Samantha Searle
Research Analyst
5 years with Gartner
5 years IT industry
Samantha Searle is a research analyst in the Business Process Management team, focusing on process governance and getting started in BPM. Previously, she worked as a research specialist for Gartner's Best Practices Council…Read Full Bio
by Samantha Searle | February 8, 2013 | Submit a Comment
An interesting critical success factor for BPM emerged from some of our research last year. Those who succeed at BPM don’t mention the “P-word” (what…process?!!) or even talk about six sigma! Why I hear you ask? Well anyone outside IT, or who isn’t an engineer or working in manufacturing finds the concept of process about as clear as mud! In fact talking to the business about process can be one of the quickest ways to get them to switch off and stop listening. So how can you get round this?
I think you could learn something from an old board game called “Taboo”. You might recall that the aim of this game was to prompt your teammates to guess a certain word but without using 5 “taboo” words. In our case, if you’re talking about BPM, the 5 taboo words might be “process”, six sigma” “BPMN”, “models” and “standardization”.
The point of this exercise is not to deprive your BPM team of a useful vocabulary, but to teach them to use a different vocabulary, a more business-orientated one. Encourage them to speak a language that the business understands and will resonate with them, then you will have their attention. This means talking about business outcomes. The minute you start talking about process, business users think back to that ERP implementation a few years back…that was about process…and it brought about disruption and unwanted change! Not a good association….
However, if instead you talk to the business about driving key business outcomes such as improving product/service quality, increasing customer satisfaction, growing the business THAT is something that will make them sit up and take notice. It’s their business, they can relate to it and it’s no doubt what they are measured on in their performance objectives. If you can help them improve their business and their chances of meeting/exceeding their performance objectices, then you’ll be their new best friend! So…
DON’T talk about process standardization or automation; DO talk about improving quality and efficiency
DON’T talk about implementing a new call center or CRM system, DO talk about delivering an excellent customer experience
DON’T talk about using a BPMS; do talk about business transformation and innovation to gain competitive advantage in your market/industry
After all, given that organizational politics was voted as the top barrier to BPM success in a recent Gartner survey, revolutionizing the way we talk about BPM is the key to breaking down this barrier. I’d love to hear your stories of how you’ve engaged with the business during your BPM program – how have you tried to engage the business in BPM and overcome organizational politics?
If you’re a Gartner seatholder and subscribe to our research then you can read more on this topic in the following note: Gain Business Buy-in for BPM or Consign Your BPM Program to Oblivion.
You’re also most welcome to attend one of our upcoming regional Gartner BPM Summits:
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by Samantha Searle | January 29, 2013 | 1 Comment
Ok this is obviously a “tongue-in-cheek” suggestion to start – the remaining 9 will be serious I promise! Every year we carry out a survey as part of our BPM summit planning to determine the latest hot topics and challenges facing BPM practitioners. One key question we asked was “Which of the following business priorities are driving your development in BPM?”. Here are the top 5 answers:
- Reducing enterprise costs
- Business agility
- Governance and transparency
- Quality and consistency
- Improving profitability
The common aim for all of them is to improve business performance and BPM is the enabler to help you achieve this. This is why we have chosen our theme for our 2013 BPM summits to be:
Aspire, Challenge, Transform: Driving Breakthrough Business Performance
For those new to BPM, the Summit will help you to take the first steps, establish the skills required, and identify the right technologies. For those who are more experienced, the Summit will provide visibility into the future, identify the next generation of BPM and help you leverage new approaches such as Social BPM, Pace Layering and Intelligent Business Operations. For more information, check out this video of our Managing VP John Dixon talking about the BPM summit in more detail (available on our Gartner YouTube channel).
Hot topics to be covered include:
- Making BPM part of your strategic plan
- How BPM can enable transformational change
- The convergence of cloud, mobile, social and information with BPM
- How to establish process ownership and effective governance
- Process intelligence and the role of the iBPMS
Our 2013 BPM Summits will be held in three regions:
EMEA: March 13 – 14, 2013, at the Park Plaza Westminster, London, U.K.
NA: April 2-4, 2013 at the Gaylord National, National Harbour, Maryland.
APAC: May 13-14 2013 at the Hilton Sydney, Sydney, Australia
This year you also have the opportunity to meet with our Gartner BPM Excellence award winners who will be involved in the summit and sharing their BPM success stories with you. See my previous blog announcing the Gartner BPM Excellence awards for more details. It’s an opportunity not to be missed! 
Watch this space for New Year Resolution #2 for BPM Practitioners…coming soon!
Category: bpm business process improvement business process management process improvement process management summit technology Tags:
by Samantha Searle | November 12, 2012 | 1 Comment
I’m pleased to say that the Gartner BPM team will be launching our BPM Excellence Awards again, in time for our BPM summits in 2013. We want to hear about your success in driving BPM excellence!
A summary of the main details is given below. For full details including how to apply, please go to the Gartner BPM excellence awards webpage, where you can also download an FAQ and application form.
What are the Gartner Business Process Management Excellence Awards?
Gartner Business Process Management (BPM) Excellence Awards program is all about highlighting world-class BPM programs and projects that deliver business results, and broadly sharing their successes, challenges and insights.
If you have recently implemented a successful BPM program or project with resulting business impact, don’t miss out on the opportunity to publicize this accomplishment and honor those responsible for its success. Whatever your industry, or government sector and no matter the focus of your BPM program or project we want to hear your story. Apply today!
Gartner is now accepting nominations for the 2013 BPM Awards program globally and the winners will be selected by region (US, EMEA, Australia). Each set of regional winners will be announced at the corresponding regional Gartner Business Process Management Summit:
- March 13–15, 2013, at the Park Plaza Westminster, London, U.K.
- April 2-4, 2013 at the Gaylord National, National Harbour, Maryland.
- May 13-14 2013 at the (venue TBD), Sydney, Australia
One overall winner will be selected for the “Best BPM Initiative” based on the compelling business results achieved with their BPM program. They should also demonstrating how organization and technology have been used to support the BPM program. Awards in these other three categories (described below) will also be made to award finalists in each region.
Evaluation Criteria
Business results are the first requirement for any successful BPM program. The preferred threshold is that the resultant net benefits should be at least twice the costs. Costs include: resources, technology, training, etc. Your case study must include specific results and a detailed list of the project/program costs. Baseline metrics for the before process will also be helpful. Submissions that highlight competitive advantage or future benefit can also be submitted and should include projections.
Applications will be evaluated on:
Category 1 – Best Business Outcome Driven by BPM
This award will go to the organization who can clearly demonstrate (and quantify) how a particular BPM project has positively impacted a key business outcome (e.g. Carphone Warehouse – a previous 2011 Gartner BPM Excellence Award winner achieved 120% increase in sales)
Category 2 – Best BPM Organization
This award will go to the organization that has best demonstrated how to (reorganize itself to) better support BPM and process centricity. We are looking for evidence of key BPM roles, presence of a BPCC, effective governance and process ownership, a cross-functional BPM focus and a strong collaboration with the business who understand BPM and embrace it as the way they do business.
Category 3 – Most Effective Use of BPM Technology
This award will go to the organization that shows the best example of how they have leveraged BPM technology to solve a particular business problem. We’re particularly looking for agility and use of model-driven BPMS, BRMS, iBPMS/IBO, case management or automated business process discovery (ABPD) (i.e. clear shift away from traditional application development).
Category 4 – Best BPM Initiative (The Overall Global Award)
This award will go to an organization that has already won one of the previous three categories regionally. The nine regional winners from those three categories will be judged on how their BPM Program has solved (one or several) particular business challenges and delivered compelling business. Evidence of the BPM objectives, vision, roles, governance, skills, clear quantitative results and effective use of technology are required.
Who Can Participate?
All organizations that are not vendors or service providers are eligible and encouraged to apply including:
- Large enterprises, and small to midsize businesses
- All vertical industries, including private sector, government and non-profit
- International organizations or those based in EMEA, US or Australia
- All business models: business-B2B, B2C, B2B2C…
Note: Although vendors and service providers are not eligible, we encourage them to assist their customers in submitting an application.
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by Samantha Searle | August 23, 2012 | Submit a Comment
What do drums and BPM have in common? Well you had to be at the opening keynote at Gartner’s BPM Summit in Sydney to find out! Puzzled attendees entered to find bongo drums and maraccas on their seats and were left wondering what on earth was about to happen!
Attendees arrive to find bongo drums have stolen their seats
Well the drums not only served as a form of entertainment, but also illustrated the key messages in the Process Improvement 2020 keynote. Jim Sinur and Nick Gall persuaded organizations to become “culturally savvy” and “unleash the power of mass collaboration”. BPM brings the discomfort of change, change impacts culture but if the culture can be convinced to embrace the change then their combined cognitive surplus can drive creative collaboration. This kind of approach is becoming increasingly important to overcome problems in a world of unpredictable events and information overload, but is also fundamental to enabling BPM to drive successful business outcomes.
Attendees of the Process Improvement 2020 keynote must have felt a similar level of discomfort when they entered the room and realized they were in for a free drum lesson! This was certainly a change from the usual keynote speech. However once people saw the value (or should I say fun?!) of a change from the normal keynote format and understood its purpose, they all joined in. What started as a one-man solo on a bongo drum grew into an impromptu orchestra of drums, maraccas and even hand claps. As our drumming group Human Rhythms changed pace and pattern, the audience adapted their responeses accordingly. Through sensing and responding to these changes, our attendees sustained a musical mish-mash of complex rhythms despite the unforeseen disruptions. It was a striking example of mass collaboration; each individual may not have thought they were doing any particular special on their own, but their combined efforts produced a pretty spectacular display of improvization!
The collaboration wasn’t just limited to the keynote either. A number of you shared your thoughts and takeways from the conference on Twitter and got some great conversations going! As a thank you to all of you who participated (we generated 342 tweets in 2 days that reached 161, 645 Twitter accounts!), here’s an Oz-shaped summary of your contributions:
Here are the most popular words tweeted on #gartnerbpm during the event
In the meantime, I’ll look forward to seeing you at our next BPM Summit in Sydney on May 13 & 14 2013!
Category: bpm business process improvement business process management collaboration process improvement process management summit Tags: bpm, business process improvement, business process management, collaboration, culture, summit
by Samantha Searle | August 3, 2012 | Submit a Comment
While the countdown begins to our BPM Sydney Summit on Augst 20 & 21, the planning has already begun for our London 2013 BPM Summit!
This is where we need your help to shape our agenda for the London 2013 BPM Summit. What topics and challenges would you like to see covered?
We’ve set up a convenient online survey for you to fill in. You can access it here:
Gartner BPM Pre-Summit Survey
The survey closes next Friday 10th August so do it now before you forget 
We look forward to receiving your input!
For anyone in Asia Pac reading this, it’s not too late to register for our BPM Sydney Summit. Full registration details and agenda can be found on the event website:
Gartner Business Process Management Summit, Sydney Australia, 20 & 21 August
We hope to see you there! In the meantime follow us on #gartnerbpm for regular updates on our BPM Sydney Summit. I will also be tweeting on @scsearle.
Category: bpm process design process improvement process management summit Tags: bpi, bpm, busines process improvement, business process management, summit, workflow
by Samantha Searle | June 19, 2012 | Submit a Comment
Sounds obvious doesn’t it? Yet results from this year’s BPM Summit Survey have revealed a stark disconnect between the perceived importance of the initial goals of a BPM project and how successful organizations believed they had been in achieving those goals. It appears that once the project has got going, those involved get so involved in the details that they lose sight of the original goal. However sometimes that’s because no one identified the goals and decided how they would be measured before the project got going. Only 52% of respondents identified the project goals upfront; the remainder either did it after the project started or didn’t have a formal measurement program in place. It is hardly surprising then that the survey revealed a staggering 64% of organizations didn’t know what the average ROI was on their BPM projects!
Fortunately some encouraging results also emerged from the survey data. Those organizations that identified measurement criteria at the beginning of a BPM project were more successful at meeting the original goals. So the message is clear: invest time in building a business case for your BPM project and it will pay off when it comes to doing benefits realization. This could make the difference between getting or not getting the funds and resources for your next BPM project! Those organizations that know how to advertise quick wins in BPM and can demonstrate clear results are the ones we see succeeding at BPM in the long term.
FYI for those of you planning to attend the Gartner BPM Summit in Sydney (to be held on 20th and 21st August at the Sheridan on the Park Hotel), John Dixon and I will be running a workshop on “Building a Business Case for BPM Projects” which you might find useful.
Category: bpm process improvement process management Tags: bpm, business performance, business vavlue, measures, process improvement, results
by Samantha Searle | May 21, 2012 | Submit a Comment
Image Credit: WikiCommons
Hold the date – Gartner’s next BPM summit in Sydney will be held on Monday 20th and Tuesday 21st August at the Sheraton in the Park Hotel.
If you register before 22nd June you get a AUS$400 discount and the opportunity to attend a networking breakfast with four Gartner analysts!
The hot topics to be covered include:
- How to deal with organizational politics and silos
- Motivation, gamification and organizational change
- BPM Roles, Skills, Metrics and Performance
- Getting Started With BPM
- Leveraging Investment in BPM Applications
Our guest keynote speaker will be Michael Rosemann who will present “Beyond Reactive Process Redesign: Innovating Processes with Emerging Technologies”. Full details of our agenda can be found on the event website.
If you’re not already a member, join our LinkedIn group for further updates and follow #gartnerbpm on Twitter!
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by Samantha Searle | April 30, 2012 | Submit a Comment
The second day of the Gartner BPM summit in Baltimore has generated even more excitement around BPM. For highlights and attendees reactions view my Storify blog of Day 2 (Thursday 26th April) here . It is interesting to see that 60% of our attendees are from IT and 40% from the business. Even more encouraging is the number of intermediate and advanced BPM practitioners (40% intermediate and 30% advanced) with only 30% of attendees at beginner level.
If you’re wondering what all the topical tweeting is about, have a look at the tag cloud below that summarises what people have been talking about on #gartnerbpm.
As for the fruity gamification theme, I hear that there have been a lot of fruit-related word games going around in sessions…or maybe we’re all just going bananas (**groan**)?!! Either way it was great to see such a high level of interaction on #gartnerbpm as well as onsite and thanks to everyone who kept the conversation going on Twitter duruing the event. If you have any further comments/feedback please let me know, else we’ll look forward to seeing you next year in Baltimore!
In the meantime you can follow me on Twitter: @scsearle
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by Samantha Searle | April 26, 2012 | Submit a Comment
750 BPM wannabees have descended on Baltimore this week to discover opportunities and acknowledge challenges relating to people, politics and process and work out how to manage them.
I’ve summarized the highlights of Day 1 using Storify (allow you to create a nice storyboard rather than a blog full of text!) which you can read here:
Day 1 of Gartner BPM Summit Links BPM, Social and Gamification
There were some great conversations going on #gartnerbpm via Twitter yesterday. Overall we had 195 tweeters who sent 662 tweets and reached 160,080 other Twitter accounts so big thanks to everyone who participated! Let’s keep the conversationg going on #gartnerbpm for Day 2!
We also had a good start to our competition to identify organizational politics challenges. Some of my favourite responses so far are:
- Knowing whose egos you have to stroke to effect change in the organization
- “COE mentality” – we cannot do anything until we establish a center of excellence and a shared services group
- Greatest organizational challenge is remaining relevant to the business and expressing outcomes in financial terms
- Source of #OPbpm is the constant battle between process standardization vs agility and people believing they’re mutually exclusive
Keep your organizational politics challenges coming either by posting them to the onsite board at the summit or tweeting them to #OPbpm #gartnerbpm.
For a reminder of all the competitions going on during the Gartner BPM summit, check out my previous blog “Don’t Miss our Onsite and #Gartnerbpm Competitions at the BPM Baltimore Summit” and Elise’s blog on the topic “Get your Game On at the Garter BPM Summit in Baltimore”
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by Samantha Searle | April 23, 2012 | 1 Comment
Our 2nd BPM summit in Baltimore begins on Wednesday and just to add some extra excitement to the event we’re running a few competitions onsite and via #gartnerbpm on Twitter.
Prizes include a free pass to next year’s BPM Summit in Baltimore and the chance to win a $100 Amazon Gift Certificate (or $100 charity donation) and are for end-users only (sorry!) .
Here are the details:
Competition #1: Crowdsourcing challenges in organizational politics
This is an opportunity to help us define organizational politics by identifying the issues and challenges that relate to organizational politics and can hinder BPM success. For example, one issue might be:
Organizational memory; we can’t seem to try something new because a similar effort to fix “X” failed in the past”.
There are two ways to enter:
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Locate the physical board at the conference (its location will be revealed on #gartnerbpm and during the welcome address at 8:30am on Wednesday!) and write down your issue/challenge on a piece of paper. You must put your name and email address on the back so we know who you are!
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Tweet your issue challenge using #OPbpm #gartnerbpm
This competition will run from Wednesday and close at 5pm ET on Thursday so make sure you enter before you forget!
Anyone can vote for their top two favourite entries either by going to the board and placing a dot sticker next to the challenge/issue or retweeting them on #OPbpm #gartnerbpm. The winner will be announced at on Friday by Elise Olding at the closing speech.
Competition #2: Fill in the blank
I will run two daily competitions on #gartnerbpm where I’ll post part of a statement and invite people the complete it by filling in the blank. Post your full response to #gartnerbpm and the best response of the day will win a free pass. Just to give an example of what to look out for, I’ll tweet a statement such as:
#gartnerbpm Intelligent processes should…
You then reply by retweeting and filling in the rest of the statement:
#gartnerbpm Intelligent processes should tell me when a process is broken!
Each day the competition will finish at 6pm ET and the winner will be announced the following morning on #gartnerbpm and via my blog.
Competition #3: WIN $100 Amazon Gift Certificate for completing our BPM research survey!
We will be inviting attendees to complete our annual BPM research survey via onsite kiosks. Your input is much appreciated and will be used in our research so as a thank you for doing the survey, you will be entered into a prize draw to win either a $100 Amazon Gift Certificate or $100 donation to the charity of your choice. In addition, everyone who fills out the survey will get a badge!
Look for out for other games onsite!
Elise Olding and other analysts will be handing out badges onsite for participating in various games; see Elise’s latest blog for details:
Get Your Game On at the Gartner BPM Summit in Baltimore
and follow #gartnerbpm and other BPM analyst blogs for further updates. Enjoy the conference and watch this space!
Category: bpm process improvement process management summit Tags: bpm, business performance, business process management, na, summit
