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Business
has never been more dynamic and challenging, making the only predictable
part of business change itself. Unfortunately, traditional business
methods and information technologies are incapable of managing current
realities. We live in a world of continuous change, where competition is
rigorous and financial pressures are unrelenting. Surprisingly, our
business models and software development approaches are historically
static, inflexible, and diffused with siloed thinking. This marks a
critical divide between business and IT's ability to provide timely
business value to the bottom line.
The volatility of the current market environment and the emergence of new
business models have made business performance management (BPM) more
critical than ever. To ensure that BPM systems are sustainable and realize
maximum benefit, leaders of BPM initiatives must focus on the most
critical aspects of change management. At the same time, a change
management strategy must be driven by evolving business models and the BPM
system that supports these models. Managing this three-way interplay will
ensure success.
Compared
to their use of data, most organizations today are still very primitive in
the ways they manage their processes. Business processes are inconsistent
across applications, locations, functions, and divisions. Few people
understand how their work relates to the overall processes in which they
participate. Even though process maps, task documentation, and job aids
exist in isolated cases, most knowledge about how things are or should
be done, is stored in an incompatible and disconnected manner. Usually
this knowledge is not even written down at all, but exists only in
people's heads.
A new end-to-end
approach to business process design, deployment and execution has indeed
emerged to meet the growing disconnect between business requirements and
IT's ability to deliver working systems. This new paradigm is called the third wave of business process
management (BPM).
BPM the third wave, Peter
Fingar.
There
are three crucial elements to understanding the new disciplines of BPM:
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Change is "built-in." BPM enables the continuous comprehension
and management of business processes, both within and
across organizations.
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Business and technology become united. BPM aims to align business
processes with the goals and capabilities of the people and systems that
are involved in their execution.
-
BPM is about much more than technology. The activities around deploying
a BPM solution will clarify the people issues around process-oriented
change.
Four
key issues are solved in successful implementations of BPM:
- BPM
makes understanding the sourcing puzzle easier (what to outsource and
what to keep in-house). This is the perfect opportunity to consider
which functions are utility and which ones are differentiating areas of
value-add. For the former, the day is fast approaching when outsourcing
in one form or another makes strong business sense. For the latter, BPM
holds the promise of enabling IT and business executives to cooperate by
empowering business control over the business process, irrespective of
where the underlying IT resides.
- BPM
improves business agility. Such agility doesn't just come from
automating business processes; it also stems from the fact that a
process-oriented approach to thinking about IT enables a clearer
division of responsibility between IT staff and line-of-business staff.
BPM enables much better cooperation between business managers (in charge
of business processes) and IT professionals (in charge of the IT assets
that deliver the services underpinning the processes) when it comes to
defining IT requirements and change requests.
- BPM
removes technology stovepipes and silos. More often than not, user
organizations are a hodgepodge of silos unable to handle the end-to-end
automation of business processes--and so are their IT architecture
practices and business applications. BPM advocates promise that BPM will
sweep away silos and stovepipes, from both business and IT perspectives.
- BPM
enables immediate change of IT systems in line with new or changed
business requirements. BPM advocates assert that by implementing a
business process management system (BPMS), and using it to manage the
execution of all your automated business processes, you will be able to
model and improve processes without software development. This single
feature empowers business to dynamically implement changes to the
operation of IT assets, as business requirements are refined or
modified.
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