Wednesday, October 8, 2008

Rashid Khan and Business Process Management

While at Procter & Gamble, I became interested in exploring how to take the company out of Workflow and into something closer to Artificial Intelligence (AI) for business management. Of course, Franz Dill and I joined forces on it who had led multiple efforts in this field at the soap company. See Franz's AI expertise here.

If time allows, I will cover the learning from the research at a later point in time.

AI is still a ways away, yet research led me to the market place of Business Process Management (BPM). I wanted to meet the person who first thought of it and digging through the noise of perceptions and self-proclamantions, I discovered Mr. Rashid Khan who had coined the term "Business Process Management" when he founded Ultimus in 1994 - a BPM software solution company. See here some of Rashid's patents.

Rashid took Ultimus from an idea to I believe now delivering solutions in 80 countries. Rashid also wrote a good primer on BPM called "Business Process Management: A Practical Guide", see here. Franz wrote about the book in a blog, "Good, mostly non-technical overview and easy read... BPM can be seen as a way of modeling processes within a corporation, along with the people who do the work. It has been criticized for too strongly regimenting process steps."

Rashid recently left Ultimus after 14 years to pursue a new venture - a consultancy for senior executives called Leadership BPM. He is also blogging here.

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