If BPM is important, use it! -

Recent findings in the AIIM Industry Watch Report titled Business Process Management: Are we Making the Most of Content-Driven Processes, show that 69% of the 495 responding companies consider BPM to be significant or imperative and 62% indicate they believe they have only addressed 1/5 of the potentially profitable processes in their organizations. When asked what they use, 11% indicated SharePoint while 36% indicated they seek BPM tools from their ECM suppliers.

The thing that strikes me most about all of this is that while the 69% say is it significant only 1/5 of the processes are being addressed. This leads me to question why? Why is this figure so low? In my classes and after lecture discussions, many of the attendees I have spoken with talk about how their organizations look to BPM in automating accounts payable, resume tracking and other processes like these but few have indicated BPM use in content-driven scenarios like contracts, proposals, promotional materials and all of those other content heavy environments where automation would benefit greatly.

In my view, there is a great opportunity for organizations to take a step back and look at the end to end processes. Loan applications triggering various processes based on the input from a web interface that generate and manage loan contracts. Consider the use of BPM to automate the creation, review and release of marketing and sales materials to internal and external resources. All of this and more can be addressed using BPM as the glue that binds system and human together in an automated collaborative environment filling the need for intelligent management of content and process.

What say you? Do you have a story to tell? What are your thoughts on this topic? What is on your mind? Do you have a topic of interest you would like discussed in this forum? Let me know.

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Submitted by Daniel O'Leary July 30, 2010 - 7:51 PM

Bob I think BPM is underutilized because it's a garbage in, garbage out world. If you take a broken, poorly understood process it and then automate it with BPM, it results in disaster. The main culprit from my BPM experience is poor understanding of the actual process, and issues with exception handling. Most BPM systems rely on things like swim lanes or something more akin to e-mail rules to route and process information. Both make exception handling difficult to design around.

For organizations considering expanding their BPM systems, they should focus on communicating across departments what a process looks like, and getting everyone to agree. Normally I do this using a white board or with a pencil and eraser. Low tech, but it works.

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Submitted by Sanooj Kutty August 04, 2010 - 6:18 AM

I have noticed most customers and business users to interpret Business Process Management as Business Process Automation. When using BPM as a technology enabler, it is not mandatory to automate every minute element of a process. The art of BPM lies in being able to differentiate between orchestration and choreography.

A process need not always be the end-to-end scenario of a functional objective or service. It can be smaller, in fact, really very tiny in some cases. using the concept of a process landscape can help as you then have one small process achieving a small objective call another process achieving another small objective subject to business rules.

Above all, though, it is important to know your political and regulatory environment before diving deep into BPM.

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