I particularly liked the Cisco and Otis process re-engineering, which showed a clear value chain, event-driven approach to BPM. Cisco wound up with the usual suspects: "market to sell, lead to order, quote to cash, issue to resolution, forecast to build, idea to product, and hire to retire," while Otis established "sales, order fulfillment, field installation, and job closing" processes.

I continue to search for the magic mix of IT-ERP processes, not too granular, not too grand. The portfolio lifecycles represent my current thinking. In pithy BPM-speak, they would be:

• Inspire to retire (service lifecycle)
• Require to retire (technology lifecycle)
• Forecast to retire (asset lifecycle)
• Identify to delete (information lifecycle)

One sobering tidbit was the apparent fragmentation of an application portfolio built on top of an ERP system at Cisco; this kind of thing is not supposed to happen, but my experience with ERP tools shows that it is all too possible.

Communications of the ACM July 2008 (51:7).  This latest, completely redsigned issue is the best one I have read today. They've done a terrific job restructuring it to include a variety of perspectives, from news to viewpoints to practice to hard research. This issue has a fascinating debate between Andriole and Roberts on the IT talent pipeline. Both make excellent points, Andriole from more of a corporate perspective, and Roberts providing a spirited rebuttal. Two practice articles on data management also worthwhile, "XML Fever" by Wilde/Glushko and "Beyond Relational Databases" by Seltzer. Wilde and Glushko point to a variety of XML pitfalls, from neophyte to advanced level, closing with some interesting perspectives on Semantic Web. Seltzer surprisingly doesn't mention Semantic Web (unless i missed it), but covers a variety of other active issues recently raised by Stonebraker among others. Finally, Tim Berners Lee and others propose a new "Web Science," and as noted previously anything with Berners-Lee is worth a read.

I'll be looking forward to my next issue of CACM; congrats to all on a redesign well done