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- Prevalent Process Patterns Enable BPM Benefits Differently
By Jim Sinur | March 4, 2008
I believe there are three common patterns of workflow that thrive under the banner of BPM. Each of these patterns deliver productivity in different ways, consequently the methodologies, tools and techniques differ around these patterns.
While these patterns may be used in combination with each other in trying to enable a certain type of business process, they can easily be identified and managed uniquely. The process professional that understands these are handled differently will likely seek and attain results faster than those who don’t understand the differences.
I have seen each of these in their pure forms and have had the challenge of enabling and transforming them to something better. I will be referring to Figure 1 throughout through this posting.
Figure 1: 
Straight-Through Processes: (Program Controlled):
This workflow pattern has been highly sought out and highly enabled by hand crafted and/or purchased applications. Through the linking of transactions, sub-applications, services, composite applications and application integrations via BPM technologies, significant economies can be gained by leveraging automation. These straight-through processes have all the rules baked into them and do not require humans to guide them in any way except to change the embedded rules when and where necessary.
This assumes that they perform flawlessly and do not hang up in any way. Examples of this kind of process would be “jet underwriting” and “automatic claim processing”. I view this as the robotics of the white collar manufacturing line where the business process is accomplished in fractions of a second and the rules are automated. Refer to the bottom band on Figure 1.
The problem with this approach is if the exceptions swamp the automatic process, then process workers are generally introduced. These processes are fairly inexpensive to run, so there is an economic benefit to automating these processes. This is the domain of the power vendors and your IT folks.
Process Worker Processes: (Process Worker Enabled):
This workflow pattern organizes human capital and flow of work that requires knowledge, cases, content and skills. While this pattern may leverage application transactions and composite applications, the work surrounding these kinds of processes involves the human touch. Quite often the work is passed from one job specialty to another and polices, constraints and rules are partially enforced by humans (see the middle band on Figure 1).
If the control is application based, then humans perform “heads-down” activities in order to feed an application transaction need and generallyachieve completion in minutes (sometimes less where highly specialized exceptions are involved). An example of this kind of process would be a customer service center where address changes would be preformed. The customer service representative would select an address change from a menu of capabilities, complete this process and potentially go on to another short and sharp online process. These are relatively inexpensive processes, but certainly not straight through processes.
The prevalent use is around cases, and the work is not considered complete until certain unknowns have been resolved. These kinds of processes can remain “open” until certain completed activities occur. While these can be completed in minutes, they can remain unresolved for months, requiring definite goals for completion. An example would be a life underwriting process where a doctor’s exam has to be completed before the policy can be issued because of the age of the insured and the size of the policy.
The policy will not be issued as a contract until the results of the exam are known and interpreted. Quite often you will see content/image processing accompanying the case folder needed to organize the legal audit trail of activities and their results. Often you will see forms of patterned correspondence automatically generated out of these processes and they are likely to be involved with a value chain of sorts.
Knowledge Worker Processes: (Professional Knowledge Worker Guided)
At the top of the process food chain are processes that require a high level of skill that might not be available in one person. Condequently, it may require the collaboration of multiple people that may or may not be employees of your organization. These kinds of processes are resolved in hours at best and sometimes can go unresolved for longer periods of time (see the top band on figure 1).
These processes are indeterminate by nature in that they may be undefined in terms of goals and outcomes. Quite often the activity starts as a “one off” situation, yet after months of experience ends up as a set of best practices that can be baked into the process worker level. An example of this kind of a process might be to determine if a potential insured condition of “double vision” is a deal stopper or maybe something that an insurance company might charge more for over the life of an insurance policy.
This might require consultations with paramedics, advanced underwriters, doctors and “double vision” experts outside the company. These indeterminate processes might involve voting and leveraging process snippets once the decision is made. These are very expensive processes that BPM can help manage and potentially discover patterns of completion that can be made into knowledge maps and process snippets. These processes are new and evolving along with Web 2.0, knowledge sources and collaboration across value chains. This is the frontier of BPM today where the policies and rules are being defined on the fly.
Bottom Line: Knowing the Nature of Work Determines the Process Pattern
The reason that BPM is moving out of the IT domain and more into the business domain revolves around the nature of the process, new levels of human interaction, the required need for speed, the required need for cost and the level of repeatability.
As the rules around a process move to a more solid state, the movement towards more repeatable processes is sure to continue for the foreseeable future. An understanding of the migration of workflow from the top knowledge worker processes down through process workers to pure automation will be a key survival skill for organizations going forward in order to compete effectively. Look for new BPM applications focused around knowledge and collaboration going forward.
Topics: BPM | 6 Comments »
Is Your BPM Vendor a Player or a Poser?
By Jim Sinur | February 28, 2008
I have found that BPM vendors come in all shapes and sizes, but one of the important tells that BPM players have revolves around how much they leverage BPM in their own processes.
It’s pretty doggone easy for a vendor to tell a potential or existing client how to use BPM and their technology, but how much the BPM discipline is applied to running their business should be something you investigate.
The Seller: (The Hit and Run)
This kind of BPM vendor is only interested in selling and does not really use their own BPM technology for their processes at all. In fact they would not even see a need to use their own technology.
They generally just sell while the market is in a lift mode and quite often disappear when you are dealing with the implementation issues. It may be because they are small and understaffed, so support is hard to come by, or they want to engage you in an expensive engagement.
These kinds of vendors generally do not thrive for long and constantly shift their message to what sells best.
The Sympathetic: (Hands On: NOT)
These vendors are quite good at listening to your requirements and will stick around a service you, but they do not really have significant commitment to applying BPM to themselves (neither the BPM discipline nor their BPM technology). They will try to get you to use what they haven’t done themselves.
Like the Seller, they do not use their own stuff. They even copy other companies’ processes for their demos. Though sometimes other client problems are more suited to show strengths, you should question the source of the demo and why they did not include one of their own.
The Sampler: (The Slight of Hand)
This vendor uses its technology to build the coolest demo application and generally sweeps you off your feet with lots of sizzle. There is little BPM steak back at the office. These demos are made to deceive people into thinking that this is a real sophisticated BPM vendor. This is pretty deceptive, but it works for them. It’s a demo that deceives.
The Simple Simon: (Toe in the Water)
There are vendors that build token processes inside their own organizations like “expense tracking” or “conference room scheduling”. These kinds of processes are not going to really impact an organization and teach the BPM vendor the joy and trials of a true BPM effort. This is the shallow end of the pool for sure.
The Submerged: (Committed to Process)
This kind of BPM vendor does more than sip its own champagne, they get drunk on BPM.
There are two kinds of BPM vendors. There are those that have a good number of their internal processes up on their own BPM technology and have experience a fair amount of BPM pleasure and pain. They are sometimes ahead of the market in BPM maturity.
The real BPM’er is the vendor that has implemented a process that crosses many of their own internal functions like ‘order to cash”. This means that they have had to deal with the organizational issues and diffuse functional excellence for “end-to-end” process excellence.
Bottom Line:
It is important for your BPM vendor to understand your challenges first hand. Make sure your due diligence includes several questions about your potential and existing vendor(s) use of their own technology.
Topics: BPM | 2 Comments »
Five Ways to Kill a BPM Effort
By Jim Sinur | February 21, 2008
Based on personal observations, discussions with hundreds of industry experts, and reviews of multiple industry surveys, I have identified the emergence of some of the worst practices that can affect a BPM effort. While other worst practices certainly exist, these five are the early BPM killers.
Support is Shaky: (Tent Poles are there for a Reason)
The most difficult aspect of BPM is to get support for the BPM effort. Everyone wants executive management support, and when this support exists, it is a beautiful thing. I’ve been lucky enough to have experienced it twice. The problem with executive management support is that successful and supportive executives are rare, and they are quite often distracted by career initiatives.
The next best alternative is a visionary business leader, one who might not be at the executive level, yet understands that good processes means a productivity increase for the organization. Even if you are fortunate enough to get top management support and/or a strong visionary, keeping that support is a challenge because successful leaders frequently move up and/or out.
The reality is that this does not always happen, requiring a grass roots effort to catch the attention of willing business professionals. I’ve been here as well. All one needs is a sample process that delivers results on a smaller scale that can be completed in three or four months. Of course, this would occur after a smaller proof of concept that would show results in 30 days.
Developing this kind of repeatable impact creates the kind momentum that attracts supporters. For those who can’t find a business sponsor at any level can try processes internal to Information Technology (IT) to practice readiness for the day the business folks are ready, willing and able. (see New to Process Management? Try ITPM )
Scope is Wrong: (Know when to hold them; Know when to fold them)
Just like any project, keeping scope-creep out of BPM efforts is important. It is also important to learn from iterations in the process definition and relax the scope where success or higher return on investment is likely. This is a difficult balance and requires solid judgment with an eye for process context. This can be aided by doing a thin top-level process model first and narrowing the context of the BPM effort (see A Strategist’s Perspective: Designing Process Properly ).
It is important to have the core team decide when the scope should change because many advisors make wise decisions. You will find that this links quite nicely with the idea of having frequent validations that can ultimately serve as excellent enablers for creating excellent processes.
Skills are Lacking: (The little train that couldn’t).
Even the most motivated and determined personnel need a skills boost. The key focus of any initial BPM effort revolves around process discovery, which also ties into process scope. If you can’t or won’t bring in outside help, then learning about process discovery to enable organizational and/or actual process changes that are manual in nature is crucial.
There are many resources available like BP Trends, BPMG, Attaining Edge, WFMC, and many other boutique process service providers. There are many more and the BP Trends resources tab has a great list of vendors and associations. I do not know of anyone who rates the trainers at this moment in time; however, this blog might be a place to start rating outside trainers to see if they understand process discovery (Process Discovery Done Right (R5)).
Seeking Validation is not Important: (The blind leading the blind).
The danger in working with an incremental process like BPM is that repeated validation is skipped. One of the main differences in the way BPM methodologies differ from traditional methodologies is that they are iterative in nature, so creating a collaborative team that communicates effectively is a huge key to success.
One of most important communication points is the validation stage. This stage requires the team to get together with key stakeholders and/or their designated representatives to verify and validate the results of the process development at key points in time. It would be important to try and identify these points ahead of time and set a standing time and day for feedback.
Success is not Leveraged: (BPM without pulleys)
It is important to communicate lessons learned going forward in any BPM effort, but the cardinal sin is not communicating and leveraging successes even if they are not initially dramatic. People love to see progress, so regularly communicating results even with inconclusive results is one way to gain support and momentum. Some of this occurs during the validation steps, but there are key milestones where initial results can really leverage your BPM efforts.
Once the process is in good enough shape to run live cases, there should be a good opportunity to show some of the dashboards and the process in action. After the BPM development effort, a post-process project report should be created and published so that lessons learned and benefits achieved are visible. Some organizations have required that there be at least three positives and three negatives for every post-mortem report (the project is dead and done, but the process lives on).
Bottom Line:
There are many ways to lose; Let me count the ways It is important to know where the potholes are in the BPM road so you can steer your way through to your destination. I have tried to identify five of the biggest ones and I suspect others will be highlighted going forward for those organizations that are pushing the BPM maturity curve and are learning how to manage the agility afforded in good BPM processes.
Topics: BPM | 3 Comments »
Basic Best Practices for BPM
By Jim Sinur | February 12, 2008
Based on my observations and conversations with thousands of business and IT professionals, many BPM efforts are at the early stages and revolve around picking the right BPM process and achieving early successes.
While we have some more advanced clients using our software, the vast majority of clients are trying to start BPM efforts and/or extend their initial benefits that have convinced them that BPM needs to permeate their organization.
For those organizations that are in the beginning stages of BPM and/or are examining a rejuvenation of their BPM efforts, I wanted to document some of the critical best practices for early BPM success. Keep in mind that these basic practices should be considered for all BPM projects. I intend on delivering on some intermediate and advanced best practices in future blog postings. Consider this as BPM Best Practices 101.
Proposition: (Picking the Right Process)
It is important to propose the right BPM efforts (some would call these efforts projects) for a sure success. I would suggest that picking a safe process is “OK” for a proof-of-concept, but after that it would be important to pick a visible process that might be considered a “killer flow”.
That is a process that everyone (or near everyone) would agree is important to do well and one which delivers future savings. In fact, BPM efforts that focus towards processes that have a potential for strong cost savings do the best in convincing those to “pile on” with BPM.
It is just as important to make sure these processes are driven by the business. While there could be a high cost saving with internal IT processes, they do not have credibility with business professionals. Ideally, your early BPM efforts deal with crossing functional lines, so that lessons can be learned in balancing functional excellence with overall process excellence. The lessons learned here will help in the more advanced BPM efforts down the road.
People: (Establishing the Right Culture).
There is more to having the right atmosphere around a BPM effort than just having really motivated and smart people. While it is important to have strong communicators that thrive on risk and the success of others that are to complete follow-on efforts, there are additional important issues to wrestle with in a successful BPM effort. First and foremost, gathering the right mix of people is imperative.
There has to be a commitment to having the involvement of strong subject matter experts. This is more than using the marginal time of a business professional. There has to be a measured set of outcomes and time commitments that need to be monitored by a visionary leader and/or an independent party/unit (e.g. project office). Second, there has to be a strong partnership between business and IT.
The business brings the knowledge and needs and IT brings the support and technical problem-resolving skills. Last, and most important, is to gain the trust of the workers who are involved in the process today. They are likely to be threatened by the implied changes that may occur in their job skills, steps and content. This is something that is earned by listening and implementing their good ideas and dealing with their concerns/feelings.
Process: (Understanding the Real Process).
It is imperative to have a keen understanding of the real process. This is much easier said than done. Even if you pick the right people, there has to be a melding of each of their respective understandings. Completing the process discovery step is critical in taking a BPM effort to success. Many successful organizations will arrange a workout session where good process discovery practices prevail (see blog Process Discovery Done Right (R5) ). Care should be taken in trying to uncover shadow processes as they contain “land mines” in them.
One of the best ways to deal with this is by verifying the process discovery outcome with key process participants. It is easy to delude oneself that the process is simple and all will cooperate with the outcome of the process workout sessions. Quite often existing processes do not have good documentation or may be imbedded in a legacy-packed or custom application, and discovery will require some patience and diligence, but starting with a high level end-to-end process and drilling down in future iterations works well.
Project: (Pulling the Right Levers)
Even if you get all of the above correct, there is still a missing piece to the BPM puzzle. A process effort must have a rapid development process that starts with a kernel process and leverages multiple iterations to show quick progress. It is easy to get stuck in process discovery too long to try and get the process perfect in the modeling stage. This is a temptation that must be avoided with disagreements dealt with by utilizing a trial-and-error approach.
For those organizations with easy-to-use simulation tools, this might be a help as well. It is important to have frequent reviews to realize benefits and qualify results. By using a dynamic-iteration-development method, this will put a premium on tools with agile features such as business simulation, dynamic business rule changes, and SOA, where the process involves technology and/or transactional components. Do it, try it, fix it !!!!
Bottom Line Process Discovery is Critical for BPM Success
How successful you are on an initial BPM effort will determine if you live another day, so doing some initial planning and reading will help you. There are a number of resources and BPM gurus that you can start with, but I would say that all will include the above basic areas of attention. Many of the experts will try and take you further, but you have to crawl before you walk, walk before you run, and run before you can attempt a marathon.
Topics: BPM | 2 Comments »
The Gartner BPM Conference in Las Vegas
By admin | February 7, 2008
I attended the Gartner BPM Conference in Las Vegas this week. It ran from February 4-7 and I was very pleased with how this event is progressing. There were 1000+ attendees, up from September 2007 and comparable in size and scope to San Diego in the Spring of 2007.
This is the world’s largest BPM conference and looks to be progressing as the early planners expected. While the audience is not at the ideal 50-50 balance of business professional and IT professionals, it is steadily headed in that direction. The initial conference had 25% business participation and that number grew to 40% this week.
Gartner is trying to be inclusive by adding other BPM groups and Gurus, and are giving the key participants a platform to reach out and help BPM progress. As I spoke to many of the attendees, both new and returnees, the consensus was that the conference was very helpful for them. This bodes will for the long term health of this conference.
While there was something for everyone at the conference, I will focus on the things that caught my eye. Rather than give you detailed session material, I would prefer to summarize the major themes and give you my take on some of them. If you want some detail, I would look at Sandy Kemsley’s Columns 2 (www.column2.com) as she does a real detailed analysis of selected sessions.
The Softer Side of BPM:
There was a consistent theme around people and organizational change. One of the by-products of doing BPM well is that many people have to change what they are doing. This happens even on the smallest of BPM efforts, so I think Gartner is right in helping the potential change agents (the BPM conference attendees) with guidance on how to complete change in a productive way despite how difficult it is for everyone.
I would like to highlight two sessions that hit the nail on the head for me. Though it was rather basic, Enabling Change and Unleashing Great Performance by Sara Roberts of Roberts Golden Consulting gave a nice overview of the ingredients of change without giving away the methodology. Diane Morello gave a sparkling nuts-and-bolts session on the change process in Rethinking Change: The Practical Realities of Successful Transformation.
Agile BPM
Gartner is also honing in on how important agile processes will be to the wave of the future. Gartner is a little too focused on the SOA approach as the primary way to enable agility, but that comes with the turf of eating heavy doses of material from the power vendors that are working their platforms to be SOA centric (IBM, Oracle, Microsoft and SAP).
I think additional insight was given in two presentations that embrace agility in a better manner. Daryl Plummer’s Agility + Process + The power to Respond to Change really framed the complete approach to agility and drove home where BPM and agility mix. Daryl has some very compelling slides describing the types of agility and places to start employing agility. The real highlight for me was Marc Kerreman’s Business Rule Management: State of the Art, where he pointed out the importance of rule management as a key set of capabilities for managing agility in BPM.
BPM Maturity
One of the major challenges we all face in BPM is understanding our respective maturity in BPM and where to focus our efforts and refine the “how to” portion. Janelle Hill hit this hard in her sparkling opening session and Gartner delivered an interesting self assessment tool with a focused follow-up session for those participants who filled out the online survey and wanted some more focused help. The overall results of the survey indicated that we are still in the early stages of maturity.
To that end, Gartner had a number of sessions for those new to BPM. There was Michele Cantara giving the BPM Primer, and Elise Olding presenting Getting Started with BPM. There were many great case studies for folks to attend that helped people see what others had done to gain success. The one disconcerting message here was to not buy tools to help get started. I would propose that utilizing a scoped proof on concept, once a plan and some skill levels are aggregated, is also a good way to start. Process discovery is a great way to go and the tools certainly compiment these efforts.
Emerging Trends in BPM
There were some themes that were highlighted strongly in presentations. There was a session on BPM Methodologies that focused on the depressing fact that this is lagging and no one methodology does a credible job. The SaaS phenomenon was dissected in several sessions. I’m not sure about SaaS yet and I have seen little traction in the BPM space. Also, there was a consistent thread around human interaction management and moving to support the knowledge worker with more flexible processes, decision supports and content.
Bottom Line:
It is clear that BPM is on its way when a BPM for Dummies book is issued, so I think this BPM thing has legs, as does the Gartner BPM conference. I would certainly attend again because of the great content, interaction and professional events staff.
Topics: BPM | 2 Comments »
Can BPM Based Templates Compete with COTS Applications?
By Jim Sinur | January 29, 2008
There is an evolution going on in the world of applications that is relegating the traditional way of leveraging COTS (commercial off the shelf) application packages a thing of the past.
The problem with COTS applications is that they are not interoperable, flexible nor component-based. They are generally only aimed at a traditional transaction-based solution with little leverage of process and knowledge workers.
Business professionals are looking for solutions that leverage agile processes, business rules, knowledge management, flexible human workflow, configurable content, collaboration based on skills profiles and a highly configurable and usable interface.
I do not see traditional application vendors evolving to this target any time soon, though several application platform vendors are moving in a better direction. Is the answer in BPM templates? Is there enough best practice embedded to purchase as a starting point? Let’s explore the possibilities.
What are BPM Templates?
Processes templates are jump-start processes that can deliver a core best practice for a particular business focus. This focus can be aimed vertically or horizontally. An example of a vertical focus would be a life insurance underwriting process that would include agents, paramedical facilities, underwriters, advanced underwriters, doctors, and policy makers. An example of a horizontal focus would be a customer service and/or a call-center-based process.
In their most simplistic form, they are jump start processes (40-50% of an ultimate process) that form a core that will be extended to fit the end business need. Since the underlying BPM infrastructure is flexible and easy to extend, this is not a bad solution to pursue for quick hits with an ability to incorporate differentiating features. In their more complex forms, BPM templates can include some or all of the following jump-start intellectual properties:
- Flexible workflows
- Business policies/rules
- Goals/KPIs with tolerances
- Prescribed Analytics
- Focused content/micro-content
- Personalization by role
- Associated knowledge
- Prebuilt collaboration patterns
- Digital asset management
- Pre-configured and flexible component orchestration patterns
- Well behaved cross platform inclusion via pre-built integration patterns
Can BPM Templates be Commercial off the Shelf (COTS) Applications?
Today few BPM templates are as complete as those described above and COTS applications have detailed best practices baked-in for immediate consumption. There is a trade off that has to be balanced here. A solid jump start process on top of a flexible infrastructure that can be easily extended might be worth more over time than a more complete and rigid solution. In talking to thousands of business and IT professionals, I have found that most COTS packages end up being altered and/or extended.
The average amount of customization exceeds 30% of the function at a high cost against a brittle application package suite. There must be a problem here as the large application suite vendors are investing billions in refurbishing their infrastructures and converting their fossilized applications. Many of the new value-added process resellers are using BPMS platforms as a base process infrastructure and a number of BPMS vendors and/or their partners are providing BPM templates.
Bottom Line:
At this point in time, the amount of best practice instantiated into a BPM template is moderate at best. However, as these templates become richer over time and the demand for agility grows, it will be common place for templates to provide a 70+ percent solution out-of-the-box with nearly unlimited extendibility possibilities. This is worth investigating for those organizations that want to surround and extend application packages.
Topics: BPM | No Comments »
The Interaction of Process Modeling with Process Execution:
By Jim Sinur | January 22, 2008
Many folks I have talked to are confused about where to model a process. All the BPMS vendors have modeling baked into them and the stand alone modeling tools have been popular with the IT architects. We find business analysts using either for modeling their processes.
So what is the answer to “When should I use a specialized modeling tool and when should I use the modeling capabilities inside a BPMS”? The answer is: It depends. I would like to run through a few situations where it is crystal clear and others where it is rather foggy. Rather than use reason, people sometimes use the tool that happens to be in their shop just because it’s paid for.
Modeling for Context Correctness: (Modeling Tools Only)
When an organization is trying to model their processes in the context of other process models, corporate goals, organizational structure,and maybe even an inventory of existing applications, it is clear to me that a modeling-only tool will suffice.
Organizations that have a planning culture are attracted to modeling-only tools. The goal here is not to have the model execute in production, though one can bridge to an execution tool through XPDL, proprietary bridges/interfaces and/or proprietary XML. A new and difficult shared-repository modeling structure called BPDM is new option that, to date, few have attempted to use..
Modeling for Process Improvement Opportunities: (Both Apply)
Sometimes business professionals just want to model a process to find “quick-and-dirty” improvements that might mean combining job functions, moving work to other functional areas, or just streamlining the number of steps.
There may never be any automation of the steps and/or the work as it flows from one set of skill specialties to another. Quite often we see business professionals using Visio or using what ever process modeling tool happens to be around as long as it is easy to use and easy to access.
This is what I call opportunistic modeling. This can be done by the modeling-only tools, and a select number of BPMS vendors who offer lighter-weight modeling capabilities. If this becomes habitual in an organization, then the versioning and and merging features become desired and Visio is usually abandoned for process improvement, but continues its life in other forms of usage.
Modeling for Process Correctness: (Both Apply):
Some people would say, “The only way to make sure a model is correct is by actually running it in the real world”. While trying to reach perfection, there comes a point where execution and change become expensive. I would like to suggest that simulation really shortens the time to achieve enough correctness for “time-to-market” results.
This is a tricky balance, but about 25% of folks that I have talked to are now employing simulation. One has to be careful as to how much correctness is needed (good enough or perfection). Good BPMS tools and modeling-only tools have this capability. However, one has to be careful not to fall for the simulation demos that look sexy, but do not check for correctness in reality. Consequently, there are few vendors with simulation capabilities that work on large and complex processes.
Model and Execute Processes: (Both apply, but a BPMS is better)
One would expect that only the BPMS tools would be able to model and execute, but there are ways of providing bi-directional bridges between modeling tools and BPMS capabilities. This is generally very tricky work as the information that gets passed back to the modeling tool is limited and one has to have a flexible process context to accept the results.
Though it can be done, many organizations do it once and give up because of the difficulties of keeping a logical and physical process model in synchronization, much less keep it in a complete business context. With new business agility features and the advent of indeterminate processes (process snippets dynamically bound) for knowledge workers, this becomes a near impossible job, with modeling-only tools linked to process execution tools. It just changes too fast.
Execute Processes: (BPMS Only)
When it comes to executing the process, it is obvious that this is the arena for the BPMS. It becomes painfully obvious that the BPMS is the best place for organizations that feel their process must be agile, plus manage people activity along with automated transactions that are leveraged from the legacy-purchased and hand-crafted applications.
If an organization is interested in simulating with real results and optimizing in near real-time, the BPMS shines in this context. Some people feel that the BPMS represents the real world; not a modeled world, but those people might not like animation movies either.
Bottom Line:
It is important to start with process modeling for quick ROI, but it is also important to project how modeling will be used down the road in your organization. There is overlap in where these two kinds of process functionality can be used. Your culture will contribute to how this decision will be made.
Topics: BPM | 6 Comments »
Oracle buys BEA as Expected
By Jim Sinur | January 16, 2008
Today, Oracle announced the acquisition BEA, finally. There have been rumors for years now about this acquisition, so this is no surprise to many. Oracle is painting this as a complimentary acquisition, but there are significant areas of technology overlap. Both organizations have deep integration capabilities, adapters, and system to system BPM.
Bottom Line:
The integration market has been headed towards a commodity market for years now. This is a consolidation play and Oracle is buying a customer base. I see little opportunity in a technology cross sell with this acquisition, but this is good news for Oracle application customers that are leveraging BEA products.
Topics: BPM | No Comments »
Process is Free
By Jim Sinur | January 15, 2008
I remember when my daddy told me “nothing is ever free”. I found his wise sound bite to be true until now. In fact, early in my adult life I thought I found an exception when I worked for a company that gave me a daily “free lunch”.
On the surface, I did not pay anything for it from my cash flow, but this company under-paid me for years and giving me a free lunch kept me in the building, so it was quick and convenient to go back to work and keep pounding out deliverables.
Have I found an exception in BPM? I think under the right circumstances, one could imagine BPM as free. Just go with me for a few minutes and let’s look at the benefits in light of 2008.
BPM Brings Economic Benefits (Around 15%)
With the economy showing softness going into 2008, all expenditures, whether internal or external, will be scrutinized with additional reviews. This bodes well for BPM in a couple of ways. Historically, well scoped BPM projects approach a 15% internal rate of return. While we all can point to process projects that have exceeded that percentage, it is important to project a realistic expectation for a return on investments in BPM.
It also good to know that 15% will likely be as high, or higher than an organizations hurdle rate (the rate at which a company can invest their money in the current market). Both returns are before expenses, but BPM benefits are not taxed. Some BPM projects can cause displacements, so there could be some “one time” costs where “skill-fits” usher some people out the door.
“So the savings are there, but I had to pay for the BPM technologies and the salaries of the people who implemented the BPM process,” you say. Well, if you picked a BPM project with significant savings over the price of the software and people, then buddy, it’s free. The next question you ask is around opportunity costs while this money and people salaries are tied up (time value of money).
BPM Brings Time to Market (Less than a year or less)
Even if BPM can bring healthy rates of return, it will not necessarily be enough in tightening times. Since the pressures on organizations to increase their bottom lines within their fiscal years will dominate, BPM projects will be focused to bring in benefits quickly. The flow of monetary benefits will be important for BPM efforts in 2008. One should consider taking longer running BPM efforts in smaller bites to show a growing source of benefits bearing results.
In the case of quick hit mentality, the benefit flow is quick. A number of these smaller hits could add up to more than your BPM technology investment plus the labor to implement it. The payback is very fast, plus you can use the BPM software for future process efforts and win back your annual maintenance fees easily plus process maintenance costs. It sounds free to me.
There are Caveats
The danger of running to BPM efforts that are “short and sharp” while delivering quick cash flow, will revolve around creating functional excellence to the detriment to the overall evolving process scope. There is a real issue around sub-optimizing important over-arching process that can affect important customers, partners, suppliers, employees and regions. It wil bel important to look laterallyl as well as deep before moving forward. The balance here will revolve around completing the lateral look quickly so that the short term benefits are not held up. One should consider “T Modeling” which involves modeling the overarching process thinly and quickly before embarking on a benefit quest. This will greatly reduce the probability of sub-optimizing only to be sorry later. Sub-optimizing on functional excellence without considering the overall context only gives BPM a black eye in the long run.
Bottom Line
I think I have made a decent case for process being free. If managed properly BPM can be more than free; BPM can pay you back many times. Daddy wasn’t always right.
Topics: BPM | 2 Comments »