Don't you love it when someone declares something and actually sees it through?   (disclaimer: I too have a promise to declare: I am creating a blog series featuring the members of the Process Design Slam and each new post will highlight a different participant). 

But I am not speaking about myself here but rather about one of our SAP Mentors, John Harrikey who is a thought leader in the Process Design Slam collaboration. I called my last blog Coming up a Level in Our Process Thinking based on a quote of his and will continue to highlight his contributions to the BPX community through a retrospect of some examples of his community participation.

Meet John Harrikey, Bringing "New Think" to BPM

Last year at our  SAP TechEd Community Day John Harrikey presented a session called "Bring New Thinking to BPM to Improve IT Alignment with Business Stakeholders"

John, as Director of IT Architecture & Strategy for CSA Group, obviously knows how to do that not only for his own organization but for a virtual team as well.  John is one of the thought leaders of the Process Design Slam but his contribution to the BPX community and this topic was evident to all attendees last year when he challenged our thinking and helped us "take the SAPspeak out of the BPM discussion" and found like-minded collaboration partners in our Process Design "dream team".  (more about others in upcoming posts)

So What Was the Promise and How Realized?

Last year during his BPX session John talked about design iteration:

"BPMN promotes a business rather than technology based dialogue that is better valued by both Business and IT stakeholders. Processes remain "recognizable" by the business allowing for design ownership and iteration. Enough detail is contained within the process model to allow IT to "build" an executable process fully aligned with the business design."

He further outlined (declared) some of his future plans which included:

• Planning move from NetWeaver 7.0 to CE 7.1, also upgrading NetWeaver 7.0
• Aligning with NetWeaver BPM (Galaxy) to improve time-to-value for process development and deployment
• Investigating further use of BI to support business metrics for process performance and to leverage alert framework for activity monitoring
• Many questions for SAP…..

I would venture to say that his collaboration in the Process Design Slam is an attempt to realize some of these goals.

Take a look at his collaborative SAP BPM models in the wiki which he created in eclipse and shared with the team or follow his sharing of explorations of CE 7.1.

Emerging Roles in Business and IT

John described these emerging roles in his SAP TechED session last year which he outlined as the following:

For the Business:

• Process Improvement Analyst
• Business Process Expert
  • Playing a lead role in process improvement and business process modeling to drive requirements & alignment
  • Potential to leverage Visual Composer for "high-fidelity" usability testing
  • Process and UI composition based on evolving service repository or service stubs for work-in-process or new service requirements

For IT

• Service modeler/developer
• UI Composer
  • Responsible for governance, development and maintenance of the service repository
  • UI composition and service development in support of process needs
  • Continue responsibilities for back-end configuration as required
  • Continue responsibilities for integration, testing and deployment

Here too, in the context of the Process Design Slam, he helped outline and provide guidance for the participants in their Virtual Power Plant Process Roles. And it is interesting to note that fellow participants seem to align to these very definitions as they gather to model a solution for a "microgrid" or "smartgrid" business case. (see participants here)

Quick Chat With John About Improving our Process Thinking

At ASUG/Sapphire 2009 in Orlando, I caught John on camera for a few additonal thoughts which I've highlighted here as quotes:

• Coming up a Level in Our Process Thinking
• Looking at the end-to-end business
• Main challenge is getting people who understand the process end to end
• Taking the SAPspeak Out of the Discussion
• Moving from functional configuration analyst to working at a process level
• Looking at Modeled process
• Looking at Modeled in Netweaver

John's success in his own organization in doing this was rewarded with the comment : "best thing we've seen out of IT in years"

Hear and see the chat below or via this link: