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BPM as a force for good

Paul Furber
By Paul Furber, ITWeb contributor
Johannesburg, 16 May 2011

Is business process management (BPM) for real? Or is it yet another unnecessary layer of complexity that the CIO and the executive committee have to manage? Added to which, no company can simply halt time while it implements BPM, and turn it back on when it's ready.

Alvin Paules, chief technology architect at SAP SA, says there are real benefits to BPM but the local uptake has been slow.

"Yes, there are real benefits from BPM. We've had some really good case studies from Europe specifically. Locally we're still a bit slow on the uptake in deployment. It could be because we lag in solid enterprise architecture and the other things that enable the package to be brought to market. But internationally, there are good cases studies: Coca-Cola, Siemens, Sony Ericsson.

“The bottom line is that if your SOA strategy is in place, your non-changing processes configured in your back end, then your BPM can enable you to put together agile processes. But BPM on its own doesn't do that. You need the underlying components. And business rules are very important as well."

Ryan Purvis, senior solutions consultant at Global360, says another problem with the BPM lag locally is one of attitude.

How do you expose your processes to social media?

Jacques Wessels, FlowCentric

"I think the biggest problem is that a lot of the customers we deal with don't actually understand BPM," he says. "They still have a workflow mentality. I think for true BPM to have any value, the business needs to understand and adopt approaches that are independent of technology. They need to follow methodologies like Six Sigma or Lean, otherwise you put technologies in and they fail faster. And those companies with methodologies have at least tested scenarios. BPM isn't a business or an IT thing - it has to be both. You have to try to keep the balance going."

Craig Leppan, principal consultant, Ovations, agrees with the comparison of BPM to Six Sigma.

"They are at the same management philosophical level. There's no magic quadrant for BPM because it has management tools and suites. From our point of view, we see a lot of value from enterprise content management (ECM) programmes and less cost of handling paper. ECM is a foundation of BPM. Our financial customers are already getting a lot of benefit from handling less paper."

Jacques Wessels, CEO of FlowCentric, says there has been an attitude shift.

"For the past 11 years, we've had huge exposure to the growth in understanding in the BPM market. And I would say that over the past three to four years, there's been a much better understanding that BPM is a management discipline and not about technology - technology is just an enabler.

“One of the main topics I heard at an IT summit recently was that CIOs increasingly need to deliver value to the bottom line. I see that clients are starting to put on their process cap long before they start thinking about technology."

Pieter Neveling, senior SOA architect, Software AG, says all too often there's a gap between thinking you've put in BPM and actually doing so.

"Software AG recently acquired a company that plays more in the business space: identifying strategy and process," he says. "And we've found out as a result that most companies are in design and file mode.

“Most companies out there think they do BPM but they don't. They take the Six Sigma and Lean approaches, model them and then think they've implemented the process. The model gets printed out, put into a cabinet and filed and forgotten about. When something happens, they go and take it out.

“Two things to note at this stage: the process that has been modelled and the process that is actually running are two different things; normally there isn't even a 30% match. The reason for that is they couldn't take what was modelled and implement it with real-time metrics coming back to identify whether they're still on track. Secondly, the reason it failed is because it's not extensible or enterprise-wide. It's not really crossing the chasm between business and IT."

BPM in practice

Rudie Raath, country manager of TS consulting at HP SA, says that for HP itself, which has over 300 000 employees, BPM is very much part of the day-to-day business.

"When we acquire companies, we can get them integrated and productive quickly thanks to our internal BPM system. Yes, it's sometimes painful but those pains help the company to move forward. We've found out that giving new employees a document won't help them understand processes. So we've moved to richer media.

“Now, new employees watch videos that explain policies and standards. Things like expense claims: how do you submit an expense claim and still stick to the process? We've found that it works to keep things as easy as possible (with the necessary checks and balances in place) and make sure the understanding is in place."

Raath says it's a two-way street.

"What I've found is that BPM is something you need to embrace, but also to contribute to. You can't always just accept what's been given but use your standard as a guideline. You can design processes but also need to get feedback from the people actually using the process. You need to ask how BPM is being adopted through the organisation and benefiting the bottom line."

Peterjohn Bishop, projects consulting manager, Softline VIP, also has an integrated system.

A lot of customers don't understand BPM.

Ryan Purvis, Global360

"We implement projects for HR and payroll. For example, a new employee will be hired, and the HR system will connect to the payroll system and they get an alert that they can order lunch. All of those processes are built into a central database so that when someone is employed, the entire system integrates them."

SAP's Paules says the user experience of BPM is essential.

"There are a couple of things to consider. The first is the way BPM has been applied in that it's a tool that gives you the agility to re-use other components or the knowledge you have in the enterprise. The beauty of it is you're not restricted to a specific UI. I can use anything as a UI that's appropriate. It could be a form that needs to be completed, or a portal page or URL that needs to be shown.

“At any time, the user should be able to go into the process and see the whole thing, where I am now and where I need to go next. Added to that I have all the metrics that tell me how it's going, where the bottlenecks are and what the status is. The advantage of BPM is that you can standardise the process, and where there's commonality, pull those out and put them into a rules engine."

Ovations' Leppan notes that in most companies, only 10% can be automated.

"So where are the gaps? The thrust of business is to get value from automation. If you're processing claims, then chugging through processes quickly is great. But if you're doing something wider, then you need to look more at your entire processes. I agree the products companies have a need to be included so that you can deal with process efficiencies in a standard manner."

HP's Raath agrees that the point of BPM is to understand the current way of executing processes.

"But when you apply BPM, then how does it change the process? And how will the adoption happen? Maybe you can get to the same end result by doing some things a little differently instead of a huge change. It's understanding what the impact of process change is."

FlowCentric's Wessels points out that both systems and vendors have evolved enormously.

"What is the real benefit? The answer I give to my clients is more efficiency and better implementation of the business rules. But there's another one: a better understanding of how processes actually work.

“We've seen over the past 10 years that once you start looking at BPM, then companies really start to look at how they work and very often they don't know. Sometimes we were the first people to sit our customers down and make them understand how their business really works. That's a real benefit they get even before they start putting in BPM."

Social interaction

Social networking phenomena such as Facebook and Twitter are putting pressure on enterprise approaches to security, technology deployment and hiring practices. BPM is next up, says Wessels.

"How do you expose your processes to new things like social media? We don't understand how to do that yet but we need to. But BPM as a whole has to deliver competitive advantage. If it doesn't, it's a waste of time."

Shiona Blundell, divisional manager of Bytes Document Solutions, says she's found social networking has had a positive effect on BPM.

"You're far more inclined to see people collaborating when social media is enabled. A lot of things in BPM are about agility. When you have a big clunky backend, then it isn't that agile and there is latency. The other thing is the biggest single failure of BPM is lack of end user adoption."

The thrust of business is to get value from automation.

Craig Leppan, Ovations

Raath agrees. "The most common point of failure in a BPM system is the person feeding into it. We sometimes miss how much of a factor education is. How do you share information on how a project was delivered in America to a consultant working in Africa?"

Leppan says case management goes a long way towards managing the interaction with social networking.

"Why do people use e-mail and social networking? Not because they're filling out a claim that's very

structured but because they are people who need to interact with other people. Case management is the art of using e-mail and social media to capture ways of solving your problem."

Neveling says there is an ultimate yardstick of BPM's success.

"BPM is an understanding of how we translate business requirements and the strategy of the business into operations. The end result is a dashboard that people can see that is relevant to them. If it's relevant and shows what's happening, then we're at true BPM."

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