BPM: Opportunity knocks?

Business process management (BPM) advocates can be forgiven for getting excited sometimes. BPM takes all of the lessons learned in business and technology improvement trends from the last 20 years and distils them into something that helps companies be more efficient, more customer-focused and more agile.

You must align your implementation to the maturity of the company.

Paul van der Merwe, consultant, RealIRM

There's plenty to like. Few managers really know what's happening at the heart of their businesses in a quantifiable way and BPM promises that can change. So why hasn't it taken over the world? There are a number of reasons, but the first is that only companies at a certain level of maturity can benefit.

Paul van der Merwe, consultant at RealIRM, says maturity is a big issue. "As a vendor, you must align your implementation to the maturity of the company. I think that's one of the reasons why BPM has such a bad name: people try to implement maturity level five in a company that's at maturity level one. There's no use automating a process if there are no repeatable processes in the company."

Bruce Nicholson, group CIO of the i5 Group, agrees that processes are at the heart of the problem. "Technology has only a little bit to do with it," he says. "We were asked by a big financial institution to automate some of the processes. But when one of the clerks receives an application form, he runs upstairs and across the building to give it to the courier to be sent. Half an hour later, he has to do the same thing again. Identifying that process is difficult. But the business has to identify processes first before automating them. You go into large enterprises and often see fundamental waste because processes haven't been properly identified."

Adding technology can often make things worse, according to Paul Hunter, senior manager at EOH Consulting. "Technology is an enabler and will make the underlying process more efficient. But if the process is inefficient, you have the perverse situation where it becomes even more so thanks to technology. When things go wrong, the system gets the blame when quite often it's that the groundwork wasn't done properly, or the change management and training weren't done properly."

Vickesh Dhookte, BPM IT specialist at IBM SA, believes “you can go with technology first in BPM as long as you have a framework that lets you change things quickly. You can also use simulation tools to model processes and test how they work. One of the IBM offerings is directly deployed interactive process design. From the model state you can have a deployed environment in seconds. The six-month engagement going into analysis before going with technology is, I believe, no longer the way forward. We have to use technology to get to that maturity."

Initial discussions are very important.

Eugene van Rensburg, regional director, K2

Eugene van Rensburg, regional director for K2, agrees that tools can help, but there does need to be upfront work that doesn't involve IT.

"Some of the visual tools we have today definitely help to shorten the software life cycle, but when you look at any organisation and its mindset - it needs to reduce headcount, for example - if you don't work at understanding what the maturity level is, what it's really trying to do and how you're going to plan out your BPM, then you're just throwing technology at it.

“You need to spend a bit of time understanding what it is the business wants to achieve. I agree that the technology doesn't have to come six months later, but the initial discussions are very important, especially about education and what it is they want to do. People think that by buying BPM they will cut down on spend, or that by buying BPM they will run their businesses better. But what does that mean? It means different things to different organisations."

Yaron Assabi, CEO of DSG, says the initial approach must be aimed high. "You have to get buy-in from the whole organisation. A project sponsor may think it's a good idea, but because BPM has such a huge impact, there needs to be a fine balance between people, process and technology. You have to constantly reinvent processes, constantly retrain and constantly redeploy. If there's no buy-in, then it won't work and it will drag out. We do 'quick win' projects in four to six weeks - any longer and processes actually become outdated. It has to be external as well: the supply chain, for example, must be aligned with the new way you work."

Tim Stanley, regional sales director for Global 360, says that when technology goes first, trouble is not too far behind. "In my experience, when technology is the lead, projects generally fail. Use technology of course, but don't lead with it, otherwise it becomes a political nightmare. BPM is not an IT solution - it's a business solution. The minute IT owns it, business doesn't get involved and doesn't drive it."

Hunter says analysing failures bears this out. "One of the important things for a successful project is getting sponsorship at the right level. Sometimes when you look at projects that haven't been successful, there are lessons to be learned. Our own research shows that 68% of technology projects fail for non-technology reasons: business reasons, people reasons, education, change management and the like."

Ezra Kahimbaara, director of strategic solutions and technology at Software AG, says it begins with helping the organisation get a cross-functional appreciation for what their drivers, methods and metrics are.

"If you look at two telcos, for instance, in the same market with the same service and product, there will still be a difference in the way they do business. You need to appreciate what that difference is and that will drive the metrics and goals. If you're going to talk technology, it first has to enable those drivers."

Even before a company's processes can be analysed and improved, BPM itself needs to be explained. Kathy Burke, sales and marketing director at DST International, says often vendors are their own worst enemy.

"We need to demystify BPM," she says. "If you go in and talk about it, the shutters come up. The mistake has been that technology has driven it and it has been pushed to the IT people to implement. We need to start insisting that we engage with the business people first, and not even use the term BPM. When it's not driven by IT, it's much easier for the end-user to understand. If we are the industry leaders in BPM, then we need to be training and educating people. Why aren't we taking the lead? We're the ones that should be helping businesses become world-class."

It's the small consulting companies that have intimate knowledge of process.

Tim Stanley, regional sales director, Global 360

Part of the challenge, says Van der Merwe, is jargon overload. "It's not business' problem to understand all these terms. It's our problem. We have had discussions within the Open Group as to how to sell architecture to business and the conclusion we reached was that we used so many IT terms, of which we're not even aware, that business sees our solution as IT-based, which it isn't."

Van Rensburg concurs. "We tend to spend 10% to 20% of the time at any account or opportunity on which we're working on education. It's really to get the customer to understand what the challenge is and what they want to do, and then educate them on the options they have, and come up with a roadmap of how to get there. It's challenging. You have to do it every time you walk into a new customer. And the problem is that vendors come in from the sides and say, 'here's an Excel add-on - this will solve your problem'. So we have to deal with that as well. Initiatives such as the BPM Summit and the BPT Group are helping, but I don't think there's enough education."

So, who's doing the most BPM education in the market? Global 360's Stanley says the answer is surprising.

"Our UK office found that across Europe, it wasn't the technology firms or even the big consulting firms, but rather the small two- and three-man consulting companies. They have an intimate knowledge of process, are very specialised and very knowledgeable. I've seen the same here in South Africa. There are 30 or 40 small companies in Johannesburg alone that make a very good living without being tied to a product or wearing a hat - just by advising companies and being good at what they do."

i5's Nicholson has had first-hand experience of this. "We've done good work with small consulting companies where they have the trust relationship and the knowledge of the client's business. They tell us what the software needs to do and the partnership is very successful."

Clearly, BPM solutions are being sold to businesses that have been educated about its benefits. But there's still a dichotomy at the top level, says Stanley.

"If you talk to a CIO or someone else IT-related, they have a very good understanding of what BPM is about in technical terms. But if you talk to CFOs or operational directors, they don't understand the value it can bring. BPM as a technology type is very different to other technology projects in that you can take an entirely new approach to processes. But C-level business executives don't understand the power of that yet."

If they could, then South African business could be at the next level, says Kahimbaara. "A lot of businesses are successful because we have very competent executives in this country, with lots of experience making sense of fuzzy variables in the market. A question that always gets a reaction in an audience of C-level executives is, 'do you know what's happening in your business?' To be able to quantify that and show them physical numbers rather than letting them try to read behaviour in their organisations or the market, that's when they start to appreciate the necessity of BPM."

But because BPM by its very nature exposes waste, changes relationships and promotes efficiency within any organisation, a successful implementation won't be welcomed by everybody. People don't like too many spotlights on their work or roles.

Says IBM's Dhookte: "One of the biggest challenges to BPM is getting organisations to change. You're getting rid of departments and hierarchies and that won't happen overnight. In this economic climate, you can't go for a big enterprise, blue-sky sale but rather a line of business-type sale."

In today's times, where organisations are self-examining more than they have over the last five years, perhaps now is the ideal time to look at BPM.