The End of BPM, or is that BPE, or BPR.. as we know it?
Many of us dislike the implication that BPM is simply a technology however we have to face a growing opinion at the top table that this is their reality. Whoever it is we should blame the damage is already done and several organisations are now seeking new ways to describe their process transformation endeavours. They are moving beyond the confines of poorly described BPM as they progressively focus ‘outside-in’ and align processes to deliver successful outcomes.
We can as much describe this as the death of Six Sigma and Lean (who can dare say Toyota are still doing well?) along with the narrow inside-out mechanistic modelling approaches.
So what do we see as we look into our crystal ball? A number of trends are evident:
- Increasing focus on connecting everything with customer success
- Growing appreciation that anything which doesn’t contribute to (1) may be surplus to requirements.
- Developing awareness that the ‘top down’ and ‘left to right’ world loved of the 20th century information age process guru’s limits our true understanding of effective business models.
You can for instance be extremely efficient (doing things right) but completely miss the point in terms of doing the right thing (delivering services and products that make customers lives simpler, easier and more successful). - Increasing emphasis on direct results rather than activities. Many business scorecards are still populated with supposed Key Indicators which are simply counts of activity, rather than measures of results.
Check your organisational scorecard for instance – how many measures are ‘inside-out’ activities and how many ‘outside-in’ results.
These trends form a pattern of behaviour across industry. In pharmaceutical for instance Johnson & Johnson has transformed its former Process Excellence organization into a Business Improvement Services organization, which works with J&J business units on process, knowledge, information and decision-making topics.
President Obama is also very much onboard with the evolution, last month nominating business consultant Jeffrey Zients to serve as the nation's first chief performance officer.
The chief risk with such a broad category of business management, calling itself ‘Business Improvement Services’ writes Tom Davenport, is "that it would lose focus, or that no individual business improver could master the broad array of tools offered."
Could this (revised) single approach effectively encompass people, process and technology?
If Scotty from StarTrek was observing BPM he would probably say “it’s worse than that he is dead Jim, dead Jim, dead.”
About the Author
Steve Towers, Co-founder and Chair of BP Group (www.bpgroup.org), is an expert on process and performance transformation. Steve founded the first community focused on business process management in 1992.
Steve has bases in Europe (UK), New York and Colorado.
