Process Cafe

Showing posts with label Business Process Management. Show all posts

Where's the BPM market going?

I remember back in the deep, dark mists of time (about ten years ago, actually), The BPM market used to have several players in it. Gartner's Magic Quadrant had a diverse number of players in each of the quadrants, and it was easy to look at and understand the fragmentation. Things were called 'BPM' and everyone knew where they stood with it - although, in reality, very few people could adequately define 'BPM' as a concept.

More recently, though, the market has started to amalgamate. Major companies were purchased by competitors and their products merged together (Metastorm and Provision is one example). The fragmentation of the market decreased suddenly. The Magic Quadrant (and Forrester's Wave) had fewer parts to it. Things looked good for the BPM vendors, but, not necessarily, good for the market.

People like Gartner then started to split their BPM Magic Quadrant up into different areas. We got BPMS, and ACM and the like. Different companies were invited in to join, and, pretty soon, the market seemed to be just as wide-ranging as before.

But is it really? Or have we just moved the goalposts?

Is this a classic reorganisation the likes of which we experience in companies at regular intervals? Movement for the sake of movement.

Is it a way for some of the consulting companies and business integrators to muddy the waters for customers and justify large consulting fees?

Or is the market genuinely in the throes of some major increase in the number of vendors working in a particular niche? Are we on the cusp of an explosion of products that will help customers conquer the BPM beast?

I'm not sure I know the answer myself, but I suspect a number of my readers will have opinions on this. Feel free to share in the comments below.

Photo Credit: Nathan O'Nions via Compfight cc

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Shadow IT - Good or Bad?

In a recent post about ‘shadow processes’ I mentioned how they are apt to be a result - in some cases - of departments running their own IT functions to try and bypass the inefficiencies of the proper IT department.
Well, the Harvard Business a review has published an article on Shadow IT and it hits the nail on the head quite succinctly in this regard.

If I may quote the opening passage as an example: Five years ago, “shadow IT” efforts were the dirty little secret of organizations. An impatient marketing or finance manager would, on the sly, secure some extra budget money and hire a contractor to build a little database that tracked mailing addresses or top-line financials. Slowly but surely, as the little database grew bigger and bigger, the manager would wedge the cost into her operating budget. Other managers might take notice and started building their own databases.

To my mind this encapsulates the key problem with IT departments in the business. They are not responsive enough to the needs of the end users.

Of course there are numerous reasons why this can be so:

The need to a manage and maintain existing legacy systems
The need to appropriately manage funding by prioritising the most important requirements.
Long lead times of larger projects diverting resources from being more responsive

These are just a few of the reasons that shadow IT functions exist.
But the most telling item in the HBR article relates to the concept of ‘departmental IT’. What they are saying is that shadow IT has now come into the open, been acknowledged by the business as viable and valuable to the end user community, and is being named as a separate function within the business.

Does anyone else feel as worried about this as I do?

The Big Issue

“But why shouldn’t the departments have their own IT function if the central IT function isn’t providing what they need?” you may ask.

There are numerous reasons but let me just pick on a couple of key ones.

Legacy maintenance. I once worked on a project which was tasked with identifying all the systems that needed to be replaced by a single ERP implementation worldwide. It took the project team about fifteen minutes to identify the centralised, IT-managed, legacy systems that were in place across the 40 affiliates worldwide. It took another six months, and many thousands of dollars, to identify all the local shadow IT implementations of Access databases, Excel spreadsheets and local portals that had spring up in the local affiliates. It also added a considerable amount of time, effort and money to the ERP project to understand and replace these with functionality in the implementation. This is the Enterprise Architecture issue.
Processes. By definition if you have implemented some sort of shadow IT system in your business then you will have modified, updated, or created some process to include the usage of the resulting IT system. This process will - by definition - not be part of your centralised process world. It will not be audited properly and it may not be the best way of doing the work.

So looking at these two items, it becomes apparent that shadow IT as a concept is not something that should be encouraged.

However, if I am a salesman out in the business trying to sell something to end customers and that lack of IT support for my needs is becoming a hindrance, I can fully understand how it is that I might try and put some sort of Shadow IT function in place to help me achieve my goal. Unfortunately while is will solve a short term goal it will create longer term problems.

In my book The Perfect Process Project, I talk about having a single owner for a process across the enterprise. The reason I say that is because having multiple owners will result in process changes that optimise the process for a specific section but sub optimise it for the whole process. If your purchase-to-pay process cuts across procurement, Accounts Payable and General Ledger, each one of these will try and optimise the process to make their life easier whilst not being cognisant of the effect such optimisation might have on the other parts of the process. Such sub-optimisation across the process will result in lower efficiencies and - hence - higher costs.

Shadow IT suffers from the same problem. You may - as a local sales manager - be optimising your IT functions to best leverage your budget and increase your sales, but any increased profits you are raising as a result of this, will likely be absorbed into the increased infrastructure and maintenance costs of having that unauthorised IT implementation there. This may not manifest itself until someone comes to upgrade or replace your systems (as in the above example), but it will always be there.

The Solution

So how do we deal with this issue? Human nature is going to keep causing people to do their own thing in order to try and improve their own situation. The key is education and reinforcement.
If you can make an affiliate or department head accountable for the increased costs as a result of shadow IT (or sub optimised, local processes), rewarding him or her for staying as close as possible to the company line, then human behaviour will be influenced by the reward system. Good managers get paid better than bad managers,
But the flip side of this is that you also need a mechanism whereby the local managers must have a way of highlighting local needs that are not being dealt with by a central solution. This is applicable to both shadow IT and localised processes. There has to be a prioritisation process to decide where scarce IT budgets are going to be focused. If the money doesn’t go your way, the incentive to not do it yourself is managed by the reward system for aligning with centralised directives.

Summary

Nobody wants to have inefficient systems and processes in place. Everyone wants to be set up in the best possible way to allow them to succeed. But sometimes the success of the overall entity must take precedence over the success of the constituent parts.

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What's your experience of BPM so far?

It seems to me that a lot of the work I am currently doing is related to "Let's see what we’ve got and document it" rather than ”OK, I'm wanting to make this more efficient, how can I do that?”.

As an example I spent time last year working with a large merchant bank who were wanting to document their sales process to help them understand how they could better sell to customer. This included understanding what was ”core” to their business and what was ”ancillary, but still profit-worthy”. The whole thrust of the BPM side of things was just to understand what they did and how they did it. We used a process management tool to do this, but at no point where we considering understanding how we could automate this or anything similar to that. It was purely a documentation effort.

My last job, similarly, was with a large aerospace manufacturer who were looking to document their HR processes. They had built up over a period of about 50 years by acquisition and this had resulted in over 250 separate companies being brought into the fold. Each of these companies had their own ways of on-boarding people, promoting people, recruiting people etc. the company wanted to document and define a single method of doing all this and rolling it out to the all the divisions. Again, nothing about automating anything, mostly about documenting.

Now I'm in discussions with a UK based transportation company who are looking to document all their existing internal processes to ensure that everything is being done correctly.

Could it be that my experience is just limited in that I tend to do a lot of the ”Let's document what we do” type of work, rather than any of the ”Let's take what we do and improve it”? Or is everyone in a similar situation? Obviously if you are a vendor selling the tools that do this you're going to have a different view of this. But for the consultants out there who are actually at the coal face doing the work, what is the nature of the work you are doing?

I think it's important to understand where the market is at the moment. There are many tools out there to help document and automate, but if the end customer is more concerned with just seeing what they've already got (or want if they don't like doing ’as-as’ documentation) rather than taking that documented state and doing something with it, then we have a different environment (and a different level of maturity) than if the market was interested in improving and automating their processes to gain efficiencies and ”synergies” (excuse the buzzword).

I'm also aware that in ”the market” there are going to be companies that are more advanced in their thinking, and, indeed, in their projects, than some of the companies I'm working with. They will have documented, improved, automated, and implemented their processes already, either as a stand-alone project or as part of a bigger project implementation. And thats all right. But I'm trying to gauge an overall level of maturity across the people who read this blog.

If we were to look at the CMM scale for maturity I'm seeing companies at level 1 or level 2 when it comes to their processes. I think that a lot of vendors are looking at their clients as being at a level 3 and above. What's the truth to this? (The above statements are based purely on anecdotal, not empirical data)

Look forward to hearing your comments and thoughts.

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The Business Value of BPM

It's the one question the C-suite will always want to have an answer for: "What is the business value of BPM?"

But what are they really asking? The answer is simple. They want to know - at the very lowest level - "If I spend $xm implementing this thing you call BPM - what will it do to my bottom line? Or, more precisely, how will it increase my profits/ value/ shareholder return?"

It's an exceedingly simple question. But one which does not have an easy answer.

In the big scheme of things I believe that there are very few organisations in the world who would not benefit from having their processes reviewed - whether this is a simple as documenting what they do so that they know where the problems are, or as complex as redesigning the whole operation to be more customer-centric (or 'Outside-In'). History has indicated that any organisation which that has been operating for more than a very short time will have process inefficiencies. These will have built up over a period of time as a result of laziness, people taking short-cuts or even changes which were made legitimately to deal with changing market conditions. The business has worked these changes into its day-to-day operations and everything is running admirably.

But it's very similar to a car. My car is a very reliable, locally built hatchback. It always starts on time, never lets me down and carries me and my things from A to B with no hassle, no complaints and no troubles. It just works. But over the few years that I have had it the tyres have started to wear down, the brake pads are wearing down and - more importantly - the engine is not as finely tuned as it was. I don't notice this, though, because I drive it everyday and the tiny changse in performance etc. are negligible on that basis.

But, being the good car owner that I am, I take the care in to be serviced. The service centre will take all the replaceable bits and replace them. It will put new tyres on them, check the pressures, clean the air filter and - most importantly - tune up the engine. When I get it back it will look like the old car I had (it may even be cleaner as they tend to give it a valet as well), it will feel like the old car I had but it will be completely different. It will run more efficiently, it will brake quicker, it will do more miles to the gallon.

The big question, though, is what is this worth to me as a driver? Will the reduced fuel consumption pay for the cost of the service? Probably not. Is the whole experience worth it? Absolutely! The car becomes a better machine. It does less harm to the environment. It is a safer vehicle all round.

But could I justify this to someone who had to pay for it? Of course I could - but probably not in monetary terms. The return on investment is probably not going to be good. However the other tangibles - and the intangibles - are going to be.

It's oftentimes the same with BPM projects. The benefit they give to your organisation in terms of improving efficiency and the ability to do the job better are more intangible than tangible.

Of course you can always fudge the figures. I worked for an organisation that justified the huge cost of a project by extrapolating the additional income that would be raised 20 years in the future by getting a product to market 2 years earlier in the patent cycle - blatantly unjustifiable numbers - and yet the project was approved on that basis. But I would encourage you not to fall into that trap. Look at your organisation and determine what you feel the benefit of the project is going to be rather than what you feel the monetary improvement of the project is going to be. With any well scoped BPM project your ROI is going to be 15% according to Gartner, so take this as a starting point and then add in all the intengibles that relate to it.

It makes sense.

.

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The State of BPM Part 3

This is the third and final of three articles discussing the state of BPM today. In the first article we discussed the current state of the BPM capability and covered items such as training, project failure and the definition (or lack thereof) of BPM. In the second article we looked at the state of the technology surrounding BPM. In particular we looked at the vendor segment and try to understand the impact of the consolidation occurring there.

The third and final part of this series will attempt to summarise the last two posts and also try and foresee where we are with the whole capability and what the future will be. Sure, it's a bit of crystal-ball gazing, but I think something like this is useful to try and work out where the whole market is going and what they key areas to focus on are.

If you want an official view on this then our friends at Gartner will be all to eager to give you their version of BPM based on extensive market research and discussions with both vendors and customers. My view is slightly different. I'm looking at this through a lens of social media. And by that I mean I'm reading the posts, tweets and similar updates that have occurred to try and make sense of where BPM is as a topic, what the hot buttons are within it, and where these are going to lead.

Primarily I will be talking about three things.

The evolution of BPM as a concept.
The introduction of Social Media to BPM.
The future for BPM technology.

The Evolution of BPM as a concept.
In part one of this series I talked about the fact that there is little common understanding of the definition of BPM. I mentioned the fact that this fuzzy definition is being further clouded by the introduction of alternate aspects of BPM such as ACM, Agile BPM, Adaptive BPM, etc (and some people are trying to differentiate what is what). All of these are totally legitimate aspects of the craft. My personal opinion is that they will continue to evolve a little further and - in a couple of years time - the market will fragment to such a point that there will be a marked distinction in the different types of "BPM".

One of the key areas of discussion at the moment is that of workflow documentation matched against unstructured processes. In today's world (as, indeed throughout history) the work that people do has fallen into two camps: The work that is repetitive - and can be documented, improved and automated - versus the unstructured work - which in reality is where the bulk of the innovation and associated work occurs. For example a call centre process can be analysed, documented and - to a certain degree - automated (think Interactive Voice Response and call routing systems), but the solution of a customer problem is something that depends on a lot of items, not all of which can be appropriately defined. The unstructured part of a call centre is that part where the true value of the process is found, but it is also the part where the BPM aspect is least sufficient. I can see as we progress that more companies will start to look at the unstructured part with a closer eye and want tools and methodologies to help them appropriately manage this. Any company which can provide that toolset and methodology will have a head start in this market.

I have written in the past about Outside-in processing. There are the usual proponents of this style who swear by it and say they have the case studies to back this up, pointing to companies such as Southwest Airlines, Apple and Best Buy as prime examples. But they then turn round in the following breath and tell us that a lot of these companies don't call it 'outside-in' but refer to it under some other name. I have another name for it too: Common sense. In my view Outside-in is just merely sense under another guise. Companies who have used common sense when defining their process have determined that the customer needs to be at the heart of everything they do, and have redesigned their methods to enable that to happen. The lack of a defined methodology for Outside-in coupled with the lack of firm case-studies identifying customers who have moved from a non common-sense approach to one with common sense but without a compelling underlying product (iPhone or iPad, anyone?) does make me nervous about fully endorsing this.

The Introduction of Social media to BPM
Is this a passing fad? Will social media have a dramatic effect on BPM? I think yes - in certain cases. If we are talking about passing status updates of process steps - or even reviewing and managing unstructured processes - then 'yes'. If we are talking about using Twitter, Facebook and similar tools to help define processes then I see a key problem: As with a lot of the current vendors, once you lock into a particular toolset it will inhibit your ability to be as flexible as you wish. With Facebook's current predilection for changing security settings on an almost weekly basis I can see this being an issue within the BPM sphere. After all you wouldn't want key process data for your organisation suddenly being passed to third party organisations, would you? As one of Facebook's privacy officers said recently "If you don't want your private information used by Facebook, don't put private information on Facebook". Such a move - like having a BPM vendor change their current functionality - will impact your ability to appropriately manage your process through social media. If you have gone down a route whereby you are heavily invested in social media and BPM, this could have a severe detrimental impact on your business.

The Future for Technology
Technology is - and always has been for me - the least important part of BPM. It is a tool in the same way as a hammer is a tool. If you are not trying to hammer in a nail but are wanting to paint a wall instead, then a hammer isn't very much use. This is the same with BPM tools. The plethora of tools available is starting to bewilder the market. The inclusion of a number of bits of functionality from various aspects of BPM is starting to make Vendor offerings into BPM 'Swiss-Army' Suites. i.e they can do all sorts of everything. But it also means they can't always do them all very well. Take simulation, for example. This is a key function of BPM and process design and yet there isn't a single vendor on the market that has produced a good, fully functioned process simulation tool. By that I mean a tool that will load a process and determine, for example, the optimum staffing level for each step according to various user-defined parameters. Sure, there are simulation suites in many tools - my personal favourite is the Proforma/Metastorm tool which is both visually well designed and produces good output- but it is still an add-on to a larger suite and one which cannot answer the type of question I have just raised.

In the previous post I talked about the potential consolidation of the market as companies start to buy out competitors and produce larger and larger BPM vendors. In some ways this is good for the end customer because it means that a given vendor will have more integrated offerings including increased functionality that may have been lacking prior to the merger. But the flip side of this is that it will reduce competition in the marketplace and automatically inflate prices (After all this is more or less what happened with the petroleum market and - as far as I can see - my gallon of petrol costs about the same price regardless of where I buy it from. Surely this is a market that is ripe for competition?). It will stifle the ability of the end customer to guide the direction in which the tools can emerge and leave the vendors in complete control. Do you want your company processes controlled by some vendor CEO outside your company?

However, what this will do then is open the field up for more and more niche vendors to provide their wares targeted at specific markets. Smaller vendors will be more open to listening to their customers and will provide software to plug gaps in the market that the larger vendors do not want to fill. They will also offer increased competition and a good price point.

Summary
This short series of posts has been aimed at helping you understand the current state of BPM as a concept, a toolset and a future direction. A lot of the opinions here are my own and do not always reflect the current market reality. For that I make no apology. I believe that the BPM market is due for a good shake-up soon. We must get to the stage where we fully understand what me mean by BPM, what we want to do to support and it where we want to take it in future. If we - as customers and consultants - don't take this step then we will be at the mercy of the vendors who will not always produce a future state that we agree with.

Hopefully you have found something of interest in this series of posts to help you understand BPM and where I, in particular, stand with it.

All information is Copyright (C) G Comerford
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The State of BPM Part 2

This is the second in a set of three articles discussing the state of BPM today. In the first article we discussed the current state of the BPM capability and covered items such as training, project failure and the defintion (or lack thereof) of BPM.

In part three we will look at the future of BPM

But part 2 will discuss the state of the technology surrounding BPM. In particular we will look at the vendor segment and try to understand the impact of the consolidation that is occurring there.

For many people - especially IT people - the mention of the words Business Process Management is immediately equated to 'A business process management Tool'. This tool can be something as simple as a Visio diagram showing a workflow, right up to a complex BPMS package which integrates with Enterprise Architecture, process analysis and the automation of such tools.

As a result I feel the capability of process management has become inextricably linked with the underlying supporting tools to do that management. Unfortunately I feel this is something which is burdening the capability far too much.

In this week's discussion we are going to look at the state of the BPM tools market and try to decipher what issues or problems are occurring as a result.

If we cast our minds back not too many years the BPM tool market basically (at least according to Gartner) consisted of a number of the larger software providers such as Aris, Mega/Pega and Provision. Alongside these there were niche manufacturers who focused on particular segments of the market or particular functionality (Metastorm comes to mind as an automation provider that had very little - if no - process development capability)

Then in recent years there has been a consolidation in the market. Some of the larger vendors bought each other out. Other larger vendors purchased (or were purchased by) a niche vendor in order to create today's market, which basically consists of a smaller number of larger software vendors with fairly comprehensive offering covering many facets of process management. Metastorm, for example, purchased Provision which gave them the tools they needed to map processes and provide simulations appropriately (and Metastorm were, themselves purchased recently by another vendor. OpenText).

IBM got into the BPM market in a big way by buying one of the leaders in the sector, and Microsoft have made major moves into this area too.

But has this actually provided anything which is better for the end users? One complaint I hear constantly - both in person and in blogs/tweets etc - is that the tools are very much 'IT focused' or 'Business Process focused' and not 'user focused'. The ability of an end user to actually get in and use a lot of these tools in a meaningful way appears to be quite limited. I do not have detailed experience of all the tools on the market but I can tell you that for the tools I have experience of this is a valid comment. Recently Craig Reid, The Process Ninja, posted an article discussing the Nimbus tool which - in his opinion - appears to be more focused on the end user and less on process professionals. But I would suggest that this is more of an exception than the rule. A lot of tools are now starting to focus on using the BPMN standard for documenting processes and this is something which - in itself - is not completely intuitive and requires training to bring a user up to speed. The tools I have used have defined a minimum 5 day training session to bring everyone up to speed on them, and these factors lead me to believe that we do not have 'user focused' tools on the market

But do we need user focused tools? Should BPM be something which is managed and maintained by the end users or should it be looked after by a dedicated group of process management professionals? That is a subject of debate (and one which I, naturally, have my own opinions on), but suffice it to say the dichotomy between having users who know little about managing processes, using tools that help them manage processes in the way they wish to rather than how the process professional might wish to, is an interesting one and one which will keep process professionals in work for many years.

So where is the process tool market going in the next couple of years?

Of course nobody knows for sure. But if the current trend of consolidation in the market continues, it could safely be assumed that the market will come to be dominated by a small number of large vendors who provide integrated process management tools that can take a business from complete process novices right the way through to Level 5 process gurus.

Or it might go the other way. There is a case to say that integration of this sort is just constricting businesses. Do we really want all of our company running at the mercy of a single software vendor? This is - effectively - what happened with ERP systems back in the 1990's. Vendors such as Oracle, JDE (before they merged) and SAP provided single systems that whole organisations could align with, but can anyone say for sure whether this provided any sort of appropriate ROI? I, personally, worked with one organisation that spent the best part of $500m implementing an ERP system across the globe. Will they ever, realistically, make that return? I don't know. But I do know that when the main system went down at their HQ they were without a global system for almost 1 month - with the appropriate loss of business, reputation and earnings that this entailed.

Whichever way the tool market goes for BPM, one thing is for sure, There will always be people who will try to buck the tend and provide something else for the market. This is - after all - where the niche vendors come from. They have recognised that a unified, bloated, system which does everything, cannot make sense for every sort of business. It's for this reason that companies have now developed Visio add-ons which allow more integrated process mapping from their Visio tool. This removes the need for customers to purchase an extra process mapping tool and allows users who are trained on Visio - which is pretty much everyone in certain organisations - to transit over to process management quite easily.

Colleagues of mine in the BPM field are talking about other facets of the capability which are more 'niche' in themselves. Terms such as ACM and Social BPM are gaining traction in the community and I would expect tools that support these to become more widespread in the near future.

However, on the flip side many organizations remain "process ignorant" when it comes to BPM because many still don't necessarily understand exactly how things are getting done in their own business. Some cited issues such as a lack of interchange standards between process modeling and execution tools, which can render system interoperability difficult. One reason that this issue exists is that organizations are using modeling-only tools that lack an execution component. Organizations are finding the breadth of available BPM systems confusing in that each vendor interface will dictate how business processes are to be designed and applied. Could it be that a single unified interchange system will prevail in the future which will allow any modelling tool to interchange data with any execution tool? The salesman at some of the larger vendors will tell you that this already exists, but seeing the number of forum questions that appear from developers who are building these execution systems, it is apparent that all is not totally well from this point of view.

But are there positives to be taken away from this? Of course there are. The consolidation of the market is not being totally driven by the need of vendors to make more money although this is, indeed, one of the main factors. There does appear to be a push from customers to get vendors to provide a complete package that will minimise the issues mentioned earlier regarding interoperabilty. Vendors are identifying the weaknesses in their own products and purchasing niche products to fill those gaps (Metastorm buying Provision was a prime example of that). All of this is good for the overall market.

Newer capabilities - such as Social BPM, Adaptive process management, MDD etc. will force the vendors to once again review their offerings and provide something to support he end user needs. This will - in turn - create a number of niche vendors who will dominate their own segment of the market. Over time the larger vendors will probably seek to consolidate by purchasing these niche vendors and incorporating their functionality into existing offerings. In the long term this will, in my opinion, produce bloated, unfriendly, unstable software (I’m looking at you, Microsoft) and the market will fragment once again.

In the final section of this series we will look at the state of things to come in BPM and try to extrapolate where this will take us and what the problems are going to be with that.

Part three will be released next week.

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The State of BPM - Part 1

This is the first of a three part series of posts on ‘The State of BPM’. Yes, I know that’s a pretty ambitious topic to do in three posts - especially without spending loads and loads of time talking about the minutiae of the topic - but I wanted to put a stake in the ground (or line in the sand) to try and summarise a number of the recent posts I’ve been reading which lead me to believe that not everything is rolling in clover in the BPM world.

The three parts of the topic will be as follows:

Part 1: This will discuss the state of the capability of BPM. y this I mean the practice of performing BPM, the pitfalls, the issues. This will not look, specifically at tools, but may cover methodologies.
Part 2: Will discuss the state of the technology surrounding BPM. In particular we will look at the vendor segment and try to understand the impact of the consolidation that is occurring there
Part 3: This will look at the state of things to come in BPM and try to extrapolate where this will take us and what the problems are going to be.

Part 1

The State of the BPM Capability

I would catgeorise this section as being related to three separate topics

a) The Definition of BPM

b) The State of Training.

c) High failure rate of projects.

Let's look at each of these:

The Definition of BPM

I think that I won’t get a lot of push-back if I make a simple statement about BPM “BPM is not very well defined”. The borders and boundaries are flexible when it comes to defining what BPM is and where it applies. This is compounded by the introduction and inclusion of a large number of acronyms into the sphere (DDM, APG etc) matched with new movements to bring other similar/related capabilities to the fore -ACM and Social BPM are two examples of this. A recent post I wrote talked about this phenomenon and the fact that various groups are trying to make more and more niche's within BPM. Each of this is - I think - merely serving to muddy the BPM waters.

As I said in that post

I know that folks such as Alexander Samarin (a key member of the Nexus at that time) have chosen to make three distinct definitions of BPM depending on whether BPM is being looked at as a discipline, a portfolio or a toolset:

Whilst I think I can align with this it does indicate that there are - at the very least - a number of possible interpretations of BPM. This, in itself, must be causing problems.

The State of Training on BPM
What constitutes BPM training? Is there a globally recognised standard for BPM training? I would maintain that there isn’t. Not that this is necessarily a problem, but unlike other officially recognised training standards (for things like project management or accountancy) there doesn’t appear to be a recognised body responsible for providing this training. This doesn’t mean that there isn’t BPM training (And I am not going to make any comments about the standard of training or the suitability of it in this post) but it does mean that there are a number of ‘BPM bodies’ who are profiting from providing their own brand of training to an unsuspecting user base.

But what about BPM? Or Six Sigma? Or Lean. Aren’t these BPM training? I would maintain that none of these constitutes BPM training, but each of them constitutes a sub-set of BPM training. I risk the wrath of the Black belts out there by saying that Six Sigma - a partially discredited methodology - is, in fact, nothing more than a basic version of quality improvement which has - in fact - done nothing to help companies that are using it improve their overall performance (although it does identify improvements at a micro level). Forbes stated that "of 58 large companies that have announced Six Sigma programs, 91 percent have trailed the S&P500 since" [1]

Does BPMN constitute the training we need? No. BPMN is, again, a subset of the training that is needed. It is a graphical representation for specifying business processes in a business process model. But it isn’t the only way of doing it. This is one of several notations that can be used for modeling and what it doesn’t do is teach the fundamentals of how to discover and map a process.

The High Failure Rate Of projects

If we bypass the different training issues, the methodology sprawl, the reduced scoping issues and the other points listed above we still get to the key issue that plagues BPM: Our friends at Gartner have stated that over 50% of process projects will fail (This is addressed in the Perfect Process Project) and this is due to a number of reasons but primarily it is lack of appropriate Executive Sponsorship and Change Management.

As a business leader, it is all very well to hear about BPM and what it can do for your company. But at the moment there simply isn’t a large number of case studies that can conclusively prove that BPM implementation will save your company fortunes, or indeed improve your efficiency. The case studies that do exist are mostly vendor produced and therefore are selected to identify the best case scenarios. Our friends at Gartner state that well scoped BPM projects approach a 15% internal ROI. I align with that theory, but I can’t get away from the fact that - like Six Sigma - the processes of providing ‘the scope’ will reduce the effectiveness of the overall project. Remember, as stated above, Jack Welsh and GE used Six Sigma to great effect back in the 1980’s/90’s, but companies that followed haven’t been as successful and there must be a reason for that

On the positive side, however, a recent study has found that organizations are showing a growing interest in BPM, but some are challenged by the lack of standards between process modeling and execution, amid other issues.

(http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/11/25/Outmoded_BPM_resources_an_issue_for_businesses_1.html) On top of that, many organizations remain "process ignorant" when it comes to BPM because many still don't necessarily understand exactly how things are getting done in their own business. Some cited issues such as a lack of interchange standards between process modeling and execution tools, which can render system interoperability difficult. One reason that this issue exists is that organizations are using modeling-only tools that lack an execution component. Organizations are finding the breadth of available BPM systems confusing in that each vendor interface will dictate how business processes are to be designed and applied. We’ll talk about this in the next post.

IT is constantly being challenged to do more with less. Outsourcing as a concept become very big recently - especially with regard to Business Processes. But now the cost of this is starting to bite and companies are pulling their BP management back in-house. It is supposedly saving them money (which does beg the question of why it was outsourced in the first place if money wasn't a driver). But at the other end of the scale the logic that processes can be automated without people involvement is coming under attack from respected individuals (http://www.intelligententerprise.com/channels/enterprise_applications/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=202101899).

Modelling and building processes has to now consider the role of the human as a PART of the process rather than just a monitor of the process or recipient of the output. This is another item which is causing pain and confusion for businesses wanting to implement 'BPM'. In the current context BPM is looked upon as a tool which will automate the processes. This brings in the concept of having some third party bring in best practice (http://process-cafe.blogspot.com/2008/09/what-in-practice.html) and tell you how to perform your business (whether this fit your model or not). Training on a particular tool is needed to understand how specific parts of a process are modeled (and the differences are quite spectacular (http://mainthing.ru/item/154/), your workforce then needs to understand physically how to create the process, model it, simulate it, implement it and manage it - all while trying to run the business and keep within budget and on time in the project. It's no wonder that a large proportion of Business Process programs don't work....

But are there positive signs? Of course there are. The consolidation in the BPM vendor market is showing that vendor's are looking at the ability to bundle different facets of BPM together to produce a package to support the business (more on that in part two). This is good for business, right? Right? But moe than that it is starting to prove that the capability of BPM is become more and more widespread across organisations. Whereas previously the work was known as 'Time & Motion' study this has now developed and business and IT leaders are starting to see that value that a well scoped and managed BPM project can bring to their organisation. This - in turn - is bringing more and more people into the BPM sphere and expanding the pool of knowledge and talent that is available (albeit without the globally accepted training)

Summary

To summarise: We have a capability in BPM that is not clearly defined, is suffering from an amount of 'bloat' with the introduction of topics such as ACM into the mix, has-ill defined globally accepted training and is suffering from a high rate of attrition when it comes to successful implementation. All this without considering the tools and packages that can be used and the impact of biased vendor involvement.

Is it any wonder BPM is in such a state?

In part two will discuss the state of the technology surrounding BPM. In particular we will look at the vendor segment and try to understand the impact of the consolidation that is occurring there. Part two will be released next week.

1 - Morris, Betsy (2006-07-11). "Tearing up the Jack Welch playbook". Fortune

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The BPM Blacklist

I wanted to try and create a definitive list of the top 10 BPM bloggers for anyone interested in the niche.

This is my equivalent of "The Black List", which is a Hollywood list of the top unproduced screenplays every year.

To qualify for the BPM Blacklist a blogger has to meet the following criteria:

Blog regularly on the topic of BPM, BI or BPMN
Produce good quality, informative posts
Tweet, be tweeted or retweeted regularly.
Has to be someone I read and follow

Criteria 1 and 3 are along a continuum. If someone hasn't posted for a while but has been regularly tweeting good content then I can cut them some slack. Similarly if they blog a lot but don't tweet regularly.

Of the available bloggers who meet this criteria I have then selected my top ten. This may not equate to your top ten.

The first version of this was produced in August 2010 by me. There have been a number of changes since then, some of which have been influenced by comments on that post.

Added to the list

Elise Olding

Keith Swenson

Max Pucher

Removed from the list
Theo Priestley : No longer meets the criteria listed (1, 3)
Ashish Bagwhat : No longer meets the criteria listed (1)
BouncingThoughts: No longer meets the selection criteria (1)

Just because you are not on the list at the moment doesn't mean you won't be re-admitted at some later date (in fact I may extend the list to 20 people). Just keep trying to meet the criteria listed above and there is a good chance you'll get on there.

Here is the 2011 Spring BPM BlackList:

Bruce Silver: Bruce is the daddy of BPMN, has been in the business for years and knows BPMN like the back of his hand (he should do - he helped write it)
Jim Sinur: He's been with Global360 and Gartner and he is the industry analyst for the BPM sector. His writing is often formal and rigid, but that doesn't take away from the value of his contents.
Adam Deane: Witty, sometimes caustic, but always on the money. Posts quite regularly. Always worth a read, especially his weekly roundup of the best BPM Quotes.
Sandy Kemsley: One of three women on the list. She attends and presents a lot at BPM conferences around the world and always has some useful insight into the latest movements in the BPM market. Her blog is 'Column 2'
The Process Ninja: He's Australian based and blogs about real-life applications of process. I look forward to his posts.
Connie Moore: The Forrester analyst for BPM and the other woman on the list. Finger on the pulse, covers the industry and the general BPM environment.
Thomas Olbrich. A German who blogs in English and German and who wrote my favourite BPM blog entry ever.
Keith Swenson's blog is a must-read: he writes thoughtful and informative posts on BPM and ACM (adaptive case management) that often inspire long conversations in the comments, and manages to do so without pushing his own company's products.
Elise Olding : Blogs with Gartner (alongside Jim Sinur). Also active in the Twitter community.
Max Pucher. I find his opinions and attitudes very contrary to popular thought. But that doesn't mean he's wrong. A contrary opinion is always useful for provoking discussion.

I have also added each of these people to a Twitter list. If you wish to follow this list you can find it at my Twitter account.

The list itself is available from the side bar on my blog and can be accessed directly from this link.

All information is Copyright (C) G Comerford
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The great 'Outside-In' debate.

Adam Deane has started an interesting debate over at his blog on the subject of outside-in.

His comment - and one I tend to align with - is that outside-in is a nebulous concept and one which is very difficult to pin down in real life. He states that he has been unable to identify examples of where Outside-in has specifically benefited an organisation. The companies often noted as being OI exemplars (Best Buy, Apple, Southwest airlines) are also ones that benefit from having a good underlying product. Therefore is this a case where OI has given them the edge or where the edge has been there already and OI has piggy-backed into it?

My personal example - and one which I stated In the comments to Adam's post - is Ryanair. They are deemed to have successfully emulated good customer outcomes through OI, and yet they have the worst service of any airline I have ever flown. Craig, The Process Ninja, comments that customer outcomes and customer service are not the same thing, and maybe this is where my understanding falls down. But is it just the case then, that OI is merely any BPM practice which looks at the customer when creating processes?

Regardless of this I would recommend you head over to Adam's blog, have a read of the entry and decide for yourself whether OI is a genuine BPM discipline, or just a different way of looking at something that's already there. Make sure, too, to read The Process Ninja's rebuttal.

I'm really, really on the fence about OI. If I look at something like Six Sigma (or 8 Omega) I can see a strict methodology and something that I can put my hands on and say 'This is ....(fill in the blanks)". But if I try to do the same for Outside-In I can't. The Process Ninja himself states that "Whilst I agree that outside-in is a philosophy, it is more than that and I understand Adam's frustration in not being able to get a hold of "a methodology". In the deep recesses of my mind I can't help but think that OI is a generic term given to any company that happens to be doing well.

The other thing I can't seem to get over is that there doesn't seem to be any comment in the blog from anyone who is an OI guru. There are one or two comments from people who have done the training course, but nothing from the people who create and propagate this 'approach'. I would really like to get some impartial advice on this rather than comments which just tell me I'm wrong. The last thing we need is The Zealots coming into this with their "I'm right and you're wrong" approach.

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The $64m question about BPM.

I have a very simple thing for you to consider today. If you could reply with your thoughts in the comments (or alternatively tweet them to my Twitter account) I would appreciate it.

"What is the one thing you would do to increase BPM take-up in organisations?"

My suggestion: Take it out of IT and make it a business project.

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Why so few women in BPM?

I wrote recently about some of my favourite BPM bloggers. One of the comments I mentioned within there was the fact that only 2 females made the list.

It got me thinking: "Why is BPM a male dominated domain?"

In reality it shouldn't actually be so. There is nothing specifically masculine about BPM as a concept. In fact I've worked on projects with lots of females who were particularly well suited to the role and were able to grasp the concepts much easier than some of the males in the group (as with a lot of things....).

Throughout my years of blogging and following BPM I have only really come across two well known female BPM bloggers and they are Sandy Kemsley and Connie Moore. Both of them have deep industry experience. Sandy is an independant and Connie is currently with Foresster Group. Add to that list Elise Olding who is a well respected Gartner analyst who has only recently moved into the blogging sphere, and you can see that the field is very small indeed.

Why is this?

Is it because there are - in fact - a huge number of talented female BPM practitioners who choose to work below the radar and not publicise themselves?

Or is it that BPM does not attract a large female following and is predominantly a male discipline?

It can't be the blogging itself because there are literally thousands and thousands of really good female bloggers out there. It can't be the BPM because - as I mentioned earlier - there are many females involved in the practice of BPM itself.

So what is it - any thoughts...?

Do you know of good, female BPM bloggers I should be following? Let me know in the comments.

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What tools should be in a BA's toolbox for BPM?

There is a great little discussion going on in the BPM Nexus forum at the moment.

The topic is 'What tools should be in a BA's toolbox for BPM?'

Instinctively (As a BA and process analyst myself) I replied "As I've said many times before both in forums and my blog 'If all you have is a hammer then every problem is a nail'. By this I mean that trying to solve your problems through the use of tools alone is inappropriate unless you have the right tools."

The discussion itself has actually moved on a little since then with the introduction of a clarifying statement which basically says that 'Most tools that are currently out on the market are too expensive for a consultant to use themselves (i.e. without being part of a large project)'. I'm not sure I agree with that completely, knowing, for example, that there are consultants out there who have complimentary licenses for some BPM tools as a result of work they have performed with vendors.

It is true to say, though, that as a single consultant with your own company it can sometimes be difficult to get any traction with some of the larger vendors (and there are examples in the forum which illustrate that).

It would be interesting to get the thoughts of some of the readers of this blog on two questions:

1) Are there any tools you absolutely must have as a BA for BPM?
2) Do these tools come easily to you or is it a struggle to get any sort of interest with the vendors?

Either reply in the comments section below or - if you are not already a member, go to the BPM Nexus, join up (It's free of charge) and add your comment to the forum

Here's hoping for a good discussion.

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More BPM Survey Results

A couple of weeks ago I asked for people to flick over to a friendly site and complete a 4 question BPM survey

The questions were -

1Which implementation strategy did your organization choose? Big bang, phased rollout, parallel adoption, combo of big bang and phased rollout, or other.
2. If you selected other, please describe the strategy you chose.
3. Was the implementation a success?
4. If you selected no, please explain why.

The results of that survey have recently been released.

The main question asked what sort of BPM project approach have you adopted: Big Bank, Phased roll-out combination big bang and phased or parallel adoption. 89% of respondents followed "big bang," "phased rollout" or a combination of the two strategies.

Eighty-eight percent of implementations - or 40 out of 45 - were successful. This is interesting when taken with the comments from Craig, The Process Ninja, who wrote recently of a 'successful' project that he thought was unsuccessful.

For more detail (and some graphics) about the results check out the google document provided by Houston Neal from http://www.softwareadvice.com/

All information is Copyright (C) G Comerford

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The BPM Nexus Survey results are out

'We could all do BPM better if we were less resistant to change'. This appears to be the overarching message coming from a recent survey of members of the BPM Nexus

The BPM Nexus recently ran a survey to understand the state of BPM in its member's organisations. The results have just been published.

The survey consisted of ten questions, some of which had predefined answers and some of which were free text. Here's a sample of the results:

When asked ‘If you had 1 wish related to BPM what would it be?’ 44% said ‘Better understanding of BPM by themselves and their organisation’

Associated with this we asked ‘What is the one thing that companies could do now, with their existing resources, to help them improve, but they don’t?”. The main answer was “Start doing it!’.

The overall impression gained from the results is that there is a general lack of knowledge and awareness of BPM within organisations - especially amongst senior management. This was coupled with 25% of respondents saying that there is no support or enabling for process education in their company.

On the positive side, though, if companies can approach the cultural issues associated with process work (which are often the cultural issues associated with change) a huge barrier for getting process work done in an organisation will be removed. Funding does not seem to be a major issue at the moment.

The results make fascinating reading. If you wish to get a copy of the results head on over to the BPM Nexus and sign up.

All information is Copyright (C) G Comerford

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Why SaaS pricing will kill BPM in the cloud

Since my post of a couple of weeks about cloud computing there have been a few more entries from within the BPM blogosphere which have complemented it quite nicely. But one which made me think a little more about the concept appeared recently

Connie Moore from Forrester mentioned that the entry price from one of the vendors for BPM in cloud is around 3K/month for a single process.

This has been blogged about over at the Curious Cranium blog by Ashish Bhagwat. He has an interesting take on the whole concept of pricing BPM in the cloud. One of the points he makes is that:

What is interesting here is that these costs then start to become a large factor in the lifecycle management of the process itself.

Let me explain

If you are dealing with processes internally in your organisation and you have a single owner for each process (As I recommend in my book ‘The Perfect Process Project’) then, logically, on a regular basis you will be reviewing the state of the process to try and understand what is happening to it and whether it is running optimally. At some point during the life cycle of the process you may wish to look at modifying it. This could be as a result of changing business needs, increased volumes, organisational needs or any one of a dozen other reasons. This is the point at which we need to understand the impact of the factors Ashish lists in the quote I have shown above. Now we are looking at a potentially serious cost impact of changing a process.

In earlier times when a BPM system (or even a BPMS system) was purchased and implemented in-house it was a simple matter to increasing volumes, or add a step or two to a process. The incremental cost of doing so was minor in a large organisation (this was over and above the cost of implementing the tool or system in the first place). However, now that the initial implementation costs has been decreased through BPM in the cloud, the running costs will come from changing the system during the life cycle of the process.

I contend that something such as this - if handled incorrectly - will cripple the ability of BPM in the cloud to proliferate appropriately.

But this is only if BPM in the cloud is offered in a SaaS model. If we refer back to my post from a few weeks ago I mention that this can all be done cheaper merely by building the components oneself, rather than taking this from a third party SaaS BPM provider. Free software, cheap cloud provision and the use of free social media software could revolutionise the way BPM is placed in an organisation - and all at a fraction of the cost of current solutions.

This cheap alternative should be one of the fundamental reasons why a SaaS bpm in the cloud offering should fail - although in reality we know that the costs of a BPM in the cloud offering will be covered by individual departments in daily operating expenses, whereas the cost of a project to implement BPM is scrutinised as a capital cost and isolated from the daily expenses. This serves to cause the project to be seen with a higher public profile whereas the expenses to be hidden amongst a myriad of other costs produced by a department. (Would you scrutinise a project costing $100,000 a month, more than a global below-the-line operating expense increase of $10,000 a month per department across ten departments? A company I worked at previously certainly would).

Summary

Costing models for BPM in the cloud will need to be carefully scrutinised to ensure that they will not inhibit the future development of the processes themselves. As such the owners will need to understand how the costing is done and what will be the impact of making a change. This will then need to be made transparent and matched against the cost of implementing such a system as an in-house cloud system rather than a purchased SaaS operation

All information is Copyright (C) G Comerford

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BPM: The truly useful capability you MUST have?

As we start the new year I wanted to pose a question that will hopefully make you think a little about the topic I want to discuss today: Why should your company be looking at BPM? What is the benefit?

Well, let’s look at a few statistics to see if there is a financial/economic/ business driver for doing this.
'A recent research report from AIIM,“Business Process Management - are we making the most of content-driven processes?” reported that 72% of organizations using BPM received a 100% payback in their BPM investment within 2 years, with 50% of those surveyed receiving a full payback within 18 months'.¹

[Click to read more..]

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The BPM Blacklist

The great 'Outside-In' debate.

The $64m question about BPM.

Why so few women in BPM?

What tools should be in a BA's toolbox for BPM?

More BPM Survey Results

The BPM Nexus Survey results are out

Why SaaS pricing will kill BPM in the cloud

BPM: The truly useful capability you MUST have?

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