to really know how we feel about this?
OMG Week
The quarterly meeting of the Object Management Group took place in Reston, Va., on March 24-28. Some highlights:
  • The future of the 7-year old SBVR specification (Semantics of Business Vocabulary and Rules) was debated, especially the need to formalize its "structured English" language.
  • A two-day "Business Architecture Innovation Summit" was very well attended with about 200 people, including many US government agency representatives.
  • During the meeting, OMG announced the creation of the Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC). IIC's founding members are AT&T, Cisco, General Electric, IBM and Intel. OMG will manage the consortium, whose purpose is to accelerate the growth of the Industrial Internet through the collaborative efforts of industry, academia, and government.
  • We heard about the LEADing Practice, a community of 3000+ organizations that share 15 years' worth of research into best practices in enterprise architecture.
  • and... OMG celebrates its 25th birthday this week!  
Oil & Gas Industry Standards
c�b� continued to play a leading role in meetings to promote the use of modeling standards to improve process and information integration in the O&G industry. This included a presentation to the Standards Leadership Council in Houston, and a couple of "Information Days" in Utrecht in which BP, ExxonMobil, and Total were represented. At least two concrete ideas have emerged from this meeting:
  • a white paper describing the business case for integration of processes related to "safety events" and the handling of alerts and alarms
  • a UML profile for WITSML (Wellsite Information Transfer Standard Markup Language) 
Security and the Internet of Things
The Cutter Executive Update on this subject, written by Claude Baudoin, is now available, free of charge, to readers of the KIT. Click here.
Seen Recently...

"Businesses have digitized, but not transformed."

-- Title of a ZDNet article by Dion Hinchcliffe

 

Erratum: the quote in the last issue should have read "The six stages of Debugging..." (not "staged"). Sorry about the typo.