HOME BUILDER
JAMES HEIN
Today's buzzword is "BPM". According to recent industry analyst reports, business process management (BPM) has become one of the most important enterprise software market segments.
Those companies offering BPM software would of course immediately agree with this assessment. You can see this trend with the number of rebranded products that now support BPM. This sounds a lot like the previous CRM rage where suddenly every product had some kind of CRM component.
So what is BPM? It starts with processes. These represent a collection of operations performed by people, and software systems, that contain both the information used in the process and the associated business rules. When a process is implemented, a business rule is applied that achieves some kind of business objective. In other words it is what is done to make the business work.
The BRM process formally defines these processes in detail. The result is a series of documents that describes the external and internal processes, who is involved, who has to work together to get it done and the associated business policies and procedures that influence the process. A good BPM document will also include the "how things are really done" rules.
According to one vendor, "a comprehensive business process management platform provides an organisation with the ability to collectively define their business processes, deploy those processes as applications accessible via the Web that are integrated with their existing software systems, and then provide managers with the visibility to monitor, analyse, control and improve the execution of those processes in real time." Or put another way, some software tools to help you put this stuff together.
The reason BPM has become popular is because it covers those operational processes found in many organisations that, cut across departmental and system boundaries, are based on a lot of manual processing, and often don't work that well because of the resulting fragmentation and inconsistency. The aim is to improve these processes and be more productive.
BPM is also good for the pundits because there are so many buzzwords. Dilbert-like bosses love it because it is fuzzy in nature, and they get to use the buzzwords. BPM aficionados get to tell you that you are using words like mapping and modelling incorrectly. Users don't like it because it typically forces change and because their directors rarely understand what it really is about.
BPM annoys IT departments because they have to get involved in making sure that business basics are followed and that people are organised properly to use the tools. They also get blamed if the "wrong" tools are purchased.
If you get past the fancy tools, the new buzzwords, the marketing and the advertising hype, BPM is just a repackaging of what you have read in these columns over the years. There are no new ideas, just document your inputs, processes and outputs.
If you are building a new system or systems you will have to do all of this anyway. Start with a nice high level diagram of processes and data elements and then gradually refine these and hook them together.
It eventually comes down to the flow of work, the tools being used to make this happen, and the data interfaces at each stage to keep track of the details and allow for the reporting of progress and results. There are no mysteries here. BPM is just a new word for what most business and systems analysts have been doing for decades. It has been dressed up in new clothes and new tools are available.
Remember ISO certification? This was another documentation process that rarely helped actually improve processes. In reality, most BPM-like documentation ends up in cupboards and filing cabinets, rarely looked at by anyone except for managers wanting to point out how successful their BPM process was.
Email: jclhein@gmail.com.
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