Live from Brainstorm - Transforming to a process driven enterprise

I am attending the Brainstorm BPM/SOA/Rules event in Washington DC this week and blogging as I go.

Next was a panel on Transforming to a process driven enterprise with Savvion, EMC/Documentum (representative from Proactivity acquisition), Adobe and BEA (someone from the Fuego acquisition)and hosted by Tom Dwyer of Yankee Group. Tom gave a fairly generic but useful definition of a process-driven enterprise as one "Structured, organized, managed and measured in terms of its core business processes" and outlined the consequences of this in terms of being able to execute process models, a managed portfolio of process, a systematic way to conceive and analyze and ultimately introduce new processes.

Interesting thoughts from the panel

Companies are focusing on fundamentals - to be competitive must be better at fundamental processes than competitors.
But most discussions start with a hard-dollar problem that has a process problem. Once a process solutions has fixed business problems then can build on this success and go top-down by saying "what else could we fix".
A focus on customer experience is also driving process-centric thinking as it is processes that drive these interactions.
Execution focus (especially at the business level) is perhaps a key difference today as thinking about process has a long history but only recently have tools, terminology, experience meshed.
Some process change comes from mandates (e.g. government agencies being forced to change processes) but still worth having an ROI mind set to generate the successes that will that drive change
Some interesting discussion about the tendency of process automation to focus on efficiency not effectiveness - this is what drove the creation of decision yield as the same issue comes up in decision automation. You need a broad focus to be sure you get your benefits. Question should be about "how can someone improve the way they operate". Interestingly I would argue that this is one of the reasons that you should think about decisions as well as processes - you might find that improving the decisions in a process is all you need to do, you don't need to (or perhaps cannot) change the process.
No-one is going to argue that doing processes poorly is a good idea but cultural issues are an issue and people don't feel empowered to make changes. Companies also don't know the process even if they know it does not work well and this creates another problem.
What causes companies to act? Pain. Hard to generate energy for change without pain awareness
What can you tell senior management about the consequences of moving to a process-centric view? Try and map to their goals