The Abstraction of BPM Maybe It’s Not That Difficult After All

Brett Stineman, senior product marketing manager of the EMC Documentum Process Suite, agreed that an emerging sense of unity is taking over the zeitgeist of business process in general: "Processes are sometimes held in the mind of people—‘So-and-so knows how it works.' But BPM allows those processes to be defined, in the sense of making them explicit. BPM brings the process into a repository that can be used among different process owners and users."

Sounds great, but it also sounds a little...uh...wishful. "No...it's actually happening," insisted Stineman, "because business units and IT have the same mandate coming from the top. This pressure is felt by both sides of the organization, and they are starting to work together better in order to achieve the same objectives, that is to work smarter, better and faster," he said.

"Businesspeople think about processes, for sure," added Ben Cody. Cody is the VP of product management at Global 360. "I don't know if they're all aware that there are enabling technologies that improve their processes. This is where IT comes in; they need to be aware that the business side is leveraging the technology infrastructure.

"The higher up you get into an organization, the more they care about visibility. The definition changes: the person in charge of A/P worries about A/P; the finance officer worries about quote-to-cash," said Cody.

The Role of IT

This subject—IT's role in a predominantly business-oriented activity—came up a lot in our little chats. "New tools, such as analysis tools, are actually empowering business owners to have more control and be more involved in defining the process," said EMC's Stineman. "But at the end of the day, IT has to be there because they're responsible for the infrastructure and the implementation."

"It would a mistake to imagine that BPM vendors have concocted this software as a way to fulfill our own fantasies about how powerful IT should be," noted Appian's Beckley. "There's a direct need to reconcile the conflict that inevitably exists between IT and business when organizations that wish to be competitive try to reorient their performance around processes. These products came about because of the reengineering efforts around processes, and because of the recognition that the leading companies in the world were the ones that were process-driven. It happened because companies like WalMart and Amazon have changed the supply-chain equation by pushing the risk out to suppliers; or they have developed just-in-time manufacturing, the way Dell has done. These are process-based businesses. And everyone wants to bring this kind of process focus to the traditional enterprise structure of ‘departments.' To do that means creating a new set of responsibilities along which business and IT must be in alignment. That requires new tools; ones that create good fences to create good neighbors and allow process ownership at the business level and process enablement at the IT level. Business process management software just allows businesses to do what they already want to do."

Metastorm's Mooney agreed: "There are a lot of people within IT organizations that aren't necessarily technology-oriented. They have titles like ‘business analyst,' and they act as liaison between business and the technical developers. These are the people who become the champions of BPM. But that's not to take anything away from business leaders. The businesspeople who touch a BPM solution very quickly see its potential. They become savvy very quickly," she added.

"At no other time has there been a greater opportunity for IT and business to collaborate," declared Scott Byrnes. "The business person looks at what can be accomplished; the IT person says ‘I can lay it out for you.' The businessperson then asks, ‘Wow...what else can you do for me?'" That's how the cycle starts.

Beckley added: "IT buyers also recognize that if they don't align IT with business, they will get outsourced. IT has competition like it's never had competition before. And if they don't respond to the demands from the business side, then someone else will. And that someone else will be offshore. There's tremendous incentive for IT to be more responsive than it has been in the past. That requires new tools."

Beckley continued: "Companies aren't changing their process once every three years, or even eight times a year. They're rolling out new products and new processes every month, every quarter. That means a new level of responsiveness from IT is required that's impossible for them to take on all on their own; it has to be a shared burden between process owners on the business side, and IT."

Brett Stineman added that, "The lines (between business and IT) have become blurred as technology has become pervasive in everyone's life. Business is willing to get involved to figure out how to achieve objectives, but they don't want to worry about the nuts and bolts. BPM makes things a lot easier for IT. By building in process controls upfront, there's less work they need to do when new versions of the process are adopted. The changes used to be far more burdensome; the rules and process flow used to be buried in thousands of lines of code with thousands of dependencies, which first would need to be discovered and then recoded and retested. Now," he pointed out "rules can be exposed explicitly in the process and rules repositories, and therefore are far faster and easier to change."

This is consistent with Sanjay Kumar of Interwoven's experience: "Most often we have seen the business analyst working with IT side-by-side to draft the process diagram. Once the process modeling has gone through a few iterations and is finalized by a business analyst, IT gets involved in its execution, by building an integration plan with other systems if necessary, and performing the software customization that may be needed." Do IT executives grasp the many business imperatives firmly enough to take a strategic (versus a mere implementation/acquisition) role? I wanted to know. "Depending on the organization, we have seen where IT has taken the lead role in coordinating with various business analysts to build a strategic roadmap for the overall process improvement, and in some other cases, IT has followed mostly the implementation role," Kumar said.

It's All About Teamwork

This hand-off from one group to the other is one way it happens in organizations; increasingly, according to my phone buddies, there's another trend emerging: The cross-functional team approach. "The role of IT is in raising the awareness and facilitating cross-functional collaboration, and using technology is one way to drive that," said Ben Cody of Global 360. Laura Mooney added, "Once a businessperson brings an application in-house for a specific problem, IT now has that application in their portfolio, and they can bring that out to address a new problem. It's more reactive than proactive. The companies that have already put BPM into practice are starting steering committees, sometimes called ‘process centers of excellence,' that are cross-functional groups that oversee various business process needs and make sure there are consistent deployments of technology," she said.

HandySoft's COO, Brian Boxman, stopped by to add, "If you put IT folks in front of businesspeople who understand the process tool in a center of excellence, you get a translation effect. You learn you can provide automation to any businessperson. That's a huge differentiation ... especially as CIO organizations are being outsourced." But, as Boxman also pointed out, these so-called centers of excellence are rare. "I wish it was more common," he said.

Ben Cody added that, "The best combination is a spirit of business change management coming together with technical competency. The key question is: at what point do you establish a center of excellence? I've seen people start too late, and not benefit from the structure; and I've also seen customers establish groups like these, then basically wait for ‘business' to come to them from within the organization. Timing is key."

Can't We All Get Along?

The subject of "enterprise" versus "domain" always comes up when you talk about BPM. It's only natural; we're talking about improving the performance of individual departments, but at the same time endeavoring to create a kind of universal platform that ALL departments can succeed with.