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Traditionally, a fine line has divided process from project in the enterprise. The Project (or Portfolio) Management Office (PMO) is responsible for oversight of projects—however that is defined within that organization—while business process governance is often distributed throughout the organization, perhaps with some input from a business process improvement team.  The business process improvement group is usually organized around a set of principles, often Six Sigma or Operational Excellence, while the PMO is operated according to its own guidelines, such as a project life cycle or systems development life cycle (I'll refer to these, collectively, as SDLC). Finally, the PMO is generally responsible for efforts that cost money, while the business process improvement folks have a clear mandate to identify savings.

At BP Logix, we feel that process and project have been separated for too long. The SDLC after all, is itself a process, requiring planning, oversight, and documentation, and subject to review, audit, and regulatory examination, just like any other process. Furthermore, the SDLC is one of the most important processes in the enterprise, often involving tremendous expenditures of money and resources. Other enterprise processes have benefited from leveraging BPM solutions: could the SDLC benefit as well?

In upcoming posts, I will talk about the challenges and benefits of using BPM software, and specifically, BP Logix Process Director, to automate the SDLC even as it makes the work of the PMO easier and more transparent. In the meantime, if this topic interests you, be sure to participate in our webinar on Tuesday, February 8, at 1pm. View our BPM events page for more information, or just drop a note to info@bplogix.com. The webinar will feature well-known BPM expert and Forrester analyst Clay Richardson.

What do you think about BPM in the PMO? Are they doomed to forever be separate? How will one or the other have to change for them to come together? Leave your comments beow.

My career has taken me a lot of places over the past two-and-a-half decades. As a technologist, I spent a lot of time creating purpose-built solutions for a variety of business needs. As a manager, I faced the challenge of supporting those solutions, sometimes long after the individual who created them had gone elsewhere. And as a CIO, I saw how the accumulation of off-the-shelf point products and custom-built BPM software solutions can create an ungovernable, change-resistant headache for an organization trying to stay nimble in a tough competitive environment.

On and off throughout these years, I have also worked for some pretty terrific BPM vendors. In those roles, I saw the other side of the coin: customers unwilling or unable to abandon costly legacy products, convinced their careers are tied to a specific way of doing things, and suspicious of "not invented here" solutions.

All of these experiences led me to the BPM software industry. Business process management (BPM) software opens the door to the possibility of smaller software portfolios, flexible response to business needs, and easy customization. BPM software enables data to flow easily from the organization's various data repositories to its employees and partners while actually strengthening the governance of the data itself as well as that of the processes driven by that data. And, perhaps most importantly, BPM-based processes are indeed "invented here", custom-configured for the needs of the business, often without programming.

Sure, business process management (BPM) has its challenges, and I hope to touch on those in this space. Ultimately, though, BPM software holds out the promise of a revolution in the way that technology impacts business, and the way that business, in turn, views technology.

Things got pretty busy around here in the last quarter of 2010, so before I get too deeply entangled in the demands of the new year, I thought it might be a good moment to put down some ideas about where business process management (BPM) might be going in 2011. I may be wrong, but if by some chance I’m not, be sure to remember: you heard it here first.

1. BPM software adoption will continue to trend upwards. I’m not a fan of the school of thought that suggests that business process management (BPM) has become a mature, widely adopted technology.  Yes, many companies have procured a BPM solution, but BPM isn’t like CRM, ERP, or other big, centralized software suites. The most effective BPM deployments have been, and will continue to be, tactical, meaning that there is room for many such installations within an enterprise.
2. BPM initiatives will increasingly originate on the business side, not on the IT side. I see this phenomenon every day. BPM has been around long enough for non-technical managers to become familiar with, and eager to obtain, its benefits. Moreover, IT is often not well positioned to identify inefficiencies or risks in many business processes. So business units will increasingly reach out to directly vendors, independently or in partnership with their IT organizations, to address those needs.
3. SharePoint 2010 roll-outs will accelerate, but at a careful pace. Businesses are still unsure what to expect from SharePoint, which is surprising considering the investment many are making in that platform. It will be immediately obvious to most users that SharePoint’s workflow automation tools fall well short of even the most basic solutions offered by pure-play BPM vendors; nonetheless, customers will demand zero-programming integration with SharePoint’s lists and libraries, and BPM providers will have to get on board.
4. Predictive BPM (what we here at BP Logix refer to as business process automation software) will gain mindshare throughout the year. It’s one thing to automate and measure business processes, but it’s quite another to get an early view as to where a process is headed while it is still in progress. The power of predictable processes is the leverage it offers the business, enabling it to adapt to changing conditions at the earliest possible opportunity.

We can’t always see the future, but we can certainly hope for the best. All of us at BP Logix wish you a very healthy, happy, and prosperous 2011.

[This post originally appeared on Redux Online, where I am a guest blogger.]

BPM software is an important consideration for companies for reasons I've discussed earlier:  end users, CIOs, and CFOs all see direct benefits from the technology.

For better or worse, however, business process management (BPM) doesn't mean the same thing to everybody.  Some BPM products involve months-long, top-down implementation efforts.  Others boast rapidly deployed point-and-click workflow builders, but provide little flexibility in building forms.  Still others offer flexible data links across dissimilar applications, but require skilled programmers to build and maintain these connections.

To some extent, these variations simply represent the diversity of business needs faced by customers.  Ultimately, though, there has to be a unifying thread, a core principle joining together the panoply of solutions claiming the BPM mantle.  Lacking such a foundation, there is nothing businesses can use to determine whether or not they need to look into BPM solutions at all, much less decide which one to acquire.

Fortunately, BPM does indeed have a central tenet:  returning control of business processes to the business.  While business needs vary, it is a fairly universal truth that process owners and operators generally desire to have more control, and more flexibility, with respect to their processes.  Bringing control over processes directly to business users leads to improvements in a number of areas, including:

1. Business process improvement (BPI), which requires an intimate knowledge of the actual process being improved, rather than the technology that happens to implement it;
2. Flexibility of response to changing business needs;
3. Process Efficiency, as processes are defined and operated by those who use them, without suffering the translation errors intrinsic to the business/IT requirements dance.

All of which is why I'm so looking forward to participating in an upcoming webinar entitled Giving Control Back to the Business.  The June 23rd event features well-known analyst Sandy Kemsley.

According to Sandy, the webinar will focus on the ways that "dynamic, leaner BPM is implemented within enterprises: the drivers for adopting it, the types of workflow application and BPM application integration to which it is best suited, and the knowledge workers’ role in creating and participating in processes."

I hope to see you there!

[This post originally appeared on Redux Online, where I am a guest blogger.]

Where I used to work (a big, now defunct, financial services firm), we automated everything.  In the HR workflow category, we had online, web-enabled processes for time reporting, employee status change, leave requests, bonus calculation, expense reimbursement, and on and on and on.  On the operations side, we had similar online support for PO processing, invoice generation, ordering supplies, and so forth.

You might think that, with all this automation, we were extremely efficient.  Unfortunately, exactly the opposite was true.  Not only did these workflow applications fail to save me any time:  they weren't really intended to.  Each had its own look and feel, its own data sets, its own supporting team of programmers and SMEs.

For example, rather than sending HR an email that said, "John X. is transferring from the IT operations group to the systems analysis group," or something like that, I had to navigate my way through one of the most non-intuitive, confusing, and clunky user interfaces ever designed.  Because this same system was used for a number of HR-related tasks, over the course of my career I spent countless hours hacking my way through a jungle of a UI to complete simple administrative procedures. (Of course, delegation was rarely an option.)  Worse yet, often I ended up having to work with somebody from HR anyway, as they had to jump in to either fix something I'd done wrong, or to bridge a gap in the system itself.

Think about your company's new employee on-boarding process.  Is it smoothly efficient, built intuitively from easy-to-use components?  Does it cover all aspects of the task, handling approvals, hand-offs, and dependencies in an elegant and transparent manner?  No?  How about invoice approval?  How about expense reporting?

The fact of the matter is that companies are still, in the words of Nobel laureate Arno Penzias, running errands for their computers when the computers should be doing the work for them. We purpose-build systems from scratch, or acquire narrow, off-the-shelf point solutions, when we ought to be devising a general solution that can be applied to the array of processes that businesses run through each and every day. This is the promise of BPM software and workflow software.

It's also BPM's best-kept secret.  Ask an average user what business process management (BPM) is for, and they'll tell you that it's for automating manual processes.  The more sophisticated among them might point out that their BPM solution provides a platform for modeling processes and connecting those processes with the data that drives them.

These are all good answers.  But I suspect that, for the vast majority of corporate end users, the real benefit is more straightforward:  BPM software offers a consistent, understandable, and transparent mechanism that is reused over and over again to navigate a wide variety of processes.  The end user can, quite simply, do her job, liberated from the training, troubleshooting, and hair-pulling associated with any large set of unrelated applications.  And, in the end, getting the job done is what BPM is all about.

I've talked about business process management (BPM) in general in some earlier posts, and I'll keep doing that.  But once in a while, everyone is entitled to toot their own horn.  We're gonna do some horn-tooting today.

Often I'll find myself in a conversation with an enterprise architect or CIO or even CEO, only to discover that they really have no background in BPM software and workflow software, and haven't learned (yet) what BPM software and workflow software can offer their business.  I like to take that opportunity to highlight three key benefits of our product, Process Director.

1. Transparency.  It can be difficult for senior business leaders to gain a comfort level with the various hardware and software “black boxes” deployed by IT.  Process Director bridges that gap with a solution that is fully customizable and extensible, and yet does not require programmers.
2. Efficiency.  If process improvement is important to a business—and in today’s world, it needs to be—then automation and metrics are a core requirement.  Process Director measures the performance of each activity within a given process; as the process is executed over time, Process Director learns how its actual timeline varies from the original forecast. This unique capability, called predictive analysis, alerts process owners that upcoming activities may not complete on time, even before those activities have started.
3. ROI. In any growing organization, the number of homegrown and off-the-shelf solutions accumulates pretty rapidly. Each one brings with it another team, another vendor, maintenance, updates, infrastructure, and training.  Process Director gives the CIO the opportunity to start replacing those one-trick-pony products with a flexible, customizable solution addressing a huge variety of business needs in operations, finance, HR, IT, sales, and other areas. Fewer vendors, less maintenance, reduced training costs, smaller infrastructure.

Transparency, efficiency, and ROI make a pretty valuable triumvirate at a time, like now, when businesses are struggling in all three areas.  It's great to be able to address those areas for our customers, while (I admit it) having a great time doing it.

[This post originally appeared on Redux Online, where I am a guest blogger.]

In my last posting I pondered the (admittedly rhetorical) question, "Why CFOs Love BPM".  This time I'd like to move the focus to an individual I sometimes think of as the natural enemy of the CFO in the wild: the CIO.

Why are the CIO and CFO so often at odds?  Well, I could spend a lot of time on that subject (and, no doubt, eventually I will).  But what's important here is not what separates the corporate leaders of finance and technology, but rather, what unites them.

Today, CIOs are shedding infrastructure faster than my German Shepherd, Bella, sheds her winter coat.

Corporate technology organizations are getting leaner, budgets are getting tighter, and as a result, hardware, software, and networks are packaged as commodities and handed off to somebody else to worry about.

But why stop there? Having plucked the low-hanging fruit, CIOs are turning an increasingly jaundiced eye towards the dozens, even hundreds, of business applications that their teams acquire, maintain, and operate.  Each application represents incremental expense, over and above the initial procurement cost:  Vendor management.  Training.  Maintenance.   Furthermore, because every app has its own approach to security, role-based administration, and change management, the risk profile of each app can be quite different, leading to an expensive, complex, and never-ending audit challenge.

The growth of the software-as-a-service (SaaS) model is, in part, a response to these issues.  And, indeed, SaaS will remain an increasingly important weapon in the CIOs cost-cutting arsenal.  But SaaS only addresses part of the problem:  take another look at the list of IT and risk management costs noted above, and you'll see that few, if any, are significantly remediated by moving a particular app or set of apps to SaaS.

Enter business process management (BPM).  Unlike most other business software--invoice management, say, or travel expense processing, or purchase order approval--BPM tools are malleable into a huge variety of applications.  In other words, by using a single BPM solution, a CIO can replace her existing inventory of dedicated apps, one by one.  Got a dedicated time and project tracking solution?  Customize a more efficient one using your existing BPM product, and say goodbye to training, annual maintenance fees, and one more vendor.  Same with new hire onboarding.  Same with customer service requests.  And so on.

At the end of the day, by leveraging BPM software and workflow software, the CIO has reduced her expense base, improved her business processes, and minimized her audit overhead.  And she can take on each project opportunistically, starting with eliminating the most expensive application, perhaps, or the one that creates the most audit challenges each year.

Finally, in order for this approach to make sense, the choice of BPM solution really does matter.  In a future post I will discuss why lean BPM is the way to go.  But for now, I'm hoping that the very idea that CIOs and CFOs can agree on the value of BPM is intriguing enough to get you started, dear reader, down the road towards investigating what BPM can do for you and your business.

Does your CIO leverage BPM to reduce your company's expensive inventory of off-the-shelf applications?  Let's hear about it:  leave a comment below!

Spring is in the air, and things are hopping at BP Logix.

First, the nice folks here at BP Logix have seen fit to bring aboard a new member of the team: namely, me, your humble blogger. My goals are to bring our customers the latest updates and information; to help determine, with our customers' input, the appropriate product strategy; and to support our customers with high-quality, expectations-busting service.

Speaking of our products: I'd like to point out a nice review of Process Director posted by the sharp folks at BPM Redux. Theo at BPM Redux tells us the same thing we hear from smart researchers at Forrester, independent analysts, and customers: Process Director revolutionizes the way that companies model, monitor and measure their complex processes.

Also on BPM Redux, you can find an interview with your humble blogger. (My wife hates the picture, but hey, if I had one that made me look like Brad Pitt, I'd definitely have used that one instead!) Speaking of matters photogenic (or otherwise): keep an eye on this space for some short video discussions about BPM, BP Logix, and the meaning of life.

Finally, I'd be remiss in letting you go without letting you know about our newest customer profile. Abbott, the pharmaceutical giant, is leveraging Workflow Director to meet challenges across the business, including HR, finance, marketing, customer service, and more. Download and enjoy reading the story of this innovative market leader, and discover why they chose BP Logix as their lean BPM partner.

I'm so excited to have joined BP Logix at this point in the company's growth, and I look forward to meeting with customers and potential customers. Please share your feedback, either using the comment form on this page, or by contacting us directly.

[Image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/wwarby/ / CC BY 2.0]