I wanted to take a few moments to pass on my thoughts about a post I read last week. This post was from Jim Sinur and related to his thoughts on the 5 Hot Questions you should be asking about BPM.According to Jim the 5 questions that came out of discussions held at Gartner's BPM conference and symposium were:
1 What are the Benefits of BPM?
2. How Should I Get Started?
3 How do I set up Organizational Supports?
4. Which BPM Technologies Should I Use?
5. How do Business Rules Help BPM?
Now I don't know about you but I think that at least four of those questions are non-specific enough to be used for any capability. Think about it. If you were thinking setting up a brand new widget manufacturing capability the top questions you would ask yourself are "What are the benefits of this?", "How should I get started?", "How do I set up the organisational structures?" and "What technologies should I use?". The only question I see in the list that I feel is specific just to BPM is the final question relating to business rules.
Maybe the take-away from this is that there are a generic set of questions that need to be asked for all capabilities that are being proposed. But as Jim has indicated that these appear to be 'hot' questions from Gartner customers can we assume that they are the ones that are currently in the forefront of businesses minds?
Jim does go on to actually answer these questions in a brief way. Like me, he is aligned with the concept that BPM can be a profit centre and reiterates this when talking about the benefits of BPM. He says
Based on surveys, award programs and inquiries, we are seeing rates of return north of 20% and payback periods less than one year for larger efforts and less than 90 days for more scoped effortsThat's pretty impressive.
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