Live from Delphi - Continuously Bridging the Gap Between Business and IT

I am attending the Delphi Business and Process Innovation Summit this week and blogging as I go.

Marc Kerremans was my next session on Continuously Bridging the Gap Between Business and IT. Marc started with a discussion of how his company closed the gap between IT and the business in a client. The starting situation was that there was ISO work driven by the quality group while IT doing local workflow-centric, technology-driven projects with lots of consultants. IT called this "BPM" and built systems that were not used. The restart was driven by his failure - they wanted to regain credibility for BPM by aligning solutions with IT infrastructure. The restart involved a very short project with narrow scope that would also generate a BPM reference architecture. First step was to prioritize projects based on things like skills in house, can you standardize a process, does it fit? Procurement came up as a candidate. They kept the analysis high level (purchasing dossier) so as to keep scope limited and only focused on steps that changed status of dossier. Avoided integration and electronic signatures. Brought process/business people and technology people together to develop solution/implementation and made sure that the functional analysis showed manual and technology steps in a single flow. Next step was to drill-down into more detail and remove the constraints around integration - this was about 3-4 months. Changed the system to reflect a to-be process and tried to focus on integration of this initial project into full context. Increasingly the client led this analysis and were able to make further progress.

Learnings from the project:

Try and abstract a more general problem/solution before building a specific one for a specific problem
Focus on business operations not on the flow of a specific object flowing through a process. This means modeling transitions between activities and interactions between participants
Find the "push/pull" point between top-down BPM drivers and bottom-up technology drivers
Various kinds of processes - flow(sequential), connected (one connects to the next), disconnected (gaps), jumbled (all mixed up) - and need to understand the kind of process to model and manage them correctly. You can manage at a higher level for coherent processes (and must do so at a lower level for more jumbled ones)
Need to consider content / data as well as process flow
Phased approach with quick hits
Question official procedures as may not be what really happens
Align process and IT architectures

All good stuff. I think the role of decisioning in these different kinds of processes may well be different in each case but any time you want to eliminate manual steps you should consider it. I am speaking tomorrow and Marc also talked about BPM Forum in Europe at www.bpm-forum.org that might be worth you checking out.