I would like to take this opportunity to thank you for your support during the past year. During 2009 I expand the geographic coverage of Biz Performance to include Europe to compensate for the impact of the recession. This has meant for past 6 months I have spent most of my time travelling in Germany and more recently Malta.

Although I have not spent much time in Singapore recently, I have not forgotten my friends and colleagues and would like too wish you all a Very Happy Chinese New Year and hope that our friendships strengthen and together we prosper through the challenges ahead.

My commitment to supporting you through Service Excellence will be the central theme that will continue throughout this year. I will endeavour too provide services that create value for you and ensure that all parties benefit from collaborating with the Biz Performance community of service providers and partners.

Although this year is still predicted to be a difficult one, there is hope and a confidence that the markets are recovering. I do believe through the continued focus on Business Intelligence, Corporate Performance Management and Business Process Management Advisory Services that we will be able to help you to take advantage of the economic recovery period. It is my belief that in times of adversity, there is always hope, and those that take the time to prepare themselves will succeed as the good the times return.

A Renewed Focus on Business Process Management

Towards the end of last year I had the good fortune to work with three Business Process Modelling products:

• JCOM1 - is a Subject Oriented Business Process Management Tool that focuses on the subjects as actors participating in a process. The subjects can be both humans and machines. The modeler refines the subjects by describing their behavior as a strictly sequential series of activities and interactions with the help of states and transitions.
• IBM WebSphere Business Modeler - is a comprehensive tool for business process modeling, analysis and process deployment focused on improving your overall end-to-end business process management (BPM) experience
• Oracle BPA - based on the market leading IDS Scheer ARIS Design Platform, it delivers a comprehensive set of integrated products that allows business users to design, model, simulate, and optimize business processes to achieve maximum operational efficiency.

These three products were introduced to me by Arise Consulting a Singapore based company, that specialises in Business Process Management. I have been working with them on a few projects and opportunities during the latter part of last year. This enabled me to visit Munich the headquarters of JCOM1 for training on their product. IT is a very exciting product and I believe an excellent product for the Asian Market. Also we were able to win a small contact with Singapore's leading Container Shipping Company who wanted to use WebSphere Business Process Modeler which gave me the opportunity to review the product and use it to develop a few of their key Asset Management and CRM processes. Arise also work closely with Oracle and are a leading implementor of Oracle BPA, which fits well them as they have extensive IDS Scheer Aris expertise. There is an interesting comparison between the products presented at the CITT (Centrope ICT Technology Transfer) - 6th Expert Meeting.

Business Process Management is an integral part of Performance Management and is becoming more and more important as the drive for SOA persists. All of the three products discussed above provide a tool set that enables services to be developed from the process models. They also fit well within the Business Architecture with an Enterprise Architecture Framework.

From model below it can be seen clearly the Integrated Business Process Management Cycle and the way in which Business Intelligence and Corporate Performance Management plays an integral part of Business Process Improvement. Businesses are dynamic and need to respond to change, Business Processes are static and improvements are developed based using performance metrics to gauge the benefits and sustainability of the business process activity.

Biz Performance over the this year will expand into Business Process Management with particular emphasis on the integration of Business Intelligence and Analytics. I will be updating the web site to reflect the experience we obtain through the year.