Listen to my podcast with Ian Gotts, Founder and CEO of Nimbus. Ian is a contributor to the ebizQ Forum and he also has a book coming out, People-Centric Process Management, which is what we discuss in the podcast.
Listen to or download the 9:21 minute podcast below:
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PS: Now your new book is called People-Centric Process Management, don't all processes essentially involve people?
IG: Clearly, they do but I think the issue is that business process management, BPM, is both confused and confusing, particularly, for people out there trying to look at business process management. They're confronted by a whole series of technologies and tend to get embroiled in the technology.
And what the book's trying to say is that every process whether it has lots of automated steps or lots of manual steps is a combination of both things and therefore you need to look at it from how it affects the people rather than diving straight into technology and trying to automate the hell of whatever they're doing. The book is really trying to draw people back and make them take a fresh look at what they've been doing.
BPM is a 20-year-old technology, exactly what can your book bring that's new to BPM?
Yeah, BPM is old. Certainly, the technology is old and the principles behind it, which is about you improve an operation as business performance have been around since companies have existed. And it's interesting, in an upturn in the marketplace, people tend to maybe put an improvement in processes on the backburner the moment that times become hard then suddenly it has a real focus. I mean Nimbus is probably actually had its best year ever in a downturn in the marketplace. The question asked us, what are we actually bringing to this, which is new? I don't think we're bringing anything particularly new but what we're actually doing is getting people to think about what the real basics and basically highlighting those.
One of these we talk in the book is about the three "R's". There's some things you already know and we're reinforcing those. The second thing is there may be areas you've forgotten and the book will remind you about those things, which are important. And then there may be other questions in the book which suddenly are ah-ha moments for you and that's where we're talking about being revealed so it's sort of reinforcing, reminding, and revealing and that's really what the book's trying to do about things which actually we all ought to be worried about.
I also certainly agree that BPM is now as important to ever to today's enterprise. Would you say your book is actually anti-technology?
Absolutely not. The fact we talk about people, it's actually people processes, and technology is actually, what the book's all about and we're leading with people because actually that's where it all starts. Every business now is run basically on computers. You can't get away from technology. What we're trying to say though is that technology around business process management isn't what is typically considered BPM technology, which is the piece of software, which automates a process, which embeds into some sort of application. People out there have lots of manual activities but they still need some sort of computer support for it so it might be simply serving up them the right document, the right form, giving them hints and tips at exactly the right time and technology needs to do that.
So what we're trying to say is let's think about this from a process perspective, understand what the end-to-end process is and then use the appropriate technology at the right point. Again, back to my earlier answer which is there's no dive straight into let's use BPM technology which is "automation technology" to understand how to do things.
Now, what would you say are some of the key questions around BPM today?
Well, some of the things that we talk about in the book -- the book's slightly unusual because they're all structured around the smart question's approach, which is two or three chapters of background and then we get into a whole series of questions. Not many answers but lots of them are questions prompting you to think about what is important and therefore, the book is structured around three key sets of areas.
First are the people questions, questions underneath what's driving you. And they're a whole series of questions about what are the drivers behind even wanting to look at some sort process improvements, things like market impact, level of regulation, market competitiveness, and I won't go through all the questions.
And against every question, I'm afraid there aren't any answers but there are some points, which are, what is the impact to the question to make you think of it more and get into details to come up with the answers? So around the people questions, we've got what's driving you. What sort of organizational culture do you have? Are you open to process? Who are the people in the process? Are we looking at particular areas of the business? Are we looking at a particular end-to-end process which spans multiple silos or actually looking to for the details somewhere? And what governance and what benefits realization are we going to put in place to make sure that this actually has been delivered? They're the people questions.
The process questions are about the project really, lots of project scope. How you going to resource it? What approach are you going to use? Is it Lean Sigma? Is it a total quality management approach? Is it some other methodology or what are the standards? Is BPMN appropriate? Maybe it isn't. Maybe BPMN is only around the technology side. Maybe there's a simpler standard, which you require to make sure that end users can understand it.
Are you going to have a center of excellence or a business process competency center? What sort of process governance because we need version control, some sort of compliance. How are we going to make sure that works? And then almost the most important question around process is how are you going to communicate this? How are you going to roll it out? How can you make sure that this is not a one-off activity but it's the start of some level of continuous improvement? So those are the process questions.
And very quickly just to finish off, the technology questions. So what's the audience? Who actually are we aiming this at and what devices? Are they accessing those over the web? Do they have iPhones or they the lucky few who have iPads? What's the enterprise architecture? So does this fit with other systems? How does it integrate with the existing systems you've got? Are they cloud-based solutions or they on-premise? And what tools or application strategy have you got? And then we get to many, many companies have already done this activity of capturing processes as many times before that legacy content. The question; is it worth anything? Is it worth converting it? Is it better to start afresh and loose that old baggage? And then back to delivery and deployment. If we're delivering it out to iPhones and onto the web, how are we going to do that and in what format?
And then back into support. What does IT need to do? Are there new tools and applications you're bringing into the organization and is IT onboard in terms of supporting that? And then the last of the questions really around vendor selection because choosing a business process management vendor maybe very different from choosing a traditional application vendor. So that's how the questions are structured and its meant to be a way of prompting you to think through things. And you may call this simplistic, the checklist of checklists, and if that works for you, brilliant.
Now, in the business world, essentially, change is the norm, now wouldn't that essentially dictate that BPM essentially is already had its day?
That's a great question. That's something we get asked all the time. People say, oh, we've very innovative. We're just moving with the times. We're really having to change customers. Well, all we need change process management, that locks us down, that stifles innovation and I'd have to agree with them that elements of their business I'm sure are very innovative. But in many industries or maybe even their own area, there are elements of their business, which they don't want to be innovative. I don't want you to be innovative about the way you fill out your expenses or the way you create the form to fill out your expenses, or the way you book a sale, or the way we actually upgrade a server.
There are many, many processes in organizations where elements that actually need to be quite structured and we need to make sure that there's a degree of rigor there. Certainly, in those industries where there's a level of compliance. Absolutely we need to stuff written down. So the pharmaceuticals run drug safety. You'd hope that there's a consistent process there.
Certainly, in the oil and gas industry where health and safely is paramount, or in the financial services industry where the way that new accounts are setup, or the way that sales are made or trades are made. There's a level of regulatory compliance. Now what we need to do is balance that dichotomy, either balance of compliance but do having an area or ability to drive a level of continuous improvement in a compliant environment. I think that's the challenge that we now have within BPM in organizations and that challenge is not going to go away.
This wraps up Part I of this podcast and make sure you turn in to Part II of my podcast with Ian Gotts. Also, make sure you check out Ian's book, People-Centric Process Management. Ian, I look forward to speaking to you once again.
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