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I recently spoke with Matt Calkins, President and CEO of Appian. Matt (or his PR agency) come up with a BPM Hippocratic Oath. I was intrigued so I took the call and did a podcast.

Listen to or download the 9:32 min. podcast below:

Download file

Now I understand the need for PR (no such thing as bad press, right?), but I'm really not sure about this one. Do no harm is not what I would advise companies when they embark upon BPM. I asked Matt what the inspiration for this oath was and he said he thinks BPM should be growing as fast as ERP was growing in the 1990's, and we need to overcome the obstacles that are impeding its growth. He equates BPM with ERP because they both automate business processes. However, ERP systems are business applications. Back in the 90's the Y2K issue was driving a lot of ERP adoption, as companies were taking the opportunity to replace aging systems rather than investing big bucks in Y2K remediation, which could be dangerous with old brittle systems.

BPM is not a business application itself although it can be used to implement business solutions. It's about orchestrating SOA solutions, optimizing business processes, while reusing existing assets. I really don't see BPM as being the same as ERP nor do I see it replacing ERP.

Matt says one of the ways BPM does harm is not involving all the people. He says BPM should not be used to redesign processes. Processes should be implemented AS IS and then evolve, and no on should be left out. I think he even says that if you change a process it can't evolve. I actually found this position rather unique. Many organizations are using BPM to improve business processes. Probably all organizations have redundancies in their business processes - people rekeying information, redoing work that's already be done elsewhere. Why would you want to duplicate that? Many BPM tools have simulation engines so you can change the process and see if that changes the time or cost equation. Most companies I have spoken with use BPM for the express purpose of changing their processes to make them more efficient. That's the value proposition of BPM.

I think Matt's real point was that it needs to be easy for people to interact with a process and if it's not easy they won't use it. Now that I can buy. But the Hippocratic Oath for BPM? I was not convinced. Were you? Are the issue Matt speaks about the issues you are facing in your BPM implementations?

Posted by bethgb at 05:31 PM in BPM | Digg This | Add to del.icio.us

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