« Don’t be Content with Just Content | Home | BPM 2.0 Enables People in New Ways »
Do We Really Need BPM 2.0?
By Jim Sinur | May 30, 2008
It seems that the Business Process Management Suite (BPMS) is just reaching a level where some organizations are leveraging many of the aspects it supports, so why would anyone want to come up with a new version of BPM? On top of that, why would anyone name anything 2.0, since it seems a little worn out?
Technologies like Web 2.0 do not seem to be generating the kind of capital growth like many experts expected. Why then BPM 2.0, or some other new name for a second generation of BPM? Let’s examine the issues.
The BPMS is Gaining Traction:
I see several organizations delivering success in terms of ROI and time-to-market on a daily basis. Process-focused activity is still in the minds eye of the business professional as well as many CIOs. It seems like the momentum is there. Of course, there have been issues around learning curves and methodologies, but for the most part BPM efforts are proving themselves.
I have not heard of any disasters and it seems that the pioneers/leaders have been successful and BPM is moving along fine for the followers. The BPMS, which is more holistic in nature, supports the full life cycle of process development through incremental improvement. The BPMS can define, model, simulate, deploy, execute, monitor, analyze and optimize processes. Even those organizations that are early in the BPM maturity cycle are seeing success in leveraging BPM technologies and business process improvement practices. Why tip the apple cart when there is progress a plenty?
The BPMS Supports Several Use Cases:
We have seen BPM successfully applied to system intensive straight through processing to eliminate mundane and repeatable processes. This is even true for processes that integrate across application and stove pipe business functions in a highly automated fashion. The problem here is that much of the work done in a business does not fall into highly automated, lights out category. Carbon units need the help of the BPMS as well; the myopic IT view won’t quite do it here.
BPM is also successful for the human intensive heads down work that exceptions kicked out from system-to-system activity or just human intensive work that defies complete automation. This can include case management and/or document management or not. This category is what I call “blue collar” activity in an information factory. Structured and predetermined tasks are the hallmark of this use case. Sometimes there is light workflow involved and others heavy BPM.
Up until now, the BPMS combines these two areas of process work, but this is not the end of the journey. Besides working up the maturity curve, there are more kinds of work to consider.
There is a an Emerging Need to Support Knowledge Workers
The next step in BPM is a big jump. I do think that including SOA is important, but the real win for BPM is to support the knowledge worker and search for best practices to permeate to the rest of the workers. Knowledge workers are the keepers of the organizational knowledge and are interested in flexible processes that can be indeterminate by nature (You can’t really draw complete and structured process model easily).
Knowledge workers, of course do have fixed snippets of structured process that they leverage in their overall job duties. Quite often these workers work in a collaborative fashion and have networks of people they interface with on a regular basis. Even though the processes may not be as structured, progress and goals must be applied and tracked for optimal time to market and throughput. This is what I call “white collar” activity in an information value chain.
Bottom Line:
BPM has to change to include knowledge intensive processes and tasks. It is debatable that we need a new term for BPM that can handle all the types of processes that are needed, but it won’t stop me. I will call this new capability BPM 2.0 for now because it includes a number of Web 2.0 features that enable knowledge workers.
It may be that the capital play for Web 2.0 might be BPM. I plan on enumerating on the kind of supports that will be needed for the knowledge intensive work in the coming weeks. Watch this space.
Topics: BPM |
June 11th, 2008 at 7:45 am
Where do you start with the greatest standards for BPM? KM? Six Sigma – Lean?
If you were just starting out in BPM, had only fragmented single processes (based off of organizational silos), disparate data / information / knowledge processes and systems: What methodology could be used to develop an integrated business process architecture (which also captures knowledge components), which can be readily visualized, simulated in a BPM tool? The uses of the business process architecture are for strategic opportunities analysis, and operation incremental business change (continuous improvement – Six Sigma / Lean).
I struggle with the terminology and uses of the models from Six Sigma / Lean – value stream – As Is / To Be, Zachaman process modeling methodology, BPM tools. How do you know what to use for what purpose and how they integrate together?
June 12th, 2008 at 10:25 pm
The point you bring up is important in that sometimes you can have great success with BPM without regard to moving across the silos of functional excellence thus yielding a superior overall process that gives overall excellence.
This is why I reccomend that people just starting practice “t modeling” in absence of a “top down” process effort that forces a look beyond the silos. (see A Strategist’s Perspective: Designing Process Properly on BP trends and blog post “A Methodology Yardstick Helps When You Attempt BPM” on Dec 11th 2007 and blog post “Process Discovery Done Right (R5)”)).
Most BPM maturity models encourage “cross silo” views of process, but most methods leave this out. The Babson approach hits this the best in my opinion, but it is not rolled out to the masses.
June 15th, 2008 at 12:23 am
Jim,
I’m glad you’ve decided to adopt the terminology that Bruce Silver and I have introduced two years ago (http://itredux.com/bpm-20/), much like you did at Gartner when you adopted the BPMS acronym I created eight years ago. Note that BPM 2.0 goes beyond what you suggested though, and I would very much appreciate if you could refrain from depleting it from its original substance. This is what happened to the first BPM acronym, and this created to quite a bit of confusion in the marketplace. I have no doubt that analyst firms benefited from it initially, but customers certainly did not.
-Ismael
June 15th, 2008 at 12:40 am
[...] my emails and blogs before the event, Google Reader recommended that I take a look at a post titled Do We Really Need BPM 2.0 and authored by Jim Sinur, former Gartner analyst who recently went to work for Global 360. While [...]
June 16th, 2008 at 2:45 pm
Ismael,
I appreciate that you may have taken a shot at BPM 2.0, but Let me finish my series and then we can talk about where we overlap or underlap. I am purposely delaying analyzing your version in the mean time. I’ll compare after I complete my cut at it.
The Gartner BPMS was also different than your cut at the BPMS and done independently. I think this will be likely for BPM 2.0 as well. Gartner will probably name the next generation of BPM, so I would get too upset about it. The important thing is that BPM is evolving and we do agree about that. We may not agree on the what and how. Let’s see down the road.
Regards,
Jim
June 17th, 2008 at 5:05 am
I agree that knowledge intensive processes need a new set of tools.
Knowledge workers carry out these processes by taking into account multiple inputs (generally a wide set of unstructured data and information) to perform difficult tasks and make complex decisions among multiple possible ways of doing the work, each one implying different levels of risk and possible benefits.
I look forward to your posts about this topic.