Paul Harmon, Executive Editor of Business Process Trends, writes the BPTrends Monthly Newsletter, which is posted on the BPTrends site and made available FREE to anyone who comes to the site. Each BPTrends Newsletter contains an in-depth article on a relevant topic, and promotes best practices in business process change. All BPTrends Newsletters are listed here in chronological order, beginning with the most recent issue.

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• December 2004: IBM's BPM Strategy, Products, and Architecture
  Paul Harmon - December 07, 2004
  The November BPTrends Newsletter focuses on IBM’s activities in the business process space. IBM is one of those dominant technology vendors whose efforts tend to shape the development of any new market. In this BPTrends Newsletter, we review IBM’s BPM Software strategy and look at its BPM architecture and current products.
  

• November 2004: The Human Side of an Enterprise Architecture
  Paul Harmon - November 02, 2004
  We’ve discussed Business and Enterprise Architectures from several perspectives. This month we zero in on the kinds of analytic tools, business models, design tools and documentation a company might want to consider when it seeks to define the human side of its enterprise architecture. We rely heavily on the Performance Improvement approach championed by ISPI.
  

• October 2004: Business Processes at a New Company
  Paul Harmon - October 05, 2004
  This month, BPTrends will consider the advice we might give a new company that was just getting started and wondered what steps it ought to take to become a process-centric company.
  

• September 2004: The Baldrige National Quality Awards Program
  Paul Harmon - September 07, 2004
  The September BPTrends Newsletter focuses on the annual Baldrige Awards given by the US Department of Commerce to companies who evidence outstanding performance as a result of their mastery of processes, quality control and process management. We take a look at the award, the criteria, and the winners.
  

• July 2004 Business Performance Management: The Other BPM
  Paul Harmon - July 06, 2004
  The July BPTrends Newsletter focuses on Performance Management, reviews the history and the concepts most people associate with it, and considers the relationship between Process and Performance management.
  

• June 2004: Business Process Intelligence
  Curt Hall - June 01, 2004
  This month’s BPTrends Newsletter, written by guest editor Curt Hall, focuses on Business Process Intelligence or BPI. This new approach to process management, monitoring, and improvement represents a fusion of traditional Business Intelligence and Business Activity Monitoring techniques with some newer techniques required to meet the demand for presenting information in a more process-centric context.
  

• May 2004: The OMG's Model Driven Architecture and BPM
  Paul Harmon - May 01, 2004
  The May issue of BPTrends on the Object Management Group’s Model Driven Architecture initiative. MDA represents a major effort to create standards that can be used to systemize software development, and is very supportive of business process management.
  

• April 2004: BPT Tools
  Paul Harmon - April 06, 2004
  In this issue of BPTrends we provide readers with a very pragmatic, introduction to the concept of BPM Tools, consider how the market has developed in the past year, and present our view of how the BPM tools market is likely to develop in the future.
  

• March 2004: Evaluating Your Company's BP Capability
  Paul Harmon - March 02, 2004
  In this month’s BPTrends Newsletter we discuss a general approach to characterizing your organization’s business process maturity. We borrow ideas from CMM, but offer a more informal and practical way of describing maturity.
  

• February 2004: Optimizing Supply Chain Processes
  Curt Hall - February 03, 2004
  In this issue of BPTrends, Curt Hall, our Guest Editor for February, provides an overview of how some companies are using business intelligence (BI) to monitor and measure supply-chain operations. This has resulted in a new analytic field called supply chain intelligence (SCI). This survey allows business managers to evaluate the value these new techniques might provide if applied to their own business processes.
  

• January 2004: Enterprise Architectures
  Paul Harmon - January 06, 2004
  Much is being written about enterprise architectures. In this issue of BPTrends Newsletter, we provide an overview of the various approaches being taken to enterprise architecture and show how enterprise architectures are sometimes integrated with business process architectures.
  

• December 2003: Analyzing and Improving Customer-Facing Processes
  Paul Harmon - December 02, 2003
  In the Spring of this year we provided an overview of the Supply Chain porcesses. In this issue we want to provide a similar overview of Cusotmer-Facing processes -- from strategy and Customer frameworks to CRM and other automation efforts.
  

• November 2003: Business Process Outsourcing: Making It Work
  Paul Harmon - November 04, 2003
  In October we provided a general overview of the Business Process Outsourcing arena. This month we want to drill into what's involved in actually outsourcing a business process and consider some of the approaches that facilitate BPO contracting.
  

• October 2003: An Overview of Business Process Outsourcing
  Paul Harmon - October 07, 2003
  October's BPTrends Newsletter surveys the rapidly growing field of Business Process Outsourcing. We provide an overview of what constitutes business process outsourcing, identify some of the major players and their strategies, and consider some of the successes and the pitfalls.
  

• Sept 2003: Managing Business Processes
  Paul Harmon - September 02, 2003
  This issue of BPTrends Newsletter focuses on how organizations manage their business processes. We consider the interaction of managers and business processes at three levels:(1) How executives move from setting strategies to redesigning buisness process archiectures, (2) how line managers control business processes, and (3) how supervisors manage specfic processes and activities. We briefly consider how automated sytsems can help managers stay on top of processes in real time. Finally we provide readers with an overview of the issues companies face when they seek to improve the management of their business processes.
  

• July 2003: Business Rules: An Introduction
  Paul Harmon - July 01, 2003
  This month's issue of the BPTrends newsletter focuses on business rules. Every company has rules that guide employee decisions and that are incorporated into software applications and databases. There is a growing movement to formalize business rules so that they can be used in a systematic way to align company efforts, organize applications, and provide managers with a quick and reliable way to change the rules when companies change strategies, goals or policies. This issue provides a survey of various business rule initiatives currently being pursued by business process practitioners.
  

• June 2003: Six Sigma Today
  Paul Harmon - June 01, 2003
  This month’s issue provides an overview of Six Sigma, probably the most important non-IT business process methodology being pursued by leading companies today. There are reports of huge savings from Six Sigma and complaints about its difficulties in some situations. We look at the basics, consider specific Six Sigma programs at Ford and Sun, look at the use of Six Sigma in new product development, and generally provide a status report on this important approach to business process change.
  

• May 2003: Second Generation Business Process Methodologies
  Paul Harmon - May 04, 2003
  The May issue of BPTrends Newsletter describes the evolution of second generation BP methodologies. We begin by describing the key features of the Supply Chain Council's SCOR methodology, then look at how the IT Business Process Management team at Hewlett-Packard used the SCOR approach in other business process domains to effectively create a new methodology for business process redesign.
  

• April 2003: Analyzing Activities
  Paul Harmon - April 04, 2003
  This month's issue, Analyzing Activities, provides a generic overview of how companies can use various business process techniques to analyze specific activities. By drilling down to the activity level, we focus on the atomic structure of business process improvement and show how job design, activity based accounting human performance analysis and Six Sigma can all be used to help us understand the basics of a business process.
  

• March 2003: Business Process Architecture and the Process-Centric Company
  Paul Harmon - March 04, 2003
  This issue reviews what a business process architecture can be and what value it can provide to process-centric companies that take advantage of this approach.
  

• February 2003: Supply Chains as Business Processes
  Paul Harmon - February 04, 2003
  This issue presents an overall strategy for thinking about supply chains, discusses the issues involved in analyzing, managing and improving supply chains, and focuses on how the Supply Chain Council's SCOR methodology can be used to support supply chain improvement
  

• January 2003: What is Business Process Change?
  Paul Harmon - January 10, 2003
  This issue provides an overview of the business process change market and defines the various communities that we use to classify materials on the BPTrends portal.