Jim Sinur

I have had a chance to reflect this past week as I’ve been on holiday in the Boston area on the Cape and attending my sons wedding this last weekend. It occurred to me that BPM has reached a critical juncture where is going to really take off or shrink back for another day. We saw receding of process twice before; once during the workflow days and once during the re-engineering days. I personally believe that BPM is in a perfect position to accelerate and succeed. I am hoping that the BPM marriage works well as I do my sons.

Meghan and Dave Hope for the Perfect Marriage

The Case for the Perfect Marriage:

The reality of today’s economy requires significant underlying savings. After the downsizing of people costs through cuts, processes are the next likely source of time and cost savings. The practice of process disciplines can also be applied to new and creative processes that can be used for competitive differentiation and pleasing the collective constituency base (customers, employees, partners, vendors and owners). Business and IT relationships flourish in the wake of process improvement efforts and the business professionals feel enabled by the visibility, tenability and agility of the resulting processes. The BPM technologies have fused nicely into platforms and the vendors have sorted out well, so the remaining players look to hang around a long time and the skills bases are growing. .

The Case for the Perfect Storm:

Sure BPM is succeeding during difficult times, but when things turn back positive, process disciplines will be left on the sidelines just like in the past. There are those that believe that business professionals can’t really manage the agility that BPM give them and IT will still be stuck in the middle of the change process. In fact, because it is early in the life of BPM, the real melt down examples are about to appear in the market. There has just been too much good news with BPM and the process efforts have not been that encompassing. Some poor unsuspecting organization is going to go for process in a big way with a “big bang” approach and will create a big failure. Folks looking at the resulting crater will run away from BPM for a long period of time.

Nobody starts something new and exciting thinking it will fail, but there will be some failures. I think there are enough evolving best practices and skills for a normal marriage. Normal marriages require adjustments and learning.