BPM Is a Verb. Workflow Was a Noun.

Brett helps here: "BPM is a management discipline, but you need technology in order to realize it fully. Process is the gap that has been between business and IT all these decades. Hopefully, we’re not just buying a silver bullet called BPM; business needs to say what will be done and IT needs to say how it will happen...those are the two elements of process. It’s a very powerful notion, but also a challenging one, to say ‘Let’s surface the business processes, take a firm grip on them and start to manage them as first-class entities that differentiate us from our competitors.’" That’s a very different story than the old re-engineering/workflow approach that emphasized efficiency in the plumbing, but paid very little attention to the business at large.

"A lot of people talk about doing pilot projects. And you DO want incremental wins, to show that your idea has legs; that’s a very sensible thing to do," says Ray Massie. "But when it comes to BPM engagements...are you ever going to crack the bigger nut with that approach? Well, if the executive sponsor—where the crucial decisions have to happen—gets the bigger picture and makes the shift to explicit process management, then yes...you can take on more ambitious projects. But if it’s just a series of short-term wins, and the ROI on each one is down to the nickel without a broader vision, then you won’t compile all the benefits you’re supposed to get out of BPM."

"We’ve seen companies create ‘lunch-and-learn’ sessions," adds Laura Mooney, "where different departments come together and hear about other successes. There are checklists: If you have the following problems, check all that apply...you might be a good candidate for this BPM solution. This is how organizations internally start a grassroots effort to justify an enterprise license."

"Whether it should have or not, workflow got cemented into the definition (of being a hardwired, one-time-only effort)," says Ray. "Some of our prospects and customers understand intuitively that BPM is an ongoing effort. But are they willing to put in the policy management officers and the other new positions in their company’s organizational structure to actually manage the process of change, which they’re going to need? The more forward-thinking ones are, but I’m not confident that everyone is doing that.

"It depends on how much the company is willing to fund downward, going back to the notion of executive buy-in," continues Ray. "The best practice is the idea of a ‘process steward,’ who acts as a liaison between departments that may have tribal knowledge they don’t want to share to protect their turf. The steward has the authority to make sure they all play together and the company is getting its dollar back on the overall initiative...on which, by the way, they can easily spend as much or more on services and internal management changes as they did on the technology."

But technology still remains an inescapable component. "There’s a whole methodology around BPM that customers have to embrace," Brett advises. "What it trickles down to is this: it’s not just about sharing knowledge about how a process works; it’s how you actually implement something. At the end of the day, technology is the enabler that allows process improvement to occur."

Technology providers and specialists within organizations are finding themselves in the unusual—and relatively new—position of having to justify expenditures for business-improvement efforts. "Yes, and unfortunately for them, it’s not the easiest thing to show immediate ROI on," says Ray. "There are two camps that we can address. One, if there’s a specific business pain in a department or an affinity group, we can approach it from a more ‘workflow-sale’ approach—here are the hand-off points, here are the reports you’ll get, etc. But in the other case, if the CIO has bought into the vision and has put the proper management in place, we can lean on them to sell it internally and the short-term ROI isn’t as much of a factor."

Ray continues: "Often, the vertical applications that are already in place do what they do quite well. But there are sometimes ‘white gaps’ in those systems between systems that may come up unexpectedly. With BPM you can tie those systems together using the EAI features. But even if you DON’T tie them together at the integration level, you can create a stop-gap, because BPM can create user applications rapidly as well. You can use people to fix it up until you get a more automated solution in place. BPM is very dynamic; you can mix those two approaches as you see fit," explains Ray.

"That’s where BPM is great," adds Brett. "Every company has the ability to achieve radical process improvement. Organizations like to see how their peers are doing it, for example. It helps to see a company in their industry have results, but they can do it in their own way."

So how does that work? I wondered. Do your customers say: We really like what our competitor did with your technology. We want to do the same thing...just don’t tell anyone.?

"Something like that," laughs Brett. "All the vendors have internal expertise to help their customers achieve gains. They do look to us to help them, but it’s not like we’re divulging any inner workings; it’s more like helping new customers because we have experience with prior customers in the same industry."

"And it’s not necessarily industry-related," adds Ray. "We are mostly in financial services and insurance, but we also have a dairy farm that tracks everything from when the cow is milked to when the trucks leave."

Where the BI Sidewalk Ends
With all the churn (not a cow pun, by the way) in the business intelligence marketspace lately, I asked what I thought was the obvious question: Is BPM absorbing the role of BI?

"We always have tried to convince the BI vendors that they needed the execution piece in order to make the information they were collecting actionable," reports Laura. "That was a really tough sell, and they never got it, which is why they’re the ones now being acquired rather than vice versa. The BPM vendors realized information is critical to business performance, but if you get that information after the fact—and you don’t leverage it in real time—that information is not that valuable."

Brett agrees, with a caveat: "The real-time aspect is definitely something the BPM vendors were way ahead of the curve on. But on the BI side, customers still have major reporting requirements. Customers are still looking for ever-more powerful reporting capabilities. There’s still that mindset, but they want both real-time AND reporting capabilities."

The relative merits of BI versus BPM are obviously a subject close to the hearts of these BPM champions, but they still make several great arguments. For instance, Ray points out that "more than half the reports coming out of (current BI applications) are about user productivity and usage/utilization. Those reports are done better by a process management tool. If your BPM architecture is open enough, you can drive events into the BPM engine from BI. For instance, if BI detects that some threshold is being triggered, you may not need human intervention to solve that in real-time; you just fire an event into a process, and it responds automatically," he explains.

"It’s true that strong BI tools DO provide trend analysis, based on historical data, and make predictions about future performance based on past performance," admits Laura. "But that information needs to be fed back into the process-modeling phase, making that roundtrip. This is how you fine-tune processes on a continuous basis. It’s an area that still has to come to fruition in practice. We’ve had customers buy into the vision, but not implement it very practically because they get caught up in the low-hanging fruit of automating process after process. Sure, go ahead and get the efficiencies first, save a lot of money, but also think about the closed-loop improvement in the longer term.

"Companies realize that any IT deployment has an ongoing cost associated with it," Laura adds. "There’s support for the servers, maintenance, on-going support costs...the nature of the term ‘BPM platform’ suggests that you are going to continue to deploy services, over time, on this platform. Customers are pretty aware of that."

"And it’s not just that you’re going to be deploying more processes on this platform, but there’s also iterative improvement. It’s not a ‘build it and move on’ situation," agrees Brett.

All of the above implies a cooperative effort that permeates the organization. Ray Massie provides an example: "Let’s say it’s a B-to-B application with a business partner, and it fails. The part of the process that unwinds and causes the failure has some technical aspects, certainly, but there also are greater business implications. What if there’s a time-sensitive factor to the application, or the agreement with the partner? If the application is down, there can be far-reaching effects to the business. So now we have a technology issue pushing into an explicit business process. In a case like that, we have to think about the way business and IT interact in a way that, before, might have just fallen to IT to ‘fix it.’

So with this, I introduce my original premise question: Do you consider BPM a noun or a verb? In other words, is BPM something that you’re always doing, versus some of the other, more traditional deployments that can be bought, paid for, installed, and forgotten?

"Absolutely," Laura enthuses. "It’s funny you call it a verb, because we have one customer who, when faced with a new business problem, will say, ‘Can we BPM it?’ They have learned that they have a great technology in their portfolio and they can use it to fix up many of their business problems. Not just the original one it was deployed to solve."

"Sometimes there are ‘ah ha’ moments," adds Brett "After they’ve gone through the first deployment, they see the power, and the value begins to pervade throughout the organization. Not only is it deployed in other places, but the same departments say, ‘Let’s take it to the next step.’"

Good advice. By reading the following essays, you are taking one of the first of many "next steps." Good luck.