SofScience Technologies

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
  http://www.fairdene.com/

There are three crucial elements to understanding the new disciplines of BPM:

- Change is "built-in." BPM enables the continuous comprehension and management of business    processes, both within and across organizations.

- 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.