Jim SinurI had someone ask me today, what the three greatest hurdles facing BPM in the near future? I was able to rattle off three of them real quickly and he was grateful for the answer. I walked away scratching my head trying to figure out if there were more and which one was really the greatest? In order to set the stage to explain my three top choices, I am going to make a couple of underlying assumptions. First is that BPM keeps delivering benefits. With the track record, to date, and the number of opportunities, that seems a pretty safe assumption unless an organization ends up botching something up badly. I have not heard of many of those kinds of situations. The other assumption is that BPM can walk the picket fence between the business and IT while giving both enough to keep them happy and moving. With those assumptions in mind, let’s check out my top three.
![MPj04092760000[1]](http://blogs.gartner.com/jim_sinur/files/2009/04/windowslivewriterwhatisthegreatesthurdlefacingbpm-d52dmpj040927600001-2.jpg)
Enabling People:
While BPM has been helping with “heads down” process workers for a while now, BPM needs to move to supporting more people activities. This is particularly important as knowledge workers need support for their kinds of unstructured processes and the kind of collaboration that they are migrating to going forward. BPM has been doing fine with defined processes, but is now making its way into more undefined processes and interactions. BPM has to make this leap going forward. This would include case management and social networking for instance, but there are other opportunities. Please see http://blogs.gartner.com/jim_sinur/2009/04/16/social-nets-and-bpm/ and http://blogs.gartner.com/jim_sinur/2009/01/15/knowledge-workers-and-unstructured-processes-go-together-like-wine-and-cheese/
Leveraging Information:
While BPM works well with structured data and content management capabilities, BPM needs to embrace events beyond the progress of business activities in the known paths of a pre-defined process. Process will need to support more information around the context in which the process is running in at the moment. What is the effect of markets, geographies or the state of the partner chain that the process is operating within right now? This means close ties to complex event processing and intelligent decision management. This would not only include the current state of the process, but would include past trends to optimize process outcomes. Please see http://blogs.gartner.com/jim_sinur/2009/04/22/finding-the-blue-candy-is-like-discovering-germane-business-events/
Scope of Impact:
If BPM sticks to small ideas and scopes to just save time and money while bettering the customer experience, it will be relegated to less than its potential going forward. Expanding BPMs influence to innovative end to end processes that are linked to important value chains will test what BPM really brings to the party. This means that BPM will have to play well in multiple contexts and be plugged into people and information. Please see http://blogs.gartner.com/jim_sinur/2009/04/06/end-to-end-processes-that-fit-you-to-a-t/
These are my top three. Which one should be the greatest of these three? Do you have others? What do you think?
Category: BPM Business Process Improvement Tags: BPM, Business Process Improvement
7 responses so far ↓
1 Neeli Basanth April 30, 2009 at 4:33 am
Jim,
Your point on people enablement is very apt. Just the fact that all steps in a process can not be automated conveys that human particpation is a must. This requires more human centric options as you have mentioned. I had a post regarding this on my blog at http://pragmatic2dot0.wordpress.com/2009/04/23/process-patterns-in-adopting-case-based-solutions/
I would like to add another, change management and improvement cycles for BPM
2 Jacob Ukelson April 30, 2009 at 9:29 am
Jim,
I vote for enabling people and their ad-hoc, unstructured processes as the main hurdle for BPM. Most business processes are of that type, and if BPM could handle real ad-hoc, unstructured people processes – then I would claim that scope issue would be solved too.
Another related hurdle is process discovery, the understanding of what processes already exist, and how they work. Currently process discovery (and its flip side, modeling) it is too expensive, too difficult and too rigid.
3 BPM | What's the future of BPM asks Gartner's Jim Sinur | VOSibilities April 30, 2009 at 3:18 pm
[...] a very interesting post on his Gartner blog, Jim Sinur asks, “What is the greatest hurdle facing BPM?” He then describes three “top choices” on which (unsurprisingly) we have an [...]
4 Theo Priestley May 1, 2009 at 10:54 am
I think the greatest hurdle facing BPM is the internal wrangling which erodes the practice from the inside. Ask 100 people what BPM means and you get 100 different answers. BPM needs to sort its own ship out before sorting out a clients. Unless there’s a unified message to show and tell then clients will continue to get mixed messages from vendors and professionals alike.
5 Mark Ragel May 1, 2009 at 5:04 pm
I think a major hurdle (if not the ‘greatest’) is intellectual exhaustion from managing value delivery in a business landscape engaged in ongoing step function transitions (technology and management paradigm) and apprehending the reality of ‘continuous improvement’.
6 Bernard Debauche May 7, 2009 at 8:33 pm
To me, the hardest things to achieve are enabling people and determining the scope of impact. Many BPM projects are limited in scope, and few end-to-end value stream processes are really BPM’d. Scope can be value chain-wide only when the whole enterprise becomes process oriented and has put in place process owners taking ownership of the “promise to customers.” Some companies have assigned such transversal process owners who manage the performance of end-to-end value chains, but to me, this is a prerequisite in order for BPM to extend its reach into the enterprise.
Enabling people is also an organizational issue—not only a technology/Web 2.0 adoption issue. People are naturally enabled in a process-driven enterprise! Because then, the process gives sense and context to action, and enables the right decision making. BPM is an event-processing pattern, which gives behavioral predictability, but to achieve this, one has to know, permanently, the exact business situation he or she is in. Therefore, complex event processing is required to assess “the state of my business right now,” providing, in order to take the appropriate action, an accurate representation of the current state. As we see, all three are related.
Bernard Debauche
VP EMEA Marketing
Axway
7 Cases Managed The World Over « BPM Focus June 21, 2009 at 1:38 pm
[...] Jim Sinur of Gartner talks of “… Agile processes that are tapped into emerging events and contexts driven by organizational and community goals … the need for creating and managing unstructured processes. This kind of environment requires organizations and vendors to master goal driven processes.” In another post he said “Today most processes are Flow directed, but the future will likely require goal direction for at least a portion of the process. This is what we call unstructured processes that are composed of process snippets that are flow directed and portions that are completely dynamic. A combo looks to be the way forward.” See here, here and here. [...]