Leo Apotheker, incoming CEO of SAP was interviewed in November 2008 in a session that appeared on U.S. television January 6, 2009. Also Harvard Business School professor Andrew McAfee participated. The moderator was Charlie Rose, whose United States Public Broadcasting System (PBS) TV show is described as a broadcast that "engages America's best thinkers, writers, politicians, athletes, entertainers, business leaders, scientists and other newsmakers in one-on-one interviews and round-table discussions." Bill Gates (12 times), Larry Ellison (6 times) and other IT luminaries have appeared previously but this was the first SAP appearance to the best of my research.
It was a wide ranging interview which I described on IT Business Edge in detail. But the business process management (BPM) angle was the frequent mention by both Apotheker and McAfee of business processes and the specific reference by both speakers to "business process factories." Apotheker and McAfee say that's what SAP does: manufacture business processes.
When I told Jon Pyke of Cordys about the use of the term he smiled (via email). He's been using the term for years. He started a company and a web site by that name in 2004 when he left TIBCO/Staffware and both came with him when he joined Cordys as chief strategy officer in 2008. According to John, "it was music to my ears."
John does not claim to be the first to use the term and thinks it could be found in some "very deep technical standards" work. Wipro has been using it in the same context for a few years too. But Pyke has certainly been evangelizing it more than anyone I know and he seems to be happy--not jealous--to hear that the idea has reached the hallowed halls of Harvard. And the more hallowed green plains of Walldorf. To Pyke the concept has some subtleties that SAP's CEO didn't describe: the ability to be called on demand, and to be part of a mash-up (although that term did not exist when he first described the process factory concept).
I like the concept of process factory, and software factory in general, because the overall information technology (IT) culture is still stuck somewhere in the pre-industrial age. IT folks are constantly re-inventing the "wheel." End users are constantly buying their own new "wheels" when there are thousands of perfectly good "wheels" lying all along the roadbed. Web 2.0 has only compounded that inefficiency (another Pyke pet peeve) and BPM has the potential of adding another multiplier effect.
In fact I don't think that will happen because of the cost it would impose on the economy as a whole. If BPM is going to take off, as I think it will, it will be because of the process factory idea. Conversely, without some variation of the process factory concept, BPM will go the way of artificial intelligence or rapid application development.
But if SAP is talking about it, it's time has arrived. 2009-the year of the process factory.
[For the benefit of our readers from outside the U.S., PBS is separate from the U.S. government -- although it receives some government funds -- and ranks in the middle of the pack in viewership, lower than a half dozen totally commercial broadcast networks and about the same as hundreds of cable choices.
[Truth in advertising: Jon and I are both Grey Eagles, which means in former lives we worked together at the former Data General. See note at the bottom of the linked story for more about Data General alumni.]
-- Dennis Byron
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