Thursday, November 12, 2009

The Wizardry of Business Process Management – Part 1

It is truly difficult to argue against the need for companies from all walks of life to improve their business processes. Doing “better, faster, and cheaper” is the “slogan du jour.”

In his keynote presentation during the recent Lombardi Driven Online virtual conference, Lombardi Software’s CEO Ron Favaron referred to BPM as “Business Pressure Management.” That pretty much says it all. Logically, to the end of managing business pressures, Lombardi offers its broad BPM suite called TeamWorks Enterprise Edition [evaluate this product].

I also recently attended a Webcast by Appian Corporation, possibly the first BPM company to deliver process, knowledge, content, collaboration, and analytics capabilities in a comprehensive suite, Appian Enterprise [evaluate this product] and its software as a service (SaaS) counterpart Appian Anywhere. I particularly liked one slide in the presentation deck wherein the eight bullet points’ first letters cleverly spelled out the mnemonic REMEMBER (why to deploy BPM now) as follows:

* Retain customers
* Enhance standardization (and consistency)
* Measure business performance
* Evaluate components of processes (subprocesses)
* Manage all elements of the business
* Bottom line improvements
* Eliminate bottlenecks
* Rapidly deploy new services (and processes).

Indeed, these are some of the typical benefits of deploying BPM systems, but the trouble, called the lack of clarity and consensus, starts with the quandary about what exactly constitutes BPM, and what exact parts and capabilities of BPM help achieve those benefits? In other words, are there more important and better BPM suites and/or components vs. those that are of less importance?

In plain English, BPM entails all methodologies and tools that help businesses improve their processes. Depending on the context, BPM can be regarded as a management discipline, a technology, or even both. If one defines BPM as an approach to methodically design, implement, execute, control, and improve business processes, then one can argue that it is a management discipline. In addition, there exists a raft of accompanying IT tools to support this discipline in all of its abovementioned stages.

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