On IT-business alignment and related things

BPM: improving the process of process improvement

I’ve been closely focused on exploring the discipline of BPM and associated tools, technologies and practices for quite a few years now. For ages, though, I’ll be honest – I struggled to crisply explain what BPM is. I can see that this might be a dangerous admission to make, but bear with me.

It’s easy to say things like

“BPM is a management practice that provides for governance of a business’s process environment toward the goal of improving agility and operational performance” [Gartner],

or

“BPM is a discipline for continually improving cross-functional business processes” [Forrester].

That’s all fine and dandy, and it’s true. But here’s the rub: a lot of the discussion about BPM really fails to explain how it’s different from the other process improvement approaches and tools that have gone before.

Remember Business Process Re-engineering (BPR)? In their 1993 bestselling book Re-engineering the Corporation, Hammer and Champy defined BPR as

“the fundamental rethinking and radical redesign of business processes to achieve dramatic improvements in critical contemporary measures of performance, such as cost, quality, service, and speed.”

BPR lit a fire under the fortunes of many companies, not least Oracle and SAP. Organisations in their thousands employed consultants like CSC (Champy’s employers) to help them redesign their business processes and introduce automated support systems for those processes (often, ERP packages).

How is BPM different from BPR? One easy answer is to say that “BPR didn’t really factor in the need for processes to change, and that’s what BPM brings to the party – as a discipline it assumes that business processes need to change, and puts the ability to drive change at the heart of its terms of reference.” I’ve said something that before and I’m sure I’ll say it again. But I’ve never been 100% confident that it really captures the essence of why BPM is interesting.

In my case study and market research work I’ve come across many examples of organisations which really benefitted from a BPM initiative – but where management of process change wasn’t high on the agenda (in most cases, the agenda was first about formalising processes, and then on driving efficiency or quality). In my experience, BPM work has value even when continuous change isn’t part of the picture.

Then, a couple of days ago, while writing up some material for a client, it hit me in the side of the head:

BPM is really about improving the process of process improvement.

That might sound either (a) obvious or (b) pompous, so let me try and explain it in a few more words.

Organisations have been applying various methods, approaches and tools to improve their business processes (including BPR) for decades. Many of them have highly developed process improvement skills and capabilities in some areas. But how did those approaches work? What was the process of process improvement? Until relatively recently the tools and approaches in use created quite a lot of waste in that process. Think about what happened in the 1990s and what still happens a lot today:

• Someone senior decides that a process needs to be improved.
• A group of specialists (process analysts, business analysts, whatever) conducts an analysis exercise. Cue much walking around with clipboards, making notes.
• Time passes.
• Workshops and interviews are organised where processes are mapped out on large sheets of brown paper.
• A team writes a large requirements document.
• Time passes.
• The organisation starts to procure one or more packaged applications and/or carry out some custom software integration work.
• Time passes.
• More time passes.
• At some point, a date arrives. The project is declared finished.

What’s wrong with this picture? Does this look like an efficient or effective process? Different groups and interested parties can’t really communicate effectively; there are long periods where no value is delivered; and the achievement of the end value (the improved process) is years out from project inception.

It’s when you identify the areas of waste that can exist in the process of process improvement, I think, that you start to see how BPM approaches and tools really deliver value. BPM approaches and tools deliver value by providing a platform for those process improvement skills and capabilities that probably already exist to be used together, across your organisation, more efficiently and with greater confidence.

Now it’s true that at the same time, BPM approaches and tools deliver a process improvement platform that can deal with the demands of continuous change and improvement. But the more I think about it, and the more I see how diverse are the needs and maturity levels of organisations in industry, the more I think that the change management aspect of BPM is a bit of a red herring – at least for many people.

Is all this obvious and have I just been incredibly ignorant or intellectually lazy until this point? Or does this look to you like a valuable way to think about and describe the value of BPM? Am I making sense?

I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below!

Tags: Research

Posted by Neil Ward-Dutton on November 27, 2009