PBS & BPM Today:

The maturity of most organization’s, today is around continuous process improvement that is “eye ball” change driven. Process directors/managers watch the outcomes of processes and tweak the workloads and outcomes to match to the goals and policies that executive management have established.. The changes need to support the adapt portion of the PBS cycle in an optempo fashion are pretty much manual, but some BPM capabilities can model alternatives with inline simulation leveraging a “champion – challenger” method to see the impact of potential changes. This will suffice for now, but there is more to come.

PBS and BPM Tomorrow:

BPM, in the future, will be goal driven and will orient itself around goals; ergo reduce the amount of manual changes. In addition process will become more plugged into events both inside and outside the processes, so that processes will become more context aware. In addition, processes are becoming more collaborative, unstructured and plugged into the collective. We are seeing the beginning signs of each of these individually in many vendors forward looking plans. There are a few that will combine many features to support the above, starting in mid 2010. .

A Better Work Experience:

While BPM has proven itself easy to use on the modeling and measurement sides, but there is an increased demand for logical workbenches that are designed by work role with personal customizations. This work experience goes beyond the typical portal experience, but extends that experience to include skills, workload, resource availability and cross process work status in various formats (visual, text, worklists, score card etc.)

Unstructured Processes:

BPM is moving to more aggressively support knowledge workers whose work tends not to be predictive in nature. There is a need to include more collaborative behaviors in process management that will likely leverage social design and processes that can’t be easily modeled. While there may be snippets of modeled process in the end to end process, the overall process will tend to be indeterminate for the knowledge worker.

Discovering Better Practices:

The agility found in BPM is a natural for delivering better practices in its journey to best practices (even if BPM is surrounding a back plane of best practice application services/components). This capability becomes essential in discovering the better behavior of knowledge workers as they drive to desired outcomes in a collaborative fashion.

Pattern Seeking/Sensing Tied to Near Real Time Agility:

The agility usually built into BPM execution technology begs for better management and use. One such method is business rules management that can link scenarios to policies to logical and physical business rules, limitations and tolerances. The other is tying process executions to pattern seeking methods and technologies to keep processes sharply tuned to the context it is running in at any given moment.

Inclusion of Optimization in Seek, Model and Adapt behaviors:

Business Pattern Strategies (BPS) needs to leverage various optimization algorithms in seeking opportunities for decisions to adjust resources including processes. Predictive analysis is an example of one of these algorithms that play well in the seek cycle. Modeling and adapt alternatives also use optimization capabilities such as inline simulation> Interest is growing in how to apply the right optimization technique at the right time.

See past posting  :http://blogs.gartner.com/jim_sinur/2009/07/29/bpm-not-only-saves-money-it-is-visually-appealing/

There are two additional areas of usability that go beyond the suite spot of today’s BPM providers. In order to continue mining BPM benefits, which are attaining benefits in the multiple millions for the early adopters, new features that enhance the work experience and unstructured processes will need to emerge going forward.

Enhancing the Work Experience:

BPM has to go beyond just the worklist paradigm to create a better work experience. Yes combining BPM with a portal is a good thing, but there is more expected of the BPM vendors, There is an expectation that the work in a worklist have context and options. This mean that the actual activity scheduled can be viewed in context of the process and all the options available to the worker are pictured in a visual sense. This means that all of the reliable helpers necessary to collaborate on activity is visible in a priority order. This also means that any support videos, forms, available resources with skills/experience profiles, better/best practices, training and help be available in an easy to digest fashion. Managers should also visually understand resource loading, productivity and quality ratings of the resources brought to fore for any activity or groups of activity. There is a ton of opportunity for making the work experience easy and superior.

See a previous posting on the workbench experience :http://blogs.gartner.com/jim_sinur/2009/06/25/bpm-based-workbenches-a-notch-above-portals/

Including Unstructured Activity:

Today BPM is really into preplanned and rigid process models. While the underlying technologies are agile and explicit rules and processes are being leveraged, process models need to move from fixed to variable behavior. This will probably start with collaboration points in a mostly fixed process, work to loosely bound process snippets to dynamically created and executed flows that are bound by governance constraints. These kind of processes allow for BPM to extend its benefits to a larger group of work activity that is not so predictable. This will likely include collaboration across organizations and into value chains that touch different legal entities.

See for a previous posting on unstructured processes http://blogs.gartner.com/jim_sinur/2009/08/06/getting-painted-in-a-corner-by-structured-business-processes/

In order to reach to new heights, BPM will have to evolve have better and unstructured work experiences.

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.

http://blogs.gartner.com/jim_sinur/2009/03/03/double-your-pleasure-application-packages-and-bpm-together/

Just watch knowledge workers for while, like doctors, lawyers, executives, research types, engineers, service developers, and marketing people. Their work is not straight forward and structured. They require processes that can flex, but guide them with fixed process snippets when they reach certain states of completion. This means that the ebb and flow of work will require both unstructured and structured processes. When organizations aggressively tap into collective knowledge inside and out side their organizations, BPM will have to behave differently. BPM will have to support morphing work driven by emerging goals and dynamic decisions and be able to identify potential best practices. Work will move from gaseous to liquid to solid over time where appropriate and stay in certain states where it makes sense.

Today processes are by and large predictable and generally internal to organizations, Yes, we are seeing processes break out into value and supply chains, but this is just the start of linking organizations and individuals to do business. As organizations start tapping into collective knowledge, industry networks and even social networks, processes are going to have to shift to support this new kind of activity. This will require fundamental changes in BPM technologies and the BPMS. I look forward to the challenge myself. Get ready for the next wave.

Business Should and Will Continue

It’s easier now to build processes and applications because there is infrastructure out there that makes it easy. Today you can find BPM in the cloud, BPM and apps on Google, mini-applications on IPods and application building capabilities available through Force, and Microsoft Sharepoint is everywhere. How long do you think it will be until some savvy BPM vendor comes up with a BPM application for the IPod? Face it, IT and it’s custom/packaged applications is being short circuited. I believe this is good to a point and goes beyond just prototyping new ways of supporting business operations in ways that responds to business pressures and the need for agility.

Business Should Beware

As the business relies more heavily on these new infrastructures, will they be able to hold up to high scale? Will the business folks really want to take on the tasks to maintain these processes and applications? Who is going to build the integration components to glue these new processes apps together? Will the business folks build and IT be stuck with the results? How does one make sure there is not rampant duplication of processes and applications? There are lots of questions and issues.

There needs to be a balance that is held together by some form of strategy and inventory that could include light weight business optimization and modeling tools or find ways to plug into a formal enterprise architecture effort. These are exciting and dangerous times. IT must facilitate some form of awareness even if it includes helping with some form of portfolio management.

Twitter-Trivia:

This stuff is pretty funny at first. People start twittering on how they need to clip their finger nails, the experience of bad gas they had after eating artichokes, or certain color neon lights cause them angst in full moonlight. You see certain individuals do this time after time. Maybe if it was Brad Pitt or Meg Ryan, someone would care, but most of the folks twittering are just not that interesting, If you have that much time to do “naval gazing” maybe you need to try something different like: “GET A LIFE”!!!! I’m feeling better already

Minutia-Trivia

I never find this stuff funny at all. There are some people, in life, that think that finding errors instead of thinking up cool new stuff or helping people be successful and happy is the way to win friends and influence people.. They go around and “Nit Pick” everything they see and usually have a “Cheshire Cat” grin on their face because they caught something wrong. If these people would all become editors and practice this approach, everything would be fine, but we all know they like it haunting those that are trying to move the ball forward. Remember “Any mule can kick down the barn, but it takes someone smart to build one”. Again “GET A LIFE” !!!! I’m feeling quite elated now.

Now that I’m back into the path of Karma, I want to apologize if I offended any one and was not perfectly politically correct. “GET A LIFE” 

I always wanted to be a “Parrot Head”, listen to Jimmy Buffet songs and sip Island drinks all day, but the workaholic in me beat me into submission. Tweeting is a start down the “bird path”. If my next painting commission wasn’t a cactus, I might paint a parrot as well to take me further down the bird path. Anyway, I will be practicing the Island drinks thing on St Maarten this coming spring, so my dream is closer than I think

People are just so crucial in our processes. It is important to treat our clients well and give them a process that does not frustrate them and maybe even delights them. If does not cost much to do it right. Leveraging the your collective client base through inexpensive collaborative set of methods, ahead of time, is cheaper than surveying them to tell you what you want to hear by designing “CYA” (cover your backside) questions. Start creating surveys with real customer feedback. Enabling your employees, partners and vendors while driving the work to the lowest level of skill where ever possible is the way to make more money Super-charging support for all skill levels enables each level to reach to higher skill levels at a lower salary cost just makes sense. The highest cost to a company is the loss of a customer, then an employee and finally a partner. Do you want to risk that with poor processes?

The Planet is more important now than ever now that we know it’s not inexhaustible. Thinking about sustainability should be on our minds “24*7”. If not just because I have eight grandchildren, so far, it makes economic sense. Why would you knowingly “push up” the costs of your future resources by gobbling them up now? Sustainability means meeting the needs of the present without compromising future the generation’s ability to meet their needs. We need to leverage BPM to optimize the use of scarce resources. We need BPM to help regions, countries and organizations to extend their sustainability over a long period of time. There are certainly untold opportunities to save paper by leveraging electronic content “Just reducing worldwide paper usage by 10% would save over 100,000,000 trees, 100,000,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and a staggering $3.5 billion in paper costs. BPM can be at the heart of optimizing resources, if applied properly. I have dozens of case studies..

Profit is the fuel that drives BPM. When I first started surveying the ROI of BPM efforts, it scared me. The numbers were great, so I predicted about 15% ROI for most everybody. The truth of the matter is that the numbers were north of 20% consistently. I saw wild numbers of 220% and 360% that I had to throw out because they would have skewed the average.  I am still waiting for a BPM project on the rocks as it is bound to happen, but the majority of BPM efforts are delivering today.

People, Planet and Profit in the corner pocket !!!!!.

I would propose we need to start thinking about unexpected exceptions and processes that are less structured (unstructured) to adapt to change and to include work that is more fluid. There are a whole lot of benefits in dealing with unstructured processes.

Unstructured Processes for Knowledge Workers

There is a huge opportunity for benefits in enabling Knowledge workers with collaborative and dynamic communications technologies that are tied to processes. Today Knowledge workers leverage structures process and collaboration technologies/features in a vacuum. There is little that brings these things together in a workbench pattern for job types. By combining snippets of structured activity and unstructured activity in a hybrid unstructured process, money can be saved enabling knowledge worker productivity.

http://blogs.gartner.com/jim_sinur/2009/01/15/knowledge-workers-and-unstructured-processes-go-together-like-wine-and-cheese/

Unstructured Process for Goal Attainment:

Process may have to flex as goals change, so coupling dynamic goals with dynamic and unstructured processes will allow the change of process composition, sequence and outcomes. This may be accomplished by management decisions supercharged by optimization technologies and decision platforms that learn toward a more real time nature. The decisions and goals could easily be affected by complex market events and management responses or a trend in an organizations collective customer/prospect base.

http://blogs.gartner.com/jim_sinur/2009/04/20/oh-process-how-do-you-flow/

Unstructured Processes for Examining Best Practices

By observing unstructured process, with technologies deemed as automated business process discovery focused, organizations can organically evolve best practices and change them dynamically. This is opposed to frozen best practices in purchased or built applications and structured BPM processes. This is a new area that is just starting to unfold, but I predict good growth as we migrate to unstructured processes.

http://blogs.gartner.com/jim_sinur/2009/03/12/automated-business-process-discovery-helps-visually-optimize-processes/

Structured BPM processes can play a part as a useful snippet of activity and the resulting cementing of certain best practices for those employing unstructured activity. This is a very exciting new area of growth for BPM.