Jim SinurLast week I had a “one on one” with one of the active Chinese service providers. He was frustrated dealing with justifying the use of BPM to the Chinese Government and Businesses. He said that he was almost ready to give up on BPM. I wasn’t real sure if he was playing me and really believed in the benefits of BPM or not. I thought the tenants of his argument was worth putting out there for comment..
![MPj04031820000[1]](http://blogs.gartner.com/jim_sinur/files/2009/11/WindowsLiveWriterStrangeBrewBPMinChina_B1D5MPj040318200001_2.jpg)
China Doesn’t Need BPM:
Why should China use BPM, a labor saver for business and IT, when China has enough people to do the job at a very low price? China is producing 330,000 IT graduates per year that can be bought for a very cheap price. Why can’t China throw masses of cheap labor at business problems? Do the math and take your BPM skills and technologies elsewhere. It’s about cheap labor and there will always be parts of the world with cheap labor can displace technologies. We can program very fast and we have very smart graduates.
Think Again:
Granted the math sounds good, but can you correctly specify the business processes, service and applications in a timely and accurate fashion? Do you really think that throwing perfect specifications (unlikely) over the fence is really going to give you the results you want? Will you be able to respond fast enough to change with the hand-offs over time zones? I would propose that the power of BPM is also timely collaboration and real world problems require iteration in a quick fashion to stay competitive.
While I value lower labor costs, I think the battle is producing higher gross domestic product (GDP) with less hours per GDP dollar. Eventually Chinas cost have to go up. It’s already happening in India. Don’t throw out BPM; throw out the programmers !!! It’s probably different in the west where the labor costs are higher.
Category: BPM Business Process Improvement Tags: BPM
5 responses so far ↓
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2 Harish November 25, 2009 at 7:28 am
Jim,
The other reasons why people would prefer to buy the BPM which is the need for turnaround the design flexibility. I am from India and face this as counter arguments frequently but as saying goes 9 mothers cant deliver the baby in one month similarly a project which needs to be rolled out and needs design flexibility has to be on a platform which provides them.
Harish
3 Wolf Graf von Schlieffen November 26, 2009 at 4:21 am
Jim, Harish,
good starting points. In addition, BPM beyond IT is a management tool which allows you to constantly assure that you aligned the Customer to what you are doing and what your stakeholders expect you are doing. So, maybe in China you start with the monitoring and management part, then work towards the specification of optimal flexibility.
Wolf
4 Jim Sinur November 26, 2009 at 12:02 pm
Wolf,
There is some flexiblity that needs to be baked in from the start. If you use parameters in a programming paradigm, I can see your point
Jim
5 David Moser November 30, 2009 at 2:13 am
If the point is that process inefficiency (in the sense of requiring excess labour per process instance) doesn’t cost enough to provide RoI for a BPM solution, one counterpoint is that BPM solutions also deliver enhanced control through embedded business and process rules. More consistent processes can deliver better customer service and therefore revenue, or assist in regulatory compliance, both arguably even bigger opportunities in China than in western economies.
If he’s finding that organisations are choosing to write their own custom BPM-like solution rather than buy a product, the response is (as Harish suggests) the likelihood of much higher initial development time and less ease of change. Also, as you suggest Jim, in time rising IT labour costs will hit companies that go down the custom road much harder than those that buy products.
Having said that, I know it’s not easy, having worked for a global consultancy that tried the BPM pitch in China. One ray of hope, perhaps, is that despite low labour costs in India the BPM vendors have had some success there (Tibco, FileNet and Lombardi come to mind – no doubt amongst many others) so it must be possible!