Over the years I’ve been part of many conversations that revolve around how ‘BPM’ is not the same as ‘BPMN’ (in the context of process automation). The point consistently made is that even when you’re tackling work improvement scenarios that are suitable for modelling with BPMN (i.e. scenarios where the structure of work can be largely designed upfront), there are lots and lots of other important considerations you need to address before you can create a deployable process application that will automate all or part of a business process and help people work more effectively.

At the risk of repeating what you may already know, the design elements commonly needed within a process application but not addressed at all by BPMN include:

• Logic associated with providing integration links to back-end systems and data sources
• Task form and other user interface definitions
• Logic to define task management (task assignment, delegation, escalation)
• Specifics of calculations and other important rules and algorithms that are separate from the conditions you specify in BPMN gateways
• Definitions of performance monitoring models, KPIs, reports and dashboards.

This isn’t an exhaustive list, but even the items above add up to a pretty comprehensive set of things you need to deal with to get to a deployable process application.

Most of what I’ve heard in discussion around this point focuses primarily on implications for the time to deliver projects: in other words, don’t think that once you’ve created a BPM and model your even close to finished application for real-world deployment. However there is a bigger issue at stake here, which is: exactly what kind of provision a given BPM technology platform makes for the specification of those items in the list above – and specifically, to what degree you’re encouraged to design and (when necessary) code these items so that each kind of concern is kept separate from all the others.

The quality of this “separation of concerns” in design might not make a huge amount of difference when you first start in implementation, but it can become incredibly important over time. And support for it turns out to be one of the most important (to my mind) differentiating points between BPM technology platforms.

Of course, because almost all BPM technology platforms centre implementation work around a graphical process model there is always likely to be a clean separation between definition of process and all of the other important design elements I’ve listed. But whereas some platforms provide a rich, well structured asset repository and clean design tools that implement the principle of “a place for everything, and everything in its place”, other platforms really provide quite weak facilities of this kind. With this latter group of platforms, it’s still theoretically possible to create process applications that are relatively easy to maintain; but designers and developers are going to be pushing against the tools available rather than working with them.

Easy process application maintainability is of course one of the key parts of the BPM technology value proposition! Without the right tools, the cost and risk of managing and improving business processes in an operational environment just aren’t as easy to control as they should be.

It’s interesting to me that there’s very little attention paid to this issue in BPM technology vendors’ marketing literature; instead, vendors prefer to focus on sexy things like support for mobile devices, integration with social collaboration capabilities, cloud-based deployments and so on. When we examine BPM technology offerings in our detailed assessment reports, though, the architecture and philosophy of the of the toolset and platform in relation to application maintainability is one of the main things we dig into.

If you’re interested in finding out more about our assessment approach, you can get access to our assessment guide reports for free here and here. You can also see overviews of our most recent versions of our in-depth reports here.

What’s your view – how important do you think the principle of “a place for everything, and everything in its place” is in BPM implementation?

Ever since I read Geoffrey Moore’s Future of IT paper introducing the concept of systems of engagement (published last year), I’ve had a slight uneasiness about the ongoing discourse. For a long time it was nothing I could put my finger on, but in some recent conversations about how technology can improve business agility, I finally realised what had been niggling me. In this blog I’m going to explain what I think is missing.

Systems of engagement vs. systems of record: a summary

If you’re not familiar with the narrative around systems of engagement, in brief it goes like this:

‘Systems of record’ – systems which manage core business information types and provide facilities for processing the information in place (think financial management, logistics, billing, CRM, and so on) – are no longer a source of competitive differentiation: they are a necessary condition of doing business, but because their capabilities are so commonplace their presence is merely table stakes. Increasingly, globalisation is forcing companies to focus more strongly on their core capabilities, and work more broadly and deeply with other companies and agencies to deliver value to customers. This means that communication and collaboration are more important than ever before. And this is where the concept of ‘systems of engagement’ comes in: the idea is that in this more distributed and  collaborative business environment, the ability to adopt the advanced communication and collaboration tools that people are familiar with in their home lives will become the new focus for competitive differentiation through technology in business environments.

Something’s missing

Before I go any further, I should be clear: I have nothing at all against the assertion that the business value of technology is shifting away from how well information is managed in place (by ‘systems of record’), towards how well information is communicated – between systems, people and organisations. I’m also absolutely in agreement with the assertion that social collaboration technologies have some really exciting roles to play in driving business improvement.

But based on my research and industry experience I think there’s something really important that’s omitted from the narrative that I’ve seen: and that’s to do with how the changing nature of value chains, combined with changing customer expectations, regulatory pressures and so on, is forcing a new kind of appraisal of how work needs to be supported by technology. Specifically, the key part of the ‘how’ here that we need to concentrate on is to do with the co-ordination of work.

It’s no longer enough (and in fact it hasn’t been enough for some years) to give people standalone tools (including those ‘systems of record’) and expect them to just get on with it and produce great work. The pressures highlighted above mean that to deliver great business performance, optimising work at the level of an individual’s contribution is a long way from enough; businesses need to be able to optimise how work gets done at a much larger scale.

However I’m not talking here about changes like the outcomes of the BPR programmes of the 1980s and 1990s – rigid process ‘improvements’ that ushered in massive changes to administration and operations through top-down diktat and only offered crude transactional ‘solutions’ that attempted to control information, the focus of work and change in a highly centralised fashion.

Instead we need to invest in systems and cultures that allow technology to be woven more closely into a broad range of types of work, where that work naturally happens, to help actively coordinate how work gets done between people, departments, and companies – and also, crucially, to gather intelligence and metrics that organisations can use to improve coordination and drive better business results.

Introducing ‘systems of co-ordination‘

Of course, anyone who’s been following my ramblings for a while will know that what I’m talking about is the application of Business Process Management (BPM) technologies and techniques*. These technologies and techniques, when used properly, create systems of co-ordination that enable businesses to systematically manage and improve their knowledge about ‘what works in work’ for them, and apply that knowledge directly in an operational context across people, departments and even corporate boundaries.

In his Future of IT analysis, Moore mentions co-ordination as a responsibility of systems engagement in passing, but I think that a mention in passing just isn’t enough. Given the length of time I’ve spent talking to companies that have implemented process improvement programmes and projects I might have too much bias colouring my view, but I think the value of these systems of co-ordination is just as crucial an element of business-technology strategy and investment as are systems of record and systems of engagement.

In an enterprise people don’t collaborate just for the fun of it – people collaborate to “get work done”. But how does knowledge about the best way to do work, and get the best results from work, get encoded, applied, managed and improved? Neither systems of record nor systems of engagement (at least, in terms of how the latter are painted in the discourse I’ve seen so far) have anything to offer in this respect.

Greasing the wheels between systems of engagement and systems of record

To my mind, then, the narrative needs to be refined. Businesses need to start to figure about the roles that systems of engagement should play in helping them maximise the effectiveness of business interactions, and consider how systems of engagement should play alongside systems of record: but crucially, the interface between systems of engagement and systems of record should not be a direct one. Between these two system layers – the grease between the wheels – should be systems of co-ordination.

What do you think? Am I the only one who thinks we need to look at this more closely? I’d love to hear your comments.

*There’s been a lot of debate about the limits of the applicability of some BPM technology in the face of different types of work – structured vs. unstructured, planned vs. unplanned, goal-oriented, collaborative, and so on – but I’m explicitly avoiding those details here and talking at a general level for the purposes of this piece.

Just before Christmas, TIBCO released its fourth-quarter and full-year financial results for 2011 (the intervening holiday is why I haven’t blogged about it until now).

While companies like Oracle struggle to deliver performance, TIBCO continues to march relentlessly on. And although it’s perhaps tempting (certainly in comparison to behemoths like Oracle) to paint TIBCO as a small player, its full-year revenue for 2011 was only a step away from the $1bn mark (at $920.2m). That’s 22% growth over 2010′s headline number: an impressive performance.

I mentioned back in early October that TIBCO has begun to extend its business way beyond that of its core enterprise middleware heritage, into new segments that are more line-of-business focused and which enable it to sell much more widely than its financial-services historical heartland. This seems to be continuing apace: a glance at the list of big customer wins sees a much more balanced list with significant contributions from telecoms, government, energy, manufacturing, life sciences and transport/logistics.

TIBCO’s tibbr enterprise social software platform was also called out explicitly in discussion of the results: it seems that this product – built in TIBCO’s labs rather than being acquired – is turning out to be one of the key levers that the company can use to get it into new conversations and relationships. TIBCO’s Spotfire analytics and visualisation technology is also responsible for a big chunk of the growth – as well as helping the company get into more and more deals outside of its historical industry base.

When it comes to BPM technology, ActiveMatrix BPM continues to grow but overall license sales here are a small contributor to TIBCO’s numbers. That’s also currently the case for Nimbus Partners’ business (acquired in August 2011). However BPM technology is actually core to many of TIBCO’s propositions – so over the coming year we’ll be looking for signs that this part of TIBCO’s portfolio is pulling its weight.

It’ll be really interesting to see where the company takes its business in 2012 as moves beyond the magic $1bn to the next step up in size. More acquisitions are on the horizon, I expect – both in core technology and also in industry-specific application and process areas. What do you think?

Over the past few days a very timely discussion has been sloshing to and fro on ebizQ, based around the question: “Is it a mistake to think a BPMS will improve your processes?”

Our experience is that driving success with BPM techniques and technologies requires a holistic approach to capability improvement – you have to work on skills, culture, management orientation and a host of other things, as well as being prepared to invest in technology.

It’s easy to say this, of course – but it can be hard to do. Building momentum to make wide-ranging changes to an organisation can be difficult: the “silver bullet” approach to technology procurement (or the ‘Field of Dreams Fallacy‘, as David Brakoniecki puts it) is very seductive. In other words: it’s much easier to concentrate on buying a cool tool than it is to get down and wrestle with some of the wider issues.

So – to help organisations with interest in BPM understand their maturity or readiness and help them build the case for more substantive change, we’ve developed what we think is a pretty damn cool online BPM Capability Benchmark and Planning tool. You can start using it, now, for free, by visiting our tools pages.

Here’s a quick run-down of how it works.

1. Go to the online BPM Capability Benchmark and Planning tool. (You’ll need to have a free Guest Pass account to use the tool. It only takes a minute to sign up and verify your account.)
2. Complete the online self-assessment survey. It’s split into five dimensions: lifecycle, organisation, architecture and technology.
3. Save your work at any time and come back to it whenever you like to add more responses or make changes (the assessment is pretty thorough, so you might want to consult with colleagues/get more information/have a think about it and then return to complete it when you’re ready.)
4. At the end of the assessment, select to calculate your competence levels – and get your high level results immediately.Your results are saved so you can return to the tool at any time; this makes it easy to re-run the calculation as you make progress and as more benchmark data is added.

For more detailed benchmarking information (providing a breakdown for your geography, industry and company size) and a personalised action plan that highlights ‘next steps’ you should think about taking to improve your capability, you can elect to generate a really nice, professional-looking personalised BPM Action Plan report (this costs just £49). Once you’ve purchased the report, it’s available to you indefinitely: each time you run the report from our site, it’ll be re-generated to take account of any updates you’ve made to your assessment and also to update your benchmarks against your peer group.

One of our testers, Sebastiaan Van den Wingaert  – BPM Manager within a large shipping company actively involved in a major BPM programme – gave us a great quote:

“This is a really easy-to-use tool that gets straight to the point. The assessment confirmed that we’re heading in the right direction, but also prompted me to put additional management focus in some areas. The recommendations in our report are actually a great representation of what we have to focus on next, and are written in a way that all our stakeholders can understand.”

This is the first release in what will grow to be a bigger set of online tools over the next few months, and we’re really excited about this development. We’ve tried to ensure that anyone involved in a BPM project or programme will find the tool useful as a way to orient themselves and identify priorities for development.

So – have at it! And please do let us know of any feedback you might have.

Today document capture specialist Kofax announced its acquisition of UK-based BPM and case management technology vendor Singularity. This comes on the heels of Lexmark’s acquisition of Dutch BPM technology vendor Pallas Athena – another vendor focused on imaging and document management applications moving ‘sideways’ to capture potential customer interest in broader process improvement projects.

In a call first thing today, Kofax CEO Reynolds Bish highlighted that he expected the acquisition to double the size of the company’s addressable market – in large part through the expansion of sales coverage and effort for Singularity’s products, which Singularity itself had largely confined to the UK.

Kofax intends to deliver tight integration of its servers with the Singularity platform within the next 12 months, and expects the $48.1m acquisition to be ‘earnings neutral’ within the same period. Singularity’s ability to deliver its technology through a Cloud platform appears to be one key factor in Kofax’s choice – on the call it explicitly referred to its intention to build a SaaS-based business to complement its existing methods of deployment (on-premise and private hosted).

One of the interesting nuggets brought out in the Q&A portion of the call was the breakdown of Singularity’s revenues: of a total of around $16m in the past year, roughly 20% has come from license sales; 30% from maintenance; and 50% from services. This was a company with a modest appetite for growth, it seems: however, Kofax intends to kick things up a notch, looking to push up license sales to 40%+ of the overall mix and decrease the contribution of services – relying more on partners to assist with projects. Singularity’s technology is good stuff, and it deserves to be considered by a global audience – let’s see if Kofax can pull it off.

With the acquisitions of Global 360 and Metastorm by Open Text and the acquisition of Pallas Athena by Lexmark, 2011 has seen a bunch of BPM technologies being rolled into what are at their foundation content and document management plays. It’ll be interesting to see what 2012 holds…

Progress Software announced today its acquisition of Corticon, the last remaining pure-play business rules management (BRM) technology provider of any size. Terms were not disclosed, but the company had recently been on a strong growth path – so it’s likely Progress paid a significant premium [we'll probably never know, of course].

Progress is pitching Corticon as a crucial ingredient as it continues to develop its RPM story, and this makes sense. Progress’ Savvion BPM technology already had a fair business rules capability (BizRules) as an integrated component, but my view is that Corticon’s technology is more widely-applicable, as well as being widely acknowledged for a very strong ease-of-use story, enabled by its heavily model-driven and graphical approach to rule specification. Its open stance towards rule management repositories will also serve it well, as Progress seeks to blend Corticon’s tools into broader capability mixes.

So in short, from an overall capability perspective, my view is that adding Corticon into the mix is a no-brainer move from Progress. Its nascent Cloud-based offering will also prove useful to Progress, I think, as it continues to develop customer propositions with hooks into public Cloud platforms.

From a market perspective, two things will be important as they unfold: (1) to what extent will Progress pitch Corticon technology outside the ‘pure RPM’ story? [I would hope this will be an important question for Progress]; and (2) what will Corticon’s extensive technology partner base – including other BPM technology vendors like Adobe, Appian, Cordys, DST, Global 360 (now Open Text), Handysoft, Software AG (IDS Scheer) – do going forward?

What do you think this means? I’d be interested in your views!

In last year’s BPM outlook, we predicted that 2011 would be a year when the progress of BPM into mainstream industry adoption would continue apace – and that has certainly come to pass. We also highlighted that we expected a very large proportion of BPM project interest to come from business areas focused on customer relationships and customer experiences – something else that’s happened.

Below are my takes for BPM’s year in 2012. Personally I don’t see any big surprises, rather, a continuation and extension of the things we’ve seen in 2011. It would be great to get your thoughts too – let us know!

Top 5 trends for BPM in 2012

1. Continued focus on customer experience and ‘outside in’ perspectives on work. BPM is all about improving the way that work gets done – and that has clear implications for minimising costs, minimising time to market, increasing agility and maximising competitiveness. As in 2011 we fully expect that BPM will shine its light most strongly in those business areas which impact customer experiences.

2. Goals of flexibility and agility, as well as efficiency. Most BPM adopters will have at least one eye on potential cost savings and efficiency gains, but increasing numbers will pursue process flexibility and agility goals. Business areas which strongly influence customer relationships will continue to be the key focus for improvement across industries.

3. BPM technology as an application development platform. BPM will be taken up enthusiastically as an application development technology approach by IT departments. For more mature BPM adopters, demonstrating the value of Centres of Excellence (COEs) will be high on the agenda.

4. Towards smart, social platforms for managing knowledge work; and integrated infrastructure for dynamic business optimisation. Support for the oversight and management of less structured, more goal-oriented types of work will start to become widespread through BPM tools; social collaboration capabilities will become embedded in most leading BPM offerings. Better support for mobile participation is a part of this. We’ll also see increased aggregation of core BPM capabilities with complementary platform elements (event processing, business rules, and real-time/predictive analytics in particular) to support the most advanced organisations’ requirement to build on the automation they’ve already done, and create dynamic business optimisation platforms.

5. Cloud platforms for project impact. Product suppliers will continue to promote their cloud-based offerings heavily, particularly gaining value (along with customers) through use of these platforms to shorten sales/purchase and initial project design cycles. The largest Systems Integrators (SIs) will all make serious BPM plays.

The outlook for 2012

The state of the nation for BPM

Despite significant economic uncertainty having an impact on organisations across industry and in the public sector, in 2012 we expect activity and investment in BPM to continue to grow at a similar rate to that which we’ve seen in the past couple of years – 10% to 15%. BPM is one of those areas of business and technology investment which works “counter-cyclically”: people tend to continue to invest in BPM projects when the overall environment is weak. BPM is all about improving the way that work gets done – and that has clear implications for minimising costs, minimising time to market, increasing agility and maximising competitiveness. As in 2011, BPM practice will shine its light most strongly in those business areas which impact customer experiences.

As BPM practice and technology becomes a more mainstream concern across industry and across sectors, we also expect investment to continue to broaden outside BPM’s heartland of financial services and insurance and into industries like retail, utilities, travel and transport, and of course the public sector.

Key BPM adoption characteristics

Just as in past years, many BPM adopters in 2012 will focus primarily on cutting costs and increasing efficiency. However, more and more organisations will start working with BPM practices – often in conjunction with use of a spread of related technologies and tools – with the ultimate goal of creating a platform for improved business agility. In those areas of the business that touch the customer, improving efficiency for efficiency’s sake is likely to be counter-productive; but rethinking work to make it as easy as possible to respond to changing market environments, customer needs and concerns and also deliver great customer experiences is likely to support growth initiatives as well as improving efficiency along the way. An increasing number of organisations will get started with BPM with the goal of increased business transparency in mind, in support of regulatory compliance demands and corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives, and also in support of increasing maturity in data-driven strategy initiatives.

Key trends in practice

In 2012, we expect BPM practice to develop in a couple of ways. The first follows a trend we’ve been watching throughout 2011, which is that BPM technologies have been explored and championed increasingly aggressively by IT departments – this is largely as a result of the on-going efforts of large infrastructure software providers with BPM offerings like IBM, Oracle, TIBCO and Software AG. In line with this we expect many more IT departments to look at BPM technologies in 2012, looking at BPM principally as an alternative kind of toolset for agile application development and delivery.

As more and more organisations deliver BPM value past one or two projects, we’ll also see increasing numbers of BPM Centres of Excellence (COEs) developed. We do expect, however, that those companies approaching BPM largely from an application development perspective will struggle to achieve business benefits on the scale of those that take a more holistic approach.

Lastly, the involvement of the large Systems Integration (SI) firms in the BPM market will have a significant effect on BPM practice ‘on the ground’ in 2012. Where SIs take an enlightened approach to BPM projects and tune their delivery models accordingly (using small teams, scoping projects sensibly, delivering iteratively and so on) they’ll be clear contributors to improving the scope and scale of BPM success for their clients; where they attempt to force-fit BPM projects into a standard project delivery model, though, they’ll create more problems than they solve.

Key technology trends

As in other areas of our 2012 expectations, the trends we’ve tracked as emerging through 2011will continue to grow in importance. The key trends here are support for more dynamic, less structured forms of work and more goal-oriented ways of managing work; integration of process platforms with social collaboration technologies to help individuals collaborate in completing tasks and resolving cases, as well as to broaden the reach of work performance and progress monitoring; delivery of aspects of BPM capabilities through cloud-based platforms; and support for mobile workers through delivery of capabilities to smartphones and tablets.

Key BPM supplier trends

In 2012, as the BPM market continues to mature, we expect to see more specialised packaging and bundling of technology to fit particular vertical industry and horizontal business activity scenarios, and less emphasis on promotion of generic “BPM Suites”. Some of this shift will emphasise more focused use of just some of the spread of capabilities traditionally associated with BPM Suites. However, the more notable shift will be in the other direction – seeing suppliers aggregating core BPM technology elements with complementary capabilities: event processing platforms, business rule management systems (BRMSs), and real-time and predictive analytics tools. These platforms and tools will address the needs of those leading-edge companies looking to build on the foundation of business automation they’ve already created, to build dynamic business optimisation capabilities that can support more specialisation and personalisation in customer-facing activities, more contextual optimisation in core business operations, and more flexibility in response to changes in overall market dynamics.

Some more supplier consolidation (following on the heels of acquisitions like those of Metastorm and Global 360 by Open Text in 2011) within the foundation BPM technology space is of course possible, but I don’t rate it particularly likely. What’s more likely, given the above technology aggregation trend, is consolidation across the technology categories highlighted above.

If we see any new technology entrants, I believe these will most likely focus primarily on offering lightweight workflow technologies and delivering those through cloud computing platforms and software-as-a-service commercial models, addressing the ‘long tail’ opportunity and seeking to sow an “Innovator’s Dilemma” for the more established technology providers. On the IT services side, it’s likely we’ll see some Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) providers experimenting with offering hosted BPM services of some kind, either as a complement to their core business or as a way to increase their ‘stickiness’ with clients.

What do you think?

What are your plans for BPM  in 2012? Leave your comments here or drop me a line at neilwd@mwdadvisors.com – it would be great to get your thoughts. To stay in touch with developments throughout 2012 subscribe to my BPM blog feed and for research report updates.

This post was written with additional insights from Angela Ashenden, MWD’s lead Collaboration analyst – thanks Angela!

Yesterday I came across this really thorough post on the Enterprise 2.0 blog by Cecil Dijoux, trying to pick apart the current state of play regarding the adoption of Enterprise 2.0 concepts and see what can be learned from Agile and Lean advocate communities in service of overcoming what he sees as a persistent and pervasive corporate attachment to Taylorism (and not in a good way ;-)).

This section struck me particularly:

“Reason #4 : Taylorism prevails because Agile / Enterprise 2.0 don’t provide enough credibility and factual data regarding what they’re bringing in terms of operational benefits.

Action #4 : Do not (only) rely on ‘rah rah’ rhetoric to sell the case of Agile/Enterprise 2.0. Provide regular scientifically measured set of data proving the value of these methodologies as Lean has been doing ever since it appeared. Besides, encourage any institutional initiative that will improve credibility of these approaches as per corporate culture.”

Make sure you click on that ‘rhetoric’ link – it’s to another of Cecil’s posts that deals really nicely with the issue of selling the value of social software.

As this area matures, it’s not going to be enough to try to sell tools and platforms on the basis that (a) they make people feel better about themselves or (b) they enable firms to hire post-millenial Bright Young Things who won’t join companies which offer Software That Sucks.

For Enterprise 2.0 concepts and tools to really hit their mainstream stride, there needs to be dialogue – and some trustable evidence – that these approaches really do drive valuable business outcomes. What we need to look for are things like:

• Reductions in staff turnover (and therefore decreased spending on hiring and training)
• More effective knowledge sharing (and therefore faster decision making, shorter work cycle times, more efficient delivery of outcomes)
• Reduced employee travel (with the obvious implications on cost)

and so on.

What we need, in short, is a body of effort that seeks to achieve the goals of Taylorism – or Scientific Management, if you prefer – but with fundamentally different methods. After all Taylor’s goal was improved labour productivity; and at a high level his view was this relied on an empirical approach to management.

Restricting a Taylorist operational management approach to only the work domains where it’s truly warranted is a worthy goal for modern enterprises, and the tools and platforms that the Enterprise 2.0 advocates promote can be an important part of the landscape everywhere. But as we try to rebalance mainstream industry thinking and get managers out of the Taylorist comfort zone, we have to avoid throwing out the measurement baby out with the mass production bathwater.

A big part of the challenge here is that the disruptive force of social software is not so much to do with the details of the new tools that have emerged; but the fact that they’ve opened up mainstream industry eyes to a new – or at least alternative – way of viewing how businesses can work. The problem is that many E2.0 advocates tend to focus on demonstrating this through the emerging technologies, and this diverts business’ attention away from the more challenging implications around organisational change (and building concrete business cases to try and counter inertia around that change) and towards the more tangible “silver bullet” temptation of social technologies.

What’s your take?

Yesterday I spent the morning at IBM’s London Southbank offices, attending a “Business Agility Executive Forum” – one event in a series being held around the world in the coming weeks to help promote IBM’s fall 2011 set of WebSphere related product launches.

A lot of the event content covered ground I’d already explored at events like IMPACT and other analyst briefings, but that wasn’t surprising – I wasn’t the kind of person the content was targeted at.

What was particularly interesting, though – and I know it was interesting for many of the others in the audience, too – was the customer presentation by Randall Overby, who heads up a BPM programme at BNY Mellon.

Yes, the BPM programme is using Blueworks Live and Business Process Manager to deliver process improvements, but for me that wasn’t the interesting bit. The interesting bit was how the programme started by addressing questions of cultural change and client involvement (the busines domain being addressed had a number of touchpoints with clients, in an environment of very high-touch, high-value customer relationships).

In the first process change project, a big part of the cultural change work revolved around getting input from 500 employees in the affected business line, and then sifting through that. Of the 800 suggestions for improvements received, 150 were eventually implemented – resulting in a 40%+ cost reduction in the business line. Rather than throttling employee morale, the project drastically improved employee engagement measures and reduced attrition rates significantly.

Unlike a lot of BPM programmes I come across, this programme also sought to benchmark client experiences of BNY Mellon’s services in depth before implementation started – and then sought in-depth feedback on the changes after they’d happened. As the programme’s projects were delivered, clients were consulted on key features – and also advised on ways they themselves might want to change the way they worked, in order to maximise effectiveness.

Going forward, BNY Mellon seems to be tearing it up – a number of other very impressive business improvement stats were shared; not all of which I got down, and some of which might not have been shareable. All in all – a very impressive story.

The presenter started out with his key lessons, but I’ll share them at the end here. They were illuminating, not least because IBM (as a “middleware vendor”) is sometimes denigrated by its competition for being all about the technology, and not really very good at helping clients understand the bigger issues at play in the BPM space. This was the presenter’s list:

• Start with BPM the concept and the method, not the technology
• BPM programs need or rely on cultural change
• Stretch the meaning of “end to end” process – include the customer, and ask “why do we do this? What does it mean for the client?”
• Ensure proper tool selection for success
• Be inclusive – BPM programs can’t succeed in isolation – you need to understand and influence many stakeholders along the way.

If I had one criticism of the event as a whole, it’s that I would have hoped for more examples of customer success like this, and less of the “here’s another new product” popups. But maybe that’s just me…

In the quest for ever more ‘business meaningful messaging’, I’ve noticed that the concept of ‘business agility’ has become ever more commonly deployed by software and hardware vendors.

There’s nothing at all wrong with business agility as an aspirational goal, of course: no business wants to be seen to be clumsy. What I have a problem with is when said vendors attempt to draw direct connections between a technology product – which, if deployed and used well, can improve technology flexibility – and business agility. This is when things break.  “Our technology makes your business agile”, so it goes. I call BS!

Making a business – or at least, the parts of it that make sense – more agile requires you to review and be prepared to change people’s incentives, business measurement systems, skills and training plans, information sharing and collaboration practices, operating models and procedures, and management culture – and probably more. Even if we just confine ourselves to the technology domain then increasing business agility is likely to require you to review architecture, governance, portfolio and change management practices. If you don’t at least think about this stuff, then the most you might be able to do is increase potential technology flexibility.

There’s another wrinkle here, too – which is that from a business manager’s perspective (if we assume that they’re an IT layperson) it might seem perfectly reasonable to enable business change by simply investing in a toolkit of new, lightweight, easy-to-use technologies and applications and letting the ‘heritage’ systems atrophy in the background. They’ve just created a technology foundation for business agility! Haven’t they?

Well, yes and no. The key realisation here is that agility is something that – if you’re serious about it – has to be sustainable and sustained for the long haul. It’s not something you can just worry about for 6 months and then forget about.

Netting this all out, where have we got to?

Good enterprise technology – combined with a good set of technology management and strategy capabilities – are a necessary but not sufficient enabler of sustainable business agility.

Of course, that’s hardly a straplline that a software marketer is going to latch onto. Catchy it ain’t! But I do think that if you’re trying to sell enterprise technology, it pays to demonstrate to your customers that you understand the bigger picture.

What do you think – do simplistic explanations of technology value seduce people into expecting technology silver bullets? Or do have most managers and decision makers become adept at filtering this kind of stuff out unconsciously, so we can afford to ignore it?