Speak Softly and Carry a Big BPM Suite
Businesses run on large, complex networks of underlying processes. Settling billing disputes, introducing new products, procuring goods and services, issuing loans, managing inventory—the quality and efficiency of these processes drive sustainable competitive advantages for the business. However, regardless of how efficient your processes are today, markets evolve, competitive landscapes change and regulatory pressures fluctuate. To stay ahead, companies need to become more process-centric and reduce their reliance on rigid outdated procedures. They require tighter controls over their processes and better internal alignment in order to navigate these uncertain and volatile waters.
The business process management (BPM) market is exploding thanks to its ability to address these problems. BPM suites provide organizations with greater management and flexibility of their processes while increasing visibility into where those processes are breaking down. By providing process automation in a way that transcends the typical hierarchical and political barriers in the organization, BPM suites are driving efficiencies across every major vertical.
BPM by Any Other Name...
Business process management has had a somewhat schizophrenic past. First, it had to differentiate itself from workflow. It did this by providing a standalone platform for defining processes involving multiple applications rather than merely stuffing flowchart capabilities into a single application like ERP or CRM. Second, BPM had to convince the market that its human-centric features for collaboration and task management made it more than simply repackaged enterprise application integration (EAI) tools, which primarily focus on message-based system-to-system integration. Third, it had to earn the right to call itself "BPM" by fighting a grueling acronym war with the likes of business performance management and business process modeling. But regardless of its history, BPM sales have grown rapidly thanks to its promise as both a management discipline and an underlying technology platform.
Aside from well-acknowledged benefits like streamlining hand-offs and aligning incentives, BPM also helps bridge the business-IT divide. Standards such as business process modeling notation (BPMN), for instance, provide a common language for business and IT to model and understand business processes. Using BPMN, business analysts don't simply throw requirements over the wall for IT to translate into automated solutions—they define abstract process flows by linking together tasks and activities. Unlike a static diagram like Visio, these same models govern the execution of the process. Moreover, when appropriate, business analysts can even retain the ability to modify and optimize these processes directly. This fundamentally changes the way the business is managed and how operational processes are executed.
For many companies, competition has never been more fierce. Therefore, using BPM to put business users back in the driver's seat of corporate strategy is a good thing. Although the industry may have argued over what to call it, the benefits of BPM have been busy speaking for themselves.
Corporate Agility; Adapting Processes
Many BPM initiatives start by focusing on modeling and executing "as-is" business processes. In many cases, this is a good start. An as-is process is often understood reasonably well by the organization, and these processes can always benefit from smoother hand-offs, a full audit trail and the efficiency of real-time management. However, if you are only using BPM to automate as-is processes, you are missing out on one of the core promises of BPM—corporate agility. Corporate agility is the ability to sense change and adapt old processes to these new circumstances. It brings with it the vision of incrementally improving "as-is" processes until they become optimized "to-be" processes. Continuous improvement is the name of the game.
Agility requires sensing market change. To sense change, organizations must analyze more information faster. On the end-user side, BPM helps by providing personalized dashboards with real-time analytics from the processes it manages. People gain access to the right information at the right time so they can make efficient decisions. What claims are open? What payments have processing exceptions? How many loans were fulfilled this month? Where are my bottlenecks? The BPM engine provides answers to these questions over the Web in real time and pushes them out to the right people.
However, sensing change requires more than pie charts and scatter plots. BPM therefore couples these analytics with other contextual information, including collaboration tools such as chat and message boards, as well as document repositories and knowledgebases. These tools provide greater context to particular processes, helping knowledge workers and managers sense change.
In addition to recognizing change, agility also requires organizations to adapt their processes to those changes. With traditional packaged (and custom) client-server software, this has been a nightmare. One problem is that these tools hardwire process logic into the application code itself. Some organizations give up on agility and impose these rigid processes on the corporation. For others, retaining agility means keeping large teams of "application maintenance" personnel in IT ready to hack into their commercial tools and modify them as needed (once they finish the other hundred things on their "to do" list, that is).
BPM technology, on the other hand, has put the power of process improvement in the hands of the business by giving authorized users control to make tactical improvements to the business processes in which they participate. BPM allows users to add new approval steps in-flight, modify the rules and policies governing a process, or simply pause or cancel work that is no longer relevant. No calls to IT; no expensive application maintenance personnel. In this way, BPM encourages a process-centric culture in which people participating in processes are empowered to continually improve them. This helps organizations to adapt their processes rather than hanging their old ones out to dry.
BPM & SOA: Two Peas in a Pod
By helping break the basic composition of software applications into subprocesses and tasks, BPM abstracts out the process flow into models that are easier for people to understand and build. But if BPM is about gluing activities together into a process, aren't process designers limited by what building blocks are available? Sure. This is why (good) BPM tools ship with a large library of pre-built services and components for doing everything from uploading documents to updating legacy systems. Plug-ins and starter kits in integrated development environments (IDEs) can also be used to further extend these lists of components. In this way, business analysts build working process applications based on components supplied by IT.