Successful adoption of business process management systems (BPMS) in South Africa is being held back by a lack of skills around the concept and technology in the market.
The industrial engineering field can offer invaluable resources for BPM.
Angie Doyle, senior consultant, Ovations
One reason that these skills are in such short supply is that there is a lack of vendor- and tool-independent training that focuses on the conceptual side of BPM, says Angie Doyle, a senior consultant at Ovations. "The lack of skills definitely inhibits BPM projects," she says.
Although software providers offer their employees and clients training in the usage of their enterprise tools, few organisations offer training resources that address the fundamentals of BPM, she adds. The result is that BPMS implementations often stutter and return on investment drops when the consultants who helped roll them out leave the client site.
The industrial engineering field can offer invaluable resources for BPM projects, but the process of aligning business operations to organisational strategy is often left up to business analysts or MBA graduates, Doyle says. Even though these people may be very capable in their own fields, they may not have the specialised knowledge BPM demands.
The lack of BPM skills has a major practical impact on BPM projects, Doyle says. For example, many organisations are hard-coding business rules rather than allowing them to be modified. The reason for this is that many of the people working on BMPS implementations do not have the training or experience to modify business rules.
Addressing the gaps
In addition, many people involved in BPMS projects are still using old notation systems to model business process and process logic because they haven't been trained in the new systems. Even when people know BMPS notation, they often lack the skills to apply it practically.
Enterprises must embark on thorough internal training and change management when introducing BPMS solutions, Doyle says. Companies must understand which skills they have available and which they are lacking, and then find training companies that can address the gaps, says Doyle.
But in certain niches, such as business rules, local courses and institutions that can offer sound training are in short supply. Choosing the right provider is complicated by the fact that many local and international training institutions are highly specialised in the training they can offer. There's also a lack of standardised certifications.
First published in the November 2013 issue of ITWeb Brainstorm magazine.
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