Jim SinurOne of the problems with applications is that they are a best practice, assuming we believe that, encased in concrete. The problem comes with changing either packaged applications and/or custom bespoke applications. The “time to market” of typical applications changes are becoming intolerable for the business.
![MPj04331910000[1]](http://blogs.gartner.com/jim_sinur/files/2009/10/WindowsLiveWriterBPMDeliversBetterPracticesandBestPractic_CCC2MPj043319100001_2.jpg)
Best Practices Should be the Goal
It’s so much easier just to buy pre-built best practices than anything and deal with changes as they come. Sure these best practices will have to be maintained and extended over time, why not start with the best known practices and surround them as needed. Packages are getting better at up grades, so why switch to BPM? Just surround best practices with BPM extensions. The world is static enough to stick with this strategy.
Better Practices are More Practical
BPM delivers ideal approaches to sneak up on best practices by starting with a “good enough” process and have the process evolve to the best practice over time. If the target for best practices changes, because of changes in the business environment, your better practices are moldable and changeable along the way. The BPM approaches avoid “lock-in” and surround strategies. You are not stuck with major application upgrades and inflexible technology bases. If you want to start with a more solid better practice, you can model and simulate processes alternatives ahead of time. You can even leverage automated process discovery to shorten the modeling efforts and use live cases
While not all aspects of a business process are volatile, it is hard to predict where the volatility will strike precisely. This is why BPM powered by BPM technologies comes into play. They are built for change. You can make them even better by leveraging “jump start” frameworks/templates of better practices that can evolve to “Your” best practices. Keep in mind these are not mutually exclusive ideas.
Category: BPM Business Process Improvement Business Rules Optimization Simulation Tags: BPM, Business Rules, Simulation
4 responses so far ↓
1 Gagan Saxena October 2, 2009 at 6:17 pm
Business agility is key today and I agree that it is better to get into production with something that works and evolve from there. BPMS’ allow this to happen without risk of application lock-in and I am a fan of that approach.
The only issue that I see is that BPMS’ are one half of the solution – giving IT and some savvy Biz Users a lot of advantage, but not directly addressing the need to change business rules rapidly and easily. In a perfect world, a Business Rules Management (BRMS) needs to be the other part of the solution. I have seen quite a bit of the either/or debate between BPMS’ and BRMS’ and fail to see why that is even a question.
@gagan_s
2 Tweets that mention BPM Delivers Better Practices and Best Practices -- Topsy.com October 2, 2009 at 8:39 pm
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3 Bernard Debauche October 30, 2009 at 4:33 pm
Yes, some think BPM means “best practice management”! It certainly provides agility to the information system, and makes it more responsive to business changes. But the process approach is not enough: my experience has showed me that it is the architecture that delivers agility, not the process approach itself. A badly architected process with a bad IT architecture can create the worst agile information system!
Bernard Debauche
VP EMEA Marketing
Axway
4 Tapping into Better Practices by Watching Knowledge Workers February 19, 2010 at 4:39 am
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