Tomorrow (26th September) I am participating in a webinar on BPM for Financial services. Joining me will be John Jarrett, Director of BPM, AGF Trust and John Bovatsek, who is responsible for Oakbrook Solutions’ BPM solution for wealth management. John Jarrett’s presentation in particular should be interesting as he will be covering the hows- and-whys of getting a BPM project off the ground from his own experience at AGF Trust.
Getting funded is hard for any IT project (I know, I know BPM isn’t just about IT but mostly ends up in that department) as the ‘do nothing’ alternative is more popular than ever in 2008. Even the term BPM causes a great deal of confusion as it is used to cover a great variety of territory from human workflow to system to system integration and from very tactical solutions to problems (such as for message fixing for instance) to strategic programs as typified by this quote from Phil Gilbert of Lombardi picked up by Dennis Byron on his BPM blog
“BPM is the scalable program by which a company develops and maintains a capability for change. By "capability for change" I mean: having a corporate culture that will actively embrace change, without fear, and work to make that change good..."
This high level pitch clearly works for some businesses (and the success of a number of BPM vendors attests to this) – however it is going to be a hard and long sell in many more businesses. More often what I have seen is more tactical adoption as I covered in my recent ebizq article and we will be talking about some more on the webinar.
Ronan
Subscribe to feed
Hi Ronan,
My quote above is accurate as far as it goes. The question really is: what is BPM? My view, and that of Lombardi, is that BPM is a business program. BPM involves governance, alignment to business goals, all that stuff. At this level, BPM does not have a compelling "business case for funding" as you point out. Instead, a BPM program is a set of capabilities and methods that allow for the achievement of dozens, or hundreds, of amazing business cases.
The project part of BPM is where the business case lives. There's a misunderstanding that a BPM project must include a "BPMS." That may, or may not, be the case. But in any event, a BPM project is the tactical utilization of skills, methods and technologies that allow for business-led design, business-intensive development, rapid iteration cycles, and short-term achievement of ROI goals.
In order to achieve all that, at scale, you have to have not only the technology but also the corporate culture that allows this. Our experience is that technology alone will only beget mundane ROI results as compared to real BPM - even when a BPMS is involved! A change in culture to one that embraces change is therefore fundamental to achieving the promise of BPM. It is the critical factor today, because all technologies, even those not embodied in BPMSs, are relatively agile.
The critical element of BPM, therefore, becomes the scalable way through which a company develops and maintains this culture.
At Lombardi, we think the tooling plays a key role in this (by way of business-consumable experiences), but it isn't the technology you are worried about. It's the culture, which is the heart of any scalable enterprise. For example, simply "using BPMN" has little to do with BPM. Direct business involvement in the creation of BPMN-based models is the key. That's the lynchpin of change: direct business involvement in the utilization of the technologies that can be then used, directly, by IT.
A company that is not thinking about this cultural change isn't really "doing BPM," they are simply using a BPMS. "BPM" and "BPMS" are not synonymous. This doesn't mean you can't start small, it simply means that in order to achieve BPM results, you have to think about the whole experience - the embrace of the business culture - and not simply the technology differences between Vendor X and Vendor Y. It's not enough to have a feature, it's important that the feature be tied to a new user community in order for it to be interesting to the real BPM practitioner.
Thanks,
Phil