International Process and Performance Institute

NOTE - THIS IS A 3-PART SERIES

PART 1

There are many software, consultancy and method providers in the field of process management. They all share one thing in common. They claim to have uncovered the solution to process management. Yet they are all missing the bigger picture.

That includes the work I have been involved in – though I reserve for myself the recognition that I have at least indirectly referenced this fact on more occasions than anyone else I know. That said the gap still exists in how we can take process management to a new level of success. This paper addresses this issue and provides a roadmap to the future of what BPM will be.

Background

BPM came into vogue (mainstream awareness) in the early part of this decade. While I do not know the amount of venture capital infused into this market it is quite large – at least several hundred million dollars. There is a reason for this. What many venture investors saw in BPM was a promise to address issues that they know exist in most organizations.

While those issues can be paraphrased in many ways at the heart of the matter is the challenge of organizing the disorganized, eliminating much of the waste in how organizations do their work, simplifying how software systems support the business, and the creation of an infrastructure that is far more flexible than in the past.

Let’s turn that around a bit.

BPM is perceived as a way to help organizations increase their efficiency, quality and responsiveness to market demands. If you are a business manager there is a very good probability that you know the frustration of wanting – even needing – to adapt practices to meet new market demands and deal with operational weaknesses. If you have been around the block a time or two you know all to well how often the organization seems to be purposefully opposed to these adaptations.

Of course the organization is not opposed to your goals. But it is a somewhat loosely tied grouping of perspectives. I’m sure you remember the story of the blind wise men that went to see an elephant. They observed a portion of the elephant and drew their conclusions on the totality from that perspective (side, tusk, trunk, knee, ear, tail).

Understand that this is what happens in our organizations as well. Our context gives us an observational perspective on the organization that is not holistic. People are heavily influenced by their context – far more than any of us realize even if we have studied this trait of human cognitive behavior.

When BPM started to gain mindshare many of us (including yours truly) got very excited (include the venture capitalists on this) for we “saw” what we believed to be an emerging market of software products that would solve this problem once and for all. We were wrong.

How could so many smart people have missed the boat? I have made a statement around the challenge of innovation that sums it all up:

The most difficult thing to observe is the most obvious.

What I allude to here is that cognitive awareness is triggered by the abnormal not the normal. We (people) operate on autopilot most of the time, we have to or we would be unable to do anything. Only when something stands out as different does our cognitive awareness begin to rev up.

With BPM, we missed the fact that we were each assessing the potential of BPM software from our own context (or perspective) and that the basic concept of BPM and BPM software does nothing to address these differences.

So we each went away with our own interpretation of BPM. All we have to do is acknowledge the now obvious fact that multiple interpretations of BPM do exist and it becomes obvious why BPM software did not fulfill the promise we thought it had.

That’s not to say that BPM software, consultancy or methods have not been helpful because in many cases they have. Yet there is a much bigger value proposition still hanging out there and that is what we really want to realize.

---to be continued---