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By Mel Duvall
Business Process Management, or BPM as it is commonly known, has become one of the hottest business and technology management trends. In fact, in its report on the Top 10 Business Priorities for 2008, research firm Gartner slotted business process improvement, a subset of BPM, as the No. 1 priority.
But for all the attention it is gathering, BPM remains a rather slippery subject for most IT executives. In part this is because it's not all about technology. BPM is first and foremost about managing and improving business processes.
A timely new offering is set to hit bookshelves in March to help IT and business executives alike get a firmer grip on BPM and how it can be put to use in their organizations. BPM Basics for Dummies is a new entry into the Dummies series by Wiley Publishing, and is written by Kiran Garimella, a former chief information officer at General Electric, Michael Lees, director of BPM product marketing at Software AG, and Bruce Williams, author of several other Dummies titles and now a VP of product solutions at Software AG. It should be noted that Software AG offers its own BPM software suite.
The book, as the authors explained to CIOZone, is meant to be a general primer for anyone tasked with developing a BPM strategy. It won't give you the nuts and bolts of how to implement BPM, but it will help you understand the bigger picture and the role technology plays.
In true Dummies fashion, the book also offers its list of 10 BPM Pitfalls to Avoid. The authors agreed to share those tips with CIOZone readers:
- Firing too early. BPM technology tempts you with its promises of visibility, productivity, and fast results. You might be seduced into plowing ahead without methodology, architecture, and process. This is a shortcut to failure. Take the time to get the business, process, and management dimensions of BPM in place before you attack the technology.
- Thinking in stovepipes. Don't think functionally. Process-centric thinking is different. You need to be thinking end-to-end; about how a value-chain comes together; how your role, performance and productivity create value within the greater process. Getting everyone to think this way takes time and persistence.
- Focusing on job cuts. If you make BPM a veiled headcount reduction initiative, you will guarantee failure. People make processes work and if you use a process initiative to justify a reduction-in-force (RIF) initiative, the program will die. BPM is for helping people work more effectively and generate more value. If workers re-engineer a process to work themselves out of a job, retrain and relocate them.
- Solving problems once. Don't just train an implementation team on how to do a one-time solution. Seek out training and professional development that will "teach them to fish." Be sure to figure out how to facilitate continuous and sustaining change.
- Not supporting users. BPM empowers process owners and participants to implement change. Be sure you support them with the policies, authority, rewards and recognition, compensation, and other means of facilitation. BPM empowers business users in ways that require the IT systems to share responsibility. Don't overlook the need to make this happen.
- Ignoring end users. Don't over-fund infrastructure at the expense of the process participants: the end users. Treat the users like customers; make them more productive and the technology more invisible, so their day-to-day tasks can continually add more value.
- Forgetting to celebrate. Rolling out something in three months that used to take two years is worth celebrating. Achieving a lofty business goal for productivity or customer satisfaction is worth celebrating. BPM projects may be shorter and the improvements more incremental, but you must measure and celebrate the successes.
- Hard-wiring the framework. BPM was created to help you create adaptive processes. But you have to design for flexibility. Don't just hard-wire today's answer at the expense of building flexibility to ensure that the answer can change to be effective in tomorrow's world.
- Using "gut feel." BPM provides the visibility and measures for fact-based decision-making. If you don't let the data drive decisions, and if you fall back and let intuition and tradition drive decisions, you will be squandering your investment and your opportunities.
- Automating failure. If a process is broken, then automating it will only generate errors faster. Because BPM enables an unprecedented level of automation in actions, activities, and decisions, this doesn't mean you just start automating things. BPM provides you the methods and tools to analyze and improve processes, and then automate them when they're performing optimally.
Source: BPM Basics for Dummies, Wiley Publishing
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