Zotero - Unleasching the power of community development

I've had the privilege of playing around with quite a good number of open source softwares and various their flavors. And I keep falling in love with Firefox each time there is a new extension that redefines my browsing experience. With my endeavor into Academic research and a basic requirement to read research papers and use them as citations made me look for a software that could manage bibliography. I was introduced to Zotero by Sumit; a colleague and senior at MDI. Zotero is a great piece of firefox extension that can make your research journey a very exciting and smooth one.

Zotero sits right into your browser and manages the research papers/journal articles for you. It's so smooth that even a novice can get addicted to it in no time. The power of community development is wonderful. May god bless open source. Amen!

The World of Business Process Management

An introduction to a not so unknown world of "Business Process Management" what is also an acronym for BPM. A brief wiki article can be had at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_process_management. Let me dissect the term Business Process Management for you. First let me take management out of it and thankfully I don't have to go into the details of discussing what Management is. Let's now briefly talk about the term "Process". The word process has it's origin from Manufacturing as far as the field of business management goes.

"Process is a naturally occurring or designed sequence of changes of properties or attributes of an object or system."

Source: Wiki

Of late there has been an urgency or should I say evolved need to see Business Process as a resource just like human resource and other resources applicable in an organization. And because of this evolution to see Business Process as a resource there is a continuous need to manage it just like any other resource.

With changing influence of technology into business there were concepts like ERP which started gaining popularity. However, initially these efforts did not enjoy the success because they focused on department or functional areas of business. The myopia they struggled with was that they failed to understand that such efforts will provide multitude of success if the pattern to implement them was process oriented. However, on a larger perspective it also gave an insight that business should be looked from the criticality of process driven rather than function driven. The problem with a function driven approach is that it looks at the business from an in-house perspective. But as we all know that the success of any business today is driven by customers and hence the approach that the business should take today should be process driven. The process that focuses on customer satisfaction.

As a result of this advancement in the way the Business is starting to take advantages of process driven approach we see many companies (esp service-oriented) to boast about being 100% process oriented. Airtel, makes such a claim. I carefully used es service oriented. This is not to take anything away from manufacturing intensive firms' claim of being process intensive. However, there can be an eternal debate about how many of manufacturing firms have functions which are product oriented rather than service oriented.

We are now starting to see that companies are becoming more and more process oriented, but not many of them have reached a stage where they can brag about being process centric.

Let me briefly give theoretical elements involved in Business Process.

I think this should be it before I completely talk about my learnings of 4 hours today.