Enter the CPO

The increasing importance of business transformation has led to the creation of a new C-level title - the chief process officer (CPO), writes Australia's ComputerWorld.

McAfee recently created the new role for Bill Curtis, who was previously CPO at Borland. His primary responsibility is to create a corporate project management office inside McAfee, develop corporate business processes and implement internal processes backing up corporate security offerings.

Gartner Asia Pacific VP John Roberts said the role of a CPO is to drive internal business process improvement. The role was previously undertaken by CIOs, he noted.

Human process management solution provider PeopleCube has introduced the latest release of its centralised event and resource management solution, reports CNW.

The latest versions of Scheduler Plus and Scheduler Plus ii feature enhancements based on customer feedback. The improvements are aimed at simplifying event resource reservation workflow as well as providing enhanced support for the FireFox browser.

The latest release of Scheduler Plus and the Web-based version, Scheduler Plus ii, features a number of feature upgrades to improve event management processes.

Open source business process management solutions firm Intalio has signed OEM agreements with Diamelle and OperMIX for the embedding of its standards-based BPMS, reports Business Wire.

Diamelle Technologies will embed Intalio|BPMS into its solutions in order to support the deployment of complex identity and access management processes, while complying with strict auditing and compliance requirements that are demanded by its financial services customers.

OperMIX will use Intalio|BPMS to deploy custom business processes on top of Salesforce.com AppExchange and provide real-time integration with third-party applications such as SAP R/3 and mySAP Business Suite.

SourceCode, the creator of the K2.net Enterprise Workflow Platform, has released the first beta of the new version of K2.net, codenamed BlackPearl, reports SDA Asia.

The complete commercial version is expected to be released in early 2007.

K2.net BlackPearl is aimed at the business process management space. Dennis Parker, president of K2.net, said: "K2.net BlackPearl is the culmination of three years of development and will form the platform on which we will launch our next-generation process management platform."