Whether your objectives are focused on quality, performance, regulatory issues or product enhancements, there’s continual movement from as-is to to-be.  The problem is that many organizations don’t have a true picture of either state.   At best, we typically start from an understanding of how things are supposed to be.  Yikes.

Fortunately, visual process discovery enables a flexible  approach to application requirements definition and provides the foundation for successful transformation.  Process models are one of the best ways to elicit, convey and validate that process understanding, and offer a solid starting point for analysis, diagnosis and innovation.

Here are a few of the benefits:

• Understand how a current process really works
• Identify bottlenecks or constraints in existing processes
• Explore strategies for optimizing processes for improved performance
• Detail integration touch points between systems or applications
• Standardize process components for maximum reuse (activities, roles, resources, business data and business rules)

On Tuesday, Feb. 8, Ravenflow’s David Ruiz will host, “Taking Process Discovery to the Cloud.”  During this complimentary webinar, he will discuss the benefits and challenges of process discovery, and the business case for using visual models to elicit, convey and validate understanding, and offer a solid starting point for analysis, diagnosis and innovation.

And for those of you who aren’t drawing  experts,  he will gladly explain and demonstrate how RAVEN Cloud can automatically generate process models from natural language text so everyone – regardless of drawing expertise – can can collaborate and contribute to model definition and validation.

The webinar begins at 10 a.m. PST (1 p.m. EST).  Click here to register.

We hope all of you have had a great start to 2011.  We’ve certainly been busy here.

Last week, we announced a new RAVEN Cloud integration with HP’s Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) 11 platform.  With RAVEN Cloud’s XPDL export capability, process models generated in RAVEN Cloud can now  be imported directly into HP ALM 11 and other lifecycle tools that support the standard.  RAVEN Cloud’s process diagrams can then serve as the basis for defining requirements, which is often one of the biggest challenges development teams face.  (Click here to learn more.)

How do we know that?

Well, today, we announced preliminary results of our 2011 State of Requirements Management Survey, which we co-sponsored with the good folks at Jama Software.  The survey attracted more than 800 participants – more than tripling our survey base from the 2008 edition.

What did we learn?  You’ll have to attend our free webinar on Tuesday, January 25 at 10 a.m. PST to find out.  But here are a few nuggets to whet your appetite:

•    Almost 70 percent of respondents stated that customer input and feedback were essential to project success
•    75 percent of respondents cite unrealistic schedules or expectations as reasons for unsuccessful project outcomes
•    An astounding 83 percent of respondents said they still use spreadsheets or documents to document and communicate requirements (clearly you all need to try RAVEN Cloud!)
•    30 percent of respondents spend at least 25 percent of their time dealing with changing requirements

We’ll give you the full scoop on the survey next Tuesday and we’ll even send you a copy of the report.  But you have to register first.  See you next Tuesday!

So our service speaks for itself, let me put it to you this way:

Start process.
The product team completes development of RAVEN Cloud.
The product team delivers RAVEN Cloud to the user community.
The product team says “Thank You for Using RAVEN Cloud” to the user community.
End process.

Thanks again, and stay tuned to experience the great new features we have planned for RAVEN Cloud in the coming months.

Our VP of products, David Ruiz, has been invited to present RAVEN Cloud as part of the Innovations Showcase tomorrow at the XPDL-BPMN User Group, hosted by the Workflow Management Coalition at Fujitsu America in Sunnyvale, Calif.   Join Dave at 10 a.m. to learn more about our XPDL capabilities – and for a sneak peak at our latest enhancements to RAVEN Cloud.

If you see us out there, please be sure to say hi; we always love to meet you!

It takes place Wednesday at 10 a.m. PDT (1 p.m. EDT).

The webinar is free, but space is limited and pre-registration is required. Please click here to reserve your spot.

What are some of the other factors that affect your bottom line?

• Age
• Gender
• Geography
• Industry

To find out how each of these factors (and more) influence your annual income, please join us Wednesday, Oct. 27 at 10 a.m. PDT (1 p.m. EDT) for a complimentary one-hour webinar presented by ASPE.

Space is limited and pre-registration is required.  Please click here to reserve your spot.

Attendees will be eligible to download a free white paper with the salary results.

On the Visio front, the download dialog has been updated so you can specify whether you want the diagram to be optimized for use with Visio 2007 or Visio 2010.  We also extended the amount of information you can send to Visio along with the diagram.   You can check this out by opening the Shape Data window in Visio and then clicking on the diagram or any of the steps within it.

In terms of UI enhancements, we’ve transformed the Process Explorer control to change the way you access the process examples and begin to show evidence of the future ability to store your own processes.  The graphic below shows what I mean:

We’ve also enhanced the Process Narrative panel so you can now switch between the narrative and a secondary panel showing the Process Attributes.  Note the iPhone style transition effect between the two panels.   Very nice…

Finally, we’ve enhanced the visual experience to more clearly show the correlation between the text and diagram.  So for example, if you select a row in the list of functions the corresponding text is highlighted in the narrative and the related steps are highlighted in the diagram:

That’s all for now.  Please continue you provide us with your feedback, as well as any process examples you would like to see featured in RAVEN Cloud.

Have a good weekend everybody.

But even better, from our perspective, is that Microsoft has been talking about RAVEN Cloud.  That’s right, Microsoft did a four-page case study on how we leveraged the Azure platform for RAVEN Cloud.

Why did we choose Azure?

As David Ruiz, VP of Products, said, “We aren’t limited to the public cloud with Windows Azure. Now that we have developed the service for Windows Azure, we can take the same code and configure it to run in any number of ways to meet customer needs.”

Click here to read the case study.  And as always, please let us know what you think.

Should I ask for a raise? Or should I stay mum and count my lucky stars?

Participate in the 2010 BA Salary Survey to find out.  More than 2,400 BAs have taken part so far and we’d like to double that number before the survey closes Sept. 10!

We’ve co-sponsored the survey with IIBA and ASPE and we will present the results in a webinar next month.  And if you share you email address with us, we’ll send you a copy of the results, along with an invitation to the webinar.  (Don’t worry, your answers will remain anonymous and are not associated with your contact details!)

Click here to participate.

We’d love to hear your thoughts and we’re happy to answer any questions you may have, so comment away!

And if you missed the webinar, you can view it on-demand here.