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BPM isn't the killer app for SOA, it seems
Tuesday, July 29, 2008 by admin
As part of our BPM Continuous Advisory Service, we’re carrying out twice-yearly research studies which capture information about the state of maturity and practice of BPM in European businesses. We’ve finally finished analysing the results of our first study, and published the report.
For me, the most interesting insight was that given the state of BPM in Europe today, industry figures promoting BPM as “the killer app for SOA” appear to be well wide of the mark – at least for now.
The report is only available to service subscribers (although you can request a free service trial if you’d like to see more), but here’s a few highlights:
- Most European organisations are closer to BPR than they are to BPM. Most organisations are concentrating on process modelling to discover opportunities for process improvement. Those actively working to build the kind of continuous process improvement framework that’s a hallmark of BPM are very much in the minority.
- Process improvement is heavily business-driven and use of specialised tools is low today. Use of specialised process modelling tools and BPM platforms is low, with (for example) a significant proportion of our study participants actively using pen and paper for process modelling. Given the levels of interest in driving more effective collaboration between stakeholders in process improvement initiatives, this represents a huge opportunity for improvement through the targeted application of more specialised technology.
- Take care when trying to “sell” SOA internally through BPM. Our study throws up a number of crucial pieces of evidence that together suggest that trying to simplistically link BPM and SOA initiatives together, particularly in the minds of non-technical business teams, is likely to be risky. You should be careful of assuming that business teams will find it straightforward to make the conceptual links between these two initiatives.
- If you want to get ahead with BPM, identify the business champions first. By looking at the responses of participants furthest down the line in adopting BPM, we find that successful process change is about organisational change: it requires both new skills, and real attention to detail in ensuring that people affected by process improvements are comfortable accepting the changes to their working practices.
The study was carried out in May and June 2008 and involved 210 telephone interviews. 70 respondents were based in the UK; 70 in France; and 70 in Germany. The respondents were also evenly split across seven industries – financial services, government, insurance, retail, telecommunications, travel & transport, and utilities. We didthe research in conjunction with our partners at Freeform Dynamics.
Posted in BPM
3 Responses to BPM isn't the killer app for SOA, it seems
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Thanks for the report. I am one of the “figures” that promote BPM as the killer app. My company has had a lot of success with this approach. The key for us is that we did not go into this with the intent of delivering SOA. We started with a business problem which was our business processes were 20 years old and were a hindrance to the business. The business bought into the process reengineering exercise which lead to the creation of a department in the business dedicated to process improvement. Then we sold SOA as the technology that will allow us to rejuvenate our legacy systems so that we could quickly build brand new work flow enabled user interfaces that spanned multiple systems, without having to spend years replacing our legacy systems. The business only needed to understand SOA as the tool that allows us to deliver BPM to them in a reasonable timeframe. One year later we have delivered several key BPM/SOA projects that improve time to market, reduce waste, improve customer satisfaction, and enable revenue opportunities. On the IT side we are seeing the benefits of reuse and flexibility.
So maybe there is risk in trying to sell BPM & SOA together, however, if you start with a business problem instead of starting with SOA, you greatly reduce the risk!
A bit of nagging:
Interesting to see that by interviewing groups of people from Germany, UK and France, you end up with a “Europe BPM report”. Hmmm. From an US based research company I would not have been surprised. But you folks are UK based!
Roeland,
You’re right that this isn’t a Europe-wide report. Ideally we would like to cover more territories but this was our first study and we’re taking “baby steps”. We thought we’d start with the three biggest IT markets in Europe. Obviously there are going to be some European patterns that we might have missed, overemphasised or de-emphasised because of this, but I think at a broad-brush level the study stands up and the findings are useful.
As we get more customers for our service, we’ll be able to invest more in research, and we’d very much like to cover more territories. If you’d like to find out more about something specific, let us know!