International Process and Performance Institute

I just returned from Las Vegas where I delivered the closing keynote at the IQPC 9^th Annual BPM Summit.  It was a great event and the participants said they were taking away a lot of good stuff.  One of the topics discussed, and with no small interest, was Best Practice Processes and Process Standardization.  One of the speakers on this topic, Linda Washington, Assistant Secretary for Administration at USDOT, showed us what DOT has done in this area and it is extremely impressive.  As a taxpayer I was relieved to know at least DOT has their act together; I’m hoping other departments of the US government are paying attention.

In public sector processes in general and in the case of a few private sector processes, best practices and process standardization makes sense, but not always.  When doesn’t it?  When customer expectations of a process are different and when market differentiation matters. This happens occasionally in government and frequently in business.

Let’s look at an example, like the process of bringing employees into an organization; also known as the hiring process.  If you are Wal-Mart, the people you bring in are not a significant differentiator for you in the market.  I’m not saying they don’t make a difference, because they do.  What I’m saying is they just don’t add significantly to the value proposition in attracting and keeping customers.  Wal-Mart’s value proposition is predominantly price driven. 

In contrast, let’s look at the consultancy market with the likes of a PWC (PriceWaterhouseCoopers), KPMG or the like.  Their consultants are actually a key ingredient in the product they offer: expertise and knowledge work.  The people they hire are part of the “secret sauce” if you will.  Therefore, this process has the potential to be a market differentiator for them.  The process Wal-Mart uses is not going to help these companies differentiate themselves.  In fact, for them it would be lunacy to use a best practice process for this situation. 

The only appropriate place to use best practice processes in the private sector are with internal processes (ones that don’t touch the customer) which are not market differentiators or provide inputs to customer facing processes.  Frankly, in most businesses, this is not very many processes.