Welcome to another First Look podcast -- I'm your host, ebizQ's Project Manager Gian Trotta.

As we've noted before, a recent survey of 146 companies Professor Yvonne Antonucci of Widener University showed that 54% of respondents were planning on sending their employees to external BPM training -- but were unable to find appropriate training - or really understand what kind of training would be best.

With us today is Derek Miers, who has spent the last 23 years deploying and implementing business process related systems and applications. He's the author of The BPM Suites Report and numerous white papers. He's also the CEO of BPM Focus, and an independent authority on BPM.

Of late, he's been hard at work on the BPMF Learning Framework, which is the subject of today's podcast.

Gian Trotta: Welcome, Derek and thank you for joining us.

Derek Miers: Thanks, Gian, it's good to be here. I just wanted to pick up on the statistic that you start with there, which is 54 percent. Just my response when I was listening to that was, "Is that all?" I actually would have thought it would probably be higher than that.

Probably the other people she was talking to were probably not necessarily as fully aware of what they were getting into. Because if they're doing it right, they need to send all of your people on a training course. Because we've got so many questions and alternative directions and it's really imperative that organizations ensure that their BPM initiatives are successful.

But they need to keep really one thing in mind, and that is that with all this wonderful technology out there -- and yes, I've spent the last 20 years looking at this stuff - the people involved still need help. You know, they need help on where to start and training on some of the toughest techniques of the best practices.

You know, it's a case of "OK, we bought a BPM Suite, but what do we do on Monday? How do we start and how do I start? And how do we insure project that for success, are set up right from the beginning. And how can I get the business to really take ownership?"

And when it comes down to it, how are we going to grow the organizational capabilities and skills that we need to become self-sufficient? And what capabilities do we need in-house, and which ones can we bring in externally? There's so much to keep up on.

And to be honest, there is a yawning skills gap that is starting to appear and is just getting worse. That's from the top down on how to run a BPM project to begin with, and to assure the success of the outline, but also around the very specialist sort of skills that are required in business modeling and process architecture and analysis.

GT: Derek, can you talk a little more about the BPMF Learning Framework?

The BPMF Learning Framework is really designed to be a sort of balanced and comprehensive program of BPM-related training and skills with individual course components, detailed methods and best practices through project delivery through the modeling and process architecture and business analysis.

GT: Derek, is this subject too broad for a holistic approach to training, or is the necessary skill set just too extensive for a single person to master?

DM:Well to be honest, I think that it is really bored…broad; I mean I'm not really bored. But it really is a question about understanding what kind of roles the organization needs to support.

We already talked a bit about assuring BPM project in tests, but this Advanced Process Modeling piece and what it does is that it's really about helping people make sense and for the specialists in their area to develop familiarity with a number of approaches.

And I really do take issue with BPM and BPMN simulation, for instance, being tied together as one piece when at the end of the day simulation tends to be about creating a model-to-management that shows that you've looked at something that might be appealing to management, but nine out of ten simulation model are deterministic in nature; i.e., in that the answer is decided beforehand and then we build a simulation to make it look like that.

And that's not how you should use simulation; it should be really about comparing and contrasting your assumptions and understanding the process.

But coming back to it, the core parts of this Advanced Process Modeling piece, is that yes, it's about BPM -- and the partner I have working with me on the BPMN course component is the core original author of the BPM specification. But it also incorporates Role Activity Diagramming, or RADS, and that's really about looking at how roles collaborate and work together in terms of being goal-focused; it's very much more practice-oriented.

The third element is what I describe as business capability modeling. Think of it as a sort of modeling the business as a set of collaborating services. It's almost like SOA for the business itself. And the course itself is based on combination of my work and that of the two external experts that we're talking about there.

And there are going to be online versions of these courses components that are going to be available in mid-summer, but coming back to your question of whether there too much for one person to master, well, there are specialist bits that need to be mastered. There are different types of roles that need specialist support.

The business analyst needs a different type of support from the process modeler; they're not the same role. The process architect needs a different type of support from both the business analyst and the process modeler.

Of course, a process architecture specialist is going to need to understand all those sorts of things and will also need to understand how to go about chunking the business in the right way and setting up the right level of dynamic interaction between the processes and what have you.

GT: What would be the ideal skill set of what is evolving into what is being called the Business Process Expert?

DM: Well, I think the core skill set is obviously process understanding and modeling. If you take a business process expert, the real expert is going to be the process architect-type person and the business analyst; the senior business analyst. They come at it from two subtly different directions.

The business analyst is someone who really understands how you go about understanding and improving the business. The process architect, on the other hand, is someone who goes out to design the processes of the business in order to meet the needs of the business. There are subtle differences, but they actually have a fundamentally different skill set and outline and to be honest, we probably don't have enough time for me to go into more detail, but just to say that one is probably more technically focused in terms of the way in which how processes work and interact the other is more business-focused in terms of driving performance improvement in the organization over time.

GT: This is fascinating, and there's no problem taking the time. What kind of IT skills should business analysts try to get in the BPM sphere and what kind of business skills should an IT person try to obtain in the BPM sphere?

DM: Well, you put it in a good way, actually because the IT people certainly need to grow business skills and the business people need to grow technology skills, because the two are really sort of fused together when you start creating The BPM Center of Excellence. The BPM Center of Excellence really sort of brings those two ends together and creates a group in center that can support and drive these sorts of improvement initiatives.

Now, I told you about how the business analyst. It's a person who is probably going to have Six Sigma, Business Process Re-engineering experience, LEAN experience -- maybe two or three or several or all of those, and Total Quality Management. They come out of those sorts of programs, but you'll find that process is very much at the heart of all these things.

And there are the sort of things they need to grow their skill sets around, and this is making it up very much on the hoof there, but it's around the essence of understanding and driving business performance improvement by capturing the right kind of information, analyzing the rules and the processes, looking at the cases that have been running through this process that might be existing already.

Let's say you've got a BPM suite that's gathering the information; it's being able to look inside the data that's been you've been gathered over the last month and discovering that all right, you see that for argument's sake that the average turnaround time is .6 of a day, but 98 percent of cases go through in .2 of a day, but then there's this other 2 or 3 percent of cases that take 20 days, and that's where we should go look and improve next.

And in a sense, that talks to the iterative nature of BPM initiatives as a whole.

On the other hand, the IT specialist who, for argument's sake, has grown up with UML and process flow diagrams and what have you, needs to really understand the drivers in the business and the things that really make a difference in terms of its competitive position in the marketplace and that means being able to become easier to do business with and turn cases around much more quickly and being able to look inside the state of a process and allow customers to actually see where things are up to.

I mean think of, for argument's sake, we take it for granted now, but FedEx has gotten to the points where they can predict within an hour of when they'll have a package delivered to you. Or else. It's gotten to the point where you can say, "I want it delivered at this time." Now when you think about the scale of that business and the ability to drive change through the organization and be able to understand their processes so well so that they can make that short of prediction, it's a big step.

So maybe I'm just talking around the houses a bit here, but there are just so many different things in so many different angles that need to be considered here.

GT: I think you defined the kind of abilities that your courses would develop -- I guess in the end, the objective is increased agility?

DM: Yes, it's funny that you should mention that, I've got a slide that I use showing all the reasons you should do BPM, and it's a very good scene-setting slide, and I talk about being more customer-centric, being easier to do business with, lowering costs, and increasing speed, which performance is one-nil, and doing more in compliance with government regulations and being able to integrate this, that and the next thing.

But when you really look at it, I think a Gartner study from mid-last year highlighted this point. I think this study was about 90 BPM products, and that was that agility was the highest objective, the highest result of all of these different programs.

It's called 31 percent or something like that, while performance improvement was 28 percent, and interestingly enough, things like compliance that we hear a lot of noise about, only actually factored into 3 percent of these studies as a sort of primary reason for doing it.

GT: Right, it's usually considered one part of the triad that supports BPM, but now you're saying it's a 3 percent factor.

DM: It's not as strong as people would have you believe. The primary things really are, OK, driving down costs, which usually means reducing the number of people, which goes back to the day of BPR, or Bigger People Reductions as it was once known. But in fact, it's actually being able to free up the business to adapt and change and move and evolve is actually far more powerful than a short-term s focus to just trying to sort of make 20 percent of the work force redundant. Because once you actually learn to adapt and evolve, then it becomes a competitive advantage -- you can change more quickly than your competitors, so therefore, over time you will win.

And really, what the BPM suite does is it that enables big companies to act like small companies. Which is when you think about what a small company does, they are agile, they can change, they can adapt. Once you've actually got BPMS driving these things, the big company can behave far like a small company.

GT: That's an interesting way of putting it, and that kind of leads to my next questions, which is, do you differentiate in your courses by company size? Do you fee that some courses are more suited for either the business or IT sides depending on company sides.

DM: Not really. I mean the courses that we have available today are really very much talking to the roles of the generic BPM project, The Center of Excellence -- the sort of capabilities and skills you need to build up in within them.

I don't think it really makes that much difference, although the experiences of the people involved in these businesses are quite different. When you talk to a small, agile merchant bank as opposed to a large clearing bank, just the whole cultural differences are massive, and indeed, when it comes to the instructor-led type courses, you know, the ones where you turn up and go to a hotel and sit in a room for a two days, it's very good to have a range of people actually on that course because then you can help people really see the differences from lots of different perspectives.

It's actually when you start to understand processes from a lot of different perspectives, that you really see them differently. You no longer see them as just chains of activities that are hooked together; you can start to see them as, "at this point the customer interacts with the customer-service operation" and it doesn't become, "oh, he calls, we do this, and we do that." It becomes "we have an interaction, we have a goal," and there is whole range of issues here and growing the maturity of the organization to be able to roll with the punches, and to be able to take these sorts of technologies and actually adapt them and use them and get real business value from them.

GT: Would you advocate a mixture of in-person and online training? Do you believe a mix would be more effective than either approach type alone?

DM: I'm sure it is. Yes, the online training is useful, obviously, because you can do it at your desk and do it at your own speed. Instructor-led training, on the other hand, lets people interact with their peers; they ask questions, you've got the eye-to-eye training, the "I didn't quite get that," so you've got the "Let me put that another way," and you come back and make it real.

There are no challenges in delivering online training, but coming back to your question, if one mixes them up, it certainly would help in terms of you just simply don't have time to go on lots and lots of training courses, so you want to be able to do this sort of online thing at your desk when you need to.

And some of the sort of more technical aspect is fun to do with that. But when you start getting into the comparison of one modeling technique versus another, it becomes a judgment issue and that sort of thing is very hard to communicate either by watching a video online or even chewing through some PowerPoint letters, reading and documentary stuff to go with it.

The whole thing of course, is about finding the right combination that works for you in your situation in the time you have available.

GT:A final question: Which one of your courses do you enjoy teaching the most?

DM:Well, I think the Ensuring BPM Process Success is the most challenging, so it's the one I enjoy the most because it's very much about how an organization needs to change and to have to root a BPM program inside an organization such that it's set up to succeed rather than set up to fail.

Now many people go out and they think, "well, let's go out and find a mission-critical application; we're going to address that," when the reality is that the mission-critical application is a big problem that has had several go-throughs in the past when really you're far better off choosing the small things that you can prove success, build skills and build credibility with the organization.

Getting that kind of message across is actually, I think, a very important thing to have happen in order for BPM to be successful in the long term.

GT: That's understood. Derek, I'd like to thank you on behalf of my audience for sharing a quarter-century of experience in less than 15 minutes; I think everyone will find it very valuable.

DM: Well, they can always come see the class I'm running in San Francisco in the middle of March and in Santa Monica in the beginning of April for the Advanced Process Modeling course.

GT: You're well traveled -- I took a look at your travel schedule and you're spanning the globe this year.

DM: Yes, I've got courses running in the UK, the U.S., South Africa, Australia, Japan and it looks highly likely that the Middle East are going to be chewing my arm off to go there for a while as well, which means I'm getting lots of frequent flyer miles and not spending too much time with my two-year old.

GT: And a lot of time in airport gift shops. But I hope that in time, the online courses will kick and we'll have more time to catch up with you. Again, we're all the more grateful for you making time from such a busy schedule.

DM: Thanks very much.

GT: For more information on your courses, where should our listeners go?

DM: Good point, well obviously, www.bpmfocus -- one word -- dot o-r-g is the place to go.