For a couple of weeks ago I attended two different oneday courses held internal in Danske Bank. The courses presented some parts of the new software development model to be used in the organisation from august 2006. The development model now is aligned with terms used elseware in the industry, like Rational RUP. This is a great improvement over Danske Bank specific terms and ways of doing things.

Process requirements and models

The first course was in process requirements and how to model processes. The new term of this kind of process is Solution Process Flow, or SPF in short. This is instead of FOMA, an acronym for a danish description of the same artifact. The course was very good and enlightening. SPFs are created after a business analyst has described the requirements for a process as e.g. ASIS or TOBE processes. In the course we were taught new terms, new ways of modeling, and there where group work with presentations during the whole day - very good. I got an understanding of how to model this kind of processes using the new development - but as allways - the full understanding will first come when you work with it in practice.

GUI requirements and models

The second cource was in GUI requirements and how to model these. In this course we were also taught new terms, new models to create during determing requirements, and we also had groupwork during the day. Also an interesting course.

One very interesting thing that were mentioned multiple times during the course was how to ensure traceablility between different models, as a lot of models are created. This is also a large research question.

I look forward to see if my ideas, which I am working on in my PhD can be applied to especially the first course.

Two days ago I made an interview with Per Bergman, project leader at the customer package project in Danske Bank. Per talked about the history behind the customer package project, the challenges faced, and the outcome of the project. The customer package project was the first to use Danske banks Business Process Management System based on IBM's Process Choreographer.

I knew about the project beforehand because I have set next to the people involved in the project the last three years, but still the interview was exstremely useful for me. I got lot of real interesting information which I did not know of.

The purpose of the interview was to get information about experiences using a BPMS system for a coming presentation I am going to hold for a goverment architect forum, but I got so much from the interview that I have desided to continue the empirical work into this project and make an evaluation report.

The purpose of this report will be to describe experiences of implementing a real business process in a workflow management system. Not many companies have succeeded in this, but the interview actually gave insight in many advanceses and also the difficulties to overcome. I guess the report will be of high interest both to industry and academic.