Best of the Best

Looking for the best posts and pages on this site? Here is a short list and description of the top viewed items:

Solutions innovation in a product driven company
Creating software solutions to business problems is an enjoyable, creative and fulfilling process. The full lifecycle of creating a true solution from nothing requires a range of skills that can only be successfully be contributed by a team with people from different backgrounds. This post describes my experiences in this world.

Electronic signatures - physical tokens are coming
The adoption of secure mechanisms for authenticating users and signing transactions is accelerating, to supplement the all too easy to obtain username and password credentials. This post, and some related ones, discuss secure electronic signatures.

Financial products have a Long Tail
The Long Tail is the perfect model for online consumer marketing and sales. It can also be applied to financial services and the products that financial institutions offer. Online brokerages actually have many the features of Long Tail retailers right now. Other products need a little technology triage before this can happen.

Microsoft Open XML truly enables document intelligence
Microsoft is finally catching up with Adobe in its ability to provide document intelligence within its Office documents, enabling offline classification, document workflow management and forms data capture. Coupled with Microsoft's ECM strategy with Sharepoint and workflow, Office 2007 will be a good stepping stone to effective document and business process management in every organization over the next few years. All vendors in the space need to adapt fast to stay ahead of the game, while leveraging the power that both Microsoft and Adobe offer with their products. Also see: Microsoft XPS, Outside the firewall processes with intelligent documents


SOA anti-patterns in New Account Opening
Learn from other peoples' mistakes... The Percolating Process SOA anti-pattern, by Steve Jones, caught my eye as a great example of what can go wrong in process and integration projects. Here I expand on the idea with some simple opinions that reflect my worst-case experience in this area.

Collaborating in structured business processes
In the life of every business process there comes a time when you just need ad-hoc user interaction. BPM doesn't really do a good job of this, having neither the tools nor the inclination to let people run free and do their own thing for an extended period of time. Collaboration has both the tools and the inclination, but it doesn't have the social skills to achieve it. This post and Part II argue for Collaboration as a Service to enable this exceptional need for collaborative human interaction within BPM.

Looking for something else?

If you are looking for something else, go to the Blog and view the Recent Posts and Archives menus on the vertical bar. Or search the Blog or Supplement sites:

Blog Supplement Web