Gluing the business to IT

The CIO.com Web site defines business process management (BPM) as "a systematic approach to improving an organisation's business processes. BPM activities seek to make business processes more effective, more efficient and more capable of adapting to an ever-changing environment".

What can be gleaned from the wording of the above is that BPM, contrary to many industry opinions, is a philosophy or methodology and not a point solution. Simply put, BPM allows an organisation to align its resources around business activities and/or processes, and not in traditional departmental fashion. So, for example, an airline would map its ticket booking process from the first customer contact to the point of payment and ticket issue. Once that is mapped, it can ensure adequate resources are assigned to each step of the process. As such, implementing BPM involves the entire organisation and requires a fundamental shift in company thinking.

Says Wessel Visser, managing consultant of EOH Consulting: "The technology that BPM is based on is already here. There are quite a few vendors out there, and the inherent methodologies and required technology is available. BPM is a technology solution, but it is more about changing the thinking and the paradigms within an organisation. Many people think they can simply push the software into the company and all process problems will be solved. But BPM, more than other software, touches the human aspect because at its heart is the interaction between people and systems. BPM is about changing people's hearts and minds, the way they do business and how they complete their activities," he says.

"The hype around BPM a few years back was about BPM tools, architectures and so on," says Susan Tredoux, MD of local BPM solution provider Quton. "That hype is over. Consolidation has taken place in the vendor arena, organisations understand BPM and are very serious about it.

"BPM is about creating a process-managed organisation. Once that has been achieved, companies look at solutions rather than tools or architectures. The solutions approach opens up quite a number of opportunities. Traditionally, there has been a lot of friction between IT and business owners. IT provided tools, where business owners wanted solutions to problems. A process-managed organisation and a solutions approach almost weaves together expectations in terms of what IT supplies and what the business needs," she adds.

It also ties users directly into the processes and systems that underlie the organisation.

BPM is about changing people's hearts and minds, the way they do business and how they complete their activities.

Wessel Visser, managing consultant, EOH Consulting

Those in the know recommend that any BPM implementation starts with a business process re-engineering exercise.

"A BPM implementation focuses the mind on totally revisiting your business," says Ability Solutions sales and marketing head John Olsson.

"The nice thing is that, when you do an implementation, you can go and clearly identify bottlenecks in your business processes." And, by implication, fix them.

Once business processes are mapped, documented and formalised, activities can be tracked and audit trails followed. This is critical for companies looking to meet compliance regulations. Says Tredoux: "Compliance and governance are a fundamental requirement that a process-driven solution should address. Compliance or governance is not an add-on; it is a fundamental requirement of a BPM solution."

Rachel Stevenson, senior consultant at business performance improvement firm Ovations, says BPM makes compliance and governance easier to maintain and monitor due to there being a single, standardised process in place. BPM systems also allow for notification and escalation if processes are not adhered to.

BPM solutions must enable organisations to implement disruptive business models.

Susan Tredoux, MD, Quton

Says EOH's Visser: "BPM assists with process control compliance, which is starting to become quite a buzzword with Sarbanes-Oxley et al. If you get the correct BPM software solution, you can 'templatise' these [business processes]. So, instead of reinventing the wheel each time, a process can easily become compliant because it [has a template] and is documented.

"BPM gives management visibility into how a process performs. This also links into BI. Traditional BI reviews the after-effect of a transaction on key performance indicators (KPIs). Management gets daily status reports for yesterday, for example. Business process intelligence - the second phase of BPM - looks at how to focus management attention on processes that impact KPIs. The solution almost gives you advanced warning of incidents that impact a KPI, which you would only see the next day on a BI report. This is the real value of BPM," he says.

More than compliance and governance, BPM offers companies the ability to constantly tweak business processes as needed, therein keeping pace with changing circumstances.

Says Visser: "Organisational success factors into the future will not be standard processes that a business has, but rather its unique processes and the ability to adapt and change those as customer and market demand changes."

SAP highlighted this trend during a recent conference held in Vienna. During his keynote, SAP AG chairman and CEO Henning Kagermann outlined the need for companies to change and adapt to mergers and acquisitions, customer demands, competitive factors and such in no time at all. SAP's business process platform has been developed specifically to meet those demands and it is one of the vendors bringing out the 'templatised' business processes that Visser refers to.

Tredoux concurs: "BPM solutions must enable organisations to implement disruptive business models. In other words, a completely different way of doing business. Everyone is not going to be in the same mould for very long. People are implementing disruptive models already. In a certain sense, the Internet brought that to us."

The key to the success of any organisation, however, is its people, and, as Visser mentions, BPM necessitates a fundamental mind shift.

Says Ovations' Stevenson: "We believe there will be a big push towards single enterprises without silos. Process and process thinking will extend right across organisations rather than only be found in certain areas. However, for process thinking to work effectively, it will need buy-in from everyone within an organisation. People will have to realise that their job function has broadened and status-conscious employees will have to realise that data and information is much more evenly spread throughout."

Structuring organisations around processes, not the traditional functions, will have widespread implications, once the mind shift has happened.

Notes Stevenson: "Organisational strategy and the concentration of process hubs in certain regions in the country or around the world will allow for back-office type functions to be performed in any location."

This, for example, will allow companies to hire cheaper skills to perform said back-office functions, irrespective of where they are, and virtually link them to the rest of the process they are working on.

"Several roles will be able to be consolidated in a single role (obviously with the correct up-skilling of people)," she adds. "So, where there were eight people who were required to fulfil numerous tasks within an activity, the eight people will still be required, but their focus will be across the whole task as individuals."

While the benefits of aligning business and IT, breaking down organisational silos and allowing the business to operate as a smooth, streamlined machine are self-evident, most companies are operating on constantly shifting ground.

In order to implement systems, meet compliance regulations, perform basic audits to establish what information lies where, why and who can access it and so on, IT almost needs the world to stop for a year so that it can go back to bedrock and roll out from scratch.

Where to start? Where to draw the line in the sand? Or maybe just start now rather than later? Those organisations that can draw that line in the sand, get systems up to scratch and working for them, as opposed to the company working for the system, will be the ones that succeed in future on the back of technologies like BPM.