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Repeated bids to bridge the gap between the business and IT groups are driving the evolution of a new breed of exceptionally agile and in-demand Business Process Experts.

Their role is “to straddle a line of business and IT organizations, translating requirements from one into another and translating capabilities from IT back up into the lines of business,” says Mark Yolton, Vice President of SAP’s recently formed and rapidly growing Business Process Expert Community.

SAP launched the BPX in May of 2006 after a survey revealed a growing number of members of the SAP Developer Network (SDN) were showing an interest in business processes and methodologies and best practices.

“These people are interested in optimizing business processes and practices. They’re less involved in developing software and more involved in modeling business practices, standardizing those, and finding ways to differentiate their companies based on business practices and processes,” Yolton added.

Yolton sees the trend occurring in parallel with -- and partly as a result of -- service-oriented architectures.

“After modeling, they turn those models into software behavior, and that’s one of the advantages of service-oriented architecture is that those models and those best practices, which are reflected through software, can be reused.”

Yolton noted that the community’s early adopters wanted “more information on what kind of skills does a business process expert need, where would I get those skills, can I get them through training and where can I get experience so that I get some practice using those new skills.”

The site, located at http://bpx.sap.com defines the concept of the Business Process Expert, details a five-part process lifecycle and key analytics, and boasts the following features:

--Training courses, downloads and demonstrations from seminars and workshops.

-- Very active discussion forums with hundreds of threads and thousands of comments. “We find them so active that the median time is about 15 or 20 minutes before you get the first reply to your discussion forum question or comment,” Yolton notes.

-- Dozens of blogs, of which 60 percent are written by non-SAP employees -- and a very popular wiki.

Yolton noted that members earn points for participating and recommendation, but the reputation management can pay off in the real as well as virtual worlds. He went on to share case studies of system integrators who have gained recognition and increased work from their participation in the BPX.

“They start to introduce themselves and talk about their background to establish credibility. And this prospective customer will say, 'No need to go any further we already know everything about you; we’ve read about you in the blogs; we’ve read your discussion forums comments; we know you’re an expert on the topic.'"

And are the business and IT people there interacting?

“We’ve been very careful to position the BPX community next to the SDN community, so we have business process experts overlapping and collaborating with their IT colleagues and counterparts,” Yolton noted.

“And that’s important to us. We want those two things to be next to each other, because there’s this age-old problem of lines of business and IT organizations not always communicating and collaborating well with each other and it doesn’t optimize for either organizations or either group,” Yolton added.

On the corporate side, Yolton described how Whirlpool and IBM and Intel have also benefitted directly from activity in the community.

“SAP also recognizes that different industries influence the way processes work within a company,” Yolton noted. “Supply-chain management within the retail industry is very different from supply-chain management in the chemicals industry.”

BPX’s first vertical industry focus is on consumer products groups; supply-chain management is the first horizontal area, with human resources, financials and CRM could follow later in 2007.

Meanwhile, SAP’s education organization has defined three skill levels for a business process expert, from beginner to true expert.

“You can expect to see courses developed, additional relationships with outside universities and other organizations to build out the skills, education and certification path for a Business Process Expert community,” Yolton said.

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Posted by: Gian Trotta at January 9, 2007 01:23 PM | Permalink