The people in processes

BUSINESS PROCESS management (BPM) may seem like little more than a logical way of structuring processes. But there's a lot more to it than that, and not taking all the factors into consideration is the reason many BPM initiatives prove to be disappointing.

Top industry players say BPM failures are due, to a large extent, to the fact that people in the processes have not been taken into consideration. The employees actually using the system, and the customers seeing the systems in use, need to be factored in to make BPM a success.

When BPM is successful, it makes a huge difference. According to research by the Association for Imaging and Information Management (AIIM), half of organisations using BPM tools see a return on their investment in 18 months or less. In all, 72% recoup their BPM spend within two years. A majority of respondents felt they have only addressed one-fifth of the potentially profitable BPM projects in their organisation and consider BPM to be "significant" or "imperative" to their business.

Jacques Wessels - COO of FlowCentric Solutions says: "Business Process Management is so much more than just being organised. It pre-supposes process awareness in the organisation that focuses on the continuous measurement and optimisation of business processes, to keep the organisation competitive and effective in an ever-changing environment."

There's no single reason why BPM initiatives fail, he says, but some common reasons for failure are a lack of change management, lack of organisational buy in, "scope creep" and a lack of management buy in.

Tim Stanley, regional sales director at Global 360, says his company surveyed its customers around two years ago, and came up with some revealing results. In a nutshell, BPM tended to overlook the end-users and their experiences with BPM. For example, where BPM is seen as a monitoring tool, there will be resistance from end-users. If they see BPM measuring their performance as a means to improve processes for the benefit of everyone, they will buy into it, he says. In addition, people actually doing the work weren't always being given the information they needed to get their jobs done efficiently.

"For example, an insurance claims call centre agent might not have access to the CRM system with information about the customer's status, or documents pertaining to the claim. There was no intuitive user interface built around their role," says Stanley.

So Global 360 came up with a new style of BPM - persona-based BPM. "The persona-based approach gives people the right information as they need it, enabling them to be as effective as they can be," he says. The concept is catching on. By tailoring the end-user interface to suit the employee's "persona" within an organisation, BPM systems can deliver the types of information each user needs. It's proving very successful, allowing for faster ROI and better user adoption, he says.

Yaron Assabi, MD of the Digital Solutions Group, says BPM needs to move closer to CRM. He feels traditional BPM technologies lack the flexibility, integration, and reach that are prevalent in CRM models, resulting in a lack of continuous process improvement in an environment that is constantly changing. On the other hand, traditional CRM applications have concentrated on customer information, and not the full spectrum of dynamic transactions and business processes that exist within these working relationships. "CRM should be about people, processes and technology," Assabi says. Converging BPM and CRM would give you the best of both worlds.

Assabi notes that successful businesses constantly update their processes based on customer interaction and feedback. He cites a fast food chain Digital Solutions Group has worked with as an example. By carefully tracking customer feedback, the company is able to reshape its products and processes, including the supply chain, on the fly, to ensure customers are always kept happy. And customer retention is crucial to business success, he notes. Gartner echoes this sentiment. Recently, Gartner analysts said in their forecast on BPM trends for the next few years, that pressure to reduce the latency of change in business processes is driving a need for more dynamic and systematised measures.

"Adopting a more dynamic form of BPM, which focuses on enabling process changes to occur when and as needed, will enable organisations to better respond to unanticipated change requirements in business processes, and to handle process changes more effectively.

"Change must be accomplished by more than just technical people. Changes will be made to processes as well as the artefacts that support them, such as rules," says Daryl Plummer, managing VP and Gartner fellow. Gartner says the next evolution of BPM will be processes that self-adjust based on the sensing of patterns in user preferences, consumer demand, predictive capabilities, trending, competitive analysis and social connections.

"Converging BPM and CRM can give you a valuable tool for not only measuring customer information, but also identifying customer trends and key business processes," he says.

In South Africa, where customer service is far from mature, CRM and BPM are often not aligned, Assabi says. There might be Web sites, mobi sites, call centres and so on, but if they aren't aligned, the company won't offer consistent service across all channels.

Julian Jackman, consulting director of Compass Management Consulting SA, notes that in South Africa, business processes are hugely "people dependent". He says aside from ensuring outcomes are realised, the true success of a BPM implementation is established in how well, and how quickly, it becomes embedded in organisational culture. This requires a comprehensive change management methodology that cultivates acceptance of processes by all people concerned, and anchors these processes in the organisation.

To improve the chances of BPM success, there has to be buy-in from management and employees across the board. BPM also has to be agile, and adaptable to changing circumstances.

Janelle Hill, research VP at Gartner, says: "As organisations continue to embrace BPM to improve business performance during challenging times, this quest is pushing BPM beyond its traditional focus on routine, predictable, sequential processes towards broader, cross-boundary processes that include more unstructured work. Knowledge work is especially complex and unstructured. New BPM technologies will enable the management of unstructured and dynamic processes to deliver greater knowledge worker productivity and competitive advantage."

Also looking ahead, Global 360's Stanley says: "In years to come, you'll see BPM moving to outsourced processes, or hosted services, starting probably with mundane, non-core processes." He sees BPM continuing to run the very structured process areas of businesses, leaving people free to apply their minds to the unstructured process areas, like new product design and launches.