Certainly you don’t have to be a Nobel Laureate in economics (and you should read “Geography and Trade” by Krugman if you have any interest whatsoever in the issues) to understand that the current economic mess is slowing M&A activity. But should it? Isn’t the idea to buy low? Seems like a great time for companies with lots of cash–which is what everyone is after!–to go on a buying spree. It’s always fun speculating what companies will be acquired and which companies will do the acquiring. Privately held companies may be under substantial pressure by their investors to sell.

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We’ve recently exceeded 40,000 distributed copies of ‘BPM Basics for Dummies’.  Whichever way you look at it, that is a lot of books and a lot of ‘Dummies’ (sorry, ‘uninitiated, potential BPM adopters’!).

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After years of repeated messaging from across the industry, there now seems to be a general recognition of the bigger process management picture that provides the backdrop for the underlying technology hawked by BPM(S) [add or remove the ‘S’ depending on what they are selling you…more on this later] vendors.

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Like Sandy Kemsley I am uncomfortable using the phrase ‘Eating Your Own Dog Food’. As a vendor, using our own software should be a desirable and valuable effort, whereas (for most of us at least) eating dogfood….not so much! In a recent post, Sandy put out a request for BPM vendors to describe what they are doing with their own software. The timing was great for Software AG as we have recently started an effort - ‘BPM@Software AG’ - to document and communicate years of internal experience and results with BPM.

More information about ‘BPM@Software AG’ will propogate over the channels over coming months, but in a nutshell, here are some of the things we are doing.

Global Sourcing - Establishing a world-class global purchasing organization supported by standardized, flexible and transparent processes.

New Hire Approvals - Rapid, automated and paperless approval for new hires with real-time transparency for all process stakeholders. This represents the first phase of a broader HR Onboarding initiative.

Global Deal Desk - Harmonizing and accelerating global deal flow with automated workflow-based approval and real-time transparency.

Solution Center Management - Streamlining the processes for creating (both internally and outsourced to partners), managing and requesting assets for customers demos, proof of concepts and implementations. Given the value we are generating with our own BPM solution, Software AG will be ‘Drinking Our Own Champagne’ (much more appealing!) for some years to come!