What's Old is New

After two+ days at the Gartner conference, I have heard the same question from several people - "Haven’t we been here before?" It is a reasonable question.

BPM as a framework for process management has grown out of the quality programs and business process reengineering (BPR). In the 90s at Ernst & Young, we called it performance improvement and had a methodology called Gap Analysis. We documented the current state, whiteboarded out the future state, identified the gap, and put together an Initiative Portfolio Development (IPD) plan for picking off the low hanging fruit. Companies now are looking at Six Sigma and Lean, but all the rest are steps that continue to be advocated.

All of the clients that have presented and many of the Gartner analysts have reinforced the point of organizational change management (OCM). Technology is not easy and driving and sustaining adoption has never been. It seems (although I don’t believe it) that people forget that selecting the right team, communicating the program, building a "burning platform" for change, and incenting users is critical. The problem is it is hard work and most of us either aren’t trained or not given the time to focus on this.

We hear lots of talk about BAM (Business Activity Monitoring). Again, we have been talking about Business Intelligence (BI), DSS (Decision Support Systems), and EIS (Executive Information Systems) for years. The Balanced Scorecard framework looked at metrics in four quadrants (financial, customer, process, and learning) and focused on the correlation of these metrics (i.e., which drove which other metric).

BUT...Before you give up, there are several things that are different which is why I think BPM has legs and will continue to grow rapidly:

1. The pace of change today is too great driving the need for a flexible application environment which allows for ongoing and real-time change. BPM offers this.
2. There is a huge shortage of solution architects (i.e., people that understand technology and business) and a gap in young people going into technology jobs which means that application control has to go back to the business people. BPM offers this.
3. Although everyone has some type of BI, most companies don’t have process oriented metrics that show up in real-time and are tied into their decision process. BPM offers this.
4. Using BPM as an abstraction layer that links application and human-centric workflows along an end-to-end business process didn’t exist in the recent past. BPM does this.
5. BPM projects are smaller dollars, quick to implement, and there are lots of proven success stories. ERP can’t say the same.

This doesn’t mean it will be easy. BPM has the ability to transform your company. Some of the case studies from these sessions show dramatic changes. (You can see some of my notes in my other blog at www.bpmbusiness.typepad.com.) And, changing from functional silos to process owners is new, represent a change in "power", and requires new skill sets. The technologies offer lots of amazing functionality...but that has never been the issue.