Jim SinurBPM portends to make process work easy and some activities / technologies are fairly simple to work with in process improvement. Process modeling is a great example of this principle. While getting the correct process model and getting all stakeholders to agree to it is certainly a challenge, but the BPM tools supporting process modeling are deceptively easy to work with in the modeling arena. Business professionals get real excited when they see their processes and find ways to cut costs and time out of them. It’s all good, right?
The problem is that this gives business professionals the impression that this is pretty easy stuff. When the processes involve composite processes that require significant IT support to complete, things do not move that fast. BPM actually gives the false impression that things are easier than they look. When the process is focused on heads-down process work where the issues are around the look and feel of a worklist, the work allocation formulas and work escalation rules, it is pretty easy straightforward. It gets much more difficult when the some of the process goes below the water line a needs web service orchestration, integration transformations, and composition logic.
When starting BPM efforts that really deliver cost savings fairly quickly, one needs to be careful not give the impression that everything in a BPM effort is easy. This is particularly true when moving up the BPM maturity model from spot projects process programs. Have you experienced any fallout of this kind?
Category: BPM Business Process Improvement Tags: BPM, Business Process Improvement
6 responses so far ↓
1 Jim Sinur: BPM Gives IT Heartburn December 17, 2008 at 4:01 pm
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2 Gary December 18, 2008 at 12:18 am
One of the big barriers I’ve experienced with BPM is in a silo’d environment. IT is hesitent give up control of the development model where ownership on a project encompasses all functionality. To move to an enviornment where capabilities are seperated as in BPM involves a serious change management effort.
3 Akiva Marks December 18, 2008 at 6:53 am
Recently I heard Kiran Garimella of Software AG describe BPM as the “SOA Killer App”, and I must say I strongly agree. Indeed, BPM shows how easy it can be…if only the underlying service structure is in place to allow BPM to do it’s job.
Otherwise, as you indicate, building out the services necessary to support the BPM processes can be a costly and time consuming endeavor, essentially destroying the ROI potential of BPM.
In my US Fortune 50 environment, we have decided 3 times to NOT invest in BPM due to that exact realization. However, that was with BPM attempting to be sold to IT management as a way to leverage abilities for the business. There certainly is a sales prospect to the business that this is a must have ability and level of IT flexibility, which comes along with demanding a paradigm shift to SOA going forward.
(I blog on such SOA topics at Making SOA Work – http://makingsoawork.blogspot.com )
4 James Taylor December 18, 2008 at 11:57 pm
I and others I know are already seeing BPM legacy systems, that is to say systems developed by those inexperienced in systems design but excited about the potential of their BPM tools. Any tool can be used to create a new generation of legacy systems if it is not used correctly. Making sure you have the right tools for each element of a system, not just one tool for everything, is part of the solution.
After all, if all you have is a hammer then everything look like a nail
JT
5 Venkatprasad December 19, 2008 at 1:40 am
We have learnt from our experience that a BPM’s implementation is inversely proportional to the sum of its complexity and its freshness. Monitoring porcesses that have an underlining similarity with the ones that we have already worked upon makes our job easy.
However, the efforts are fruitful when we observer the end user’s new found satisfaction. BPM’s ROI, as against other IT implementaitons, is immediate.So, as you have rightly mentioned, we fail with the customer only when the expectations are not set right well in advance.
6 Suresh V December 19, 2008 at 7:49 am
While this is true, however as BPM evolves and becomes more intelligently built to create a business process vide an auto discovery mode and use for optimisation, the true benefit of the BPM to IT can be realised for a composite environment..However we are still in the evolutionary stages and am sure we will go there in days to come. Until then, it will be in the heartburn mode before the right antacid arrives in the scene.