BPM In Government: A key enabler for Citizen friendly service delivery : Part II
As I had mentioned in my previous post on this topic, governments and public sector are increasingly become a key target users of BPM related technologies. Though I am still looking for hard data to back this up, my experience with the customers and noise levels in BPM community surely indicate towards this trend. So I was not surprised when I saw a mail in my Inbox last week from WfMC (Work Flow Management Council) announcing their theme for their much awaited annual BPM and Workflow handbook and the theme was ‘Spotlight on Government’!
In this post, I would like to share some of my thoughts on key areas where BPM can help governments achieve improved efficiency and service levels. Following areas come to mind in today’s context.
1. Compliance enforcement (both internal compliance as well compliance by external entities). I had got some feedback on my earlier post on this point and am inclined to add this as point # 1.
2. Service consolidation in form of ‘Single e-window’ for citizen facing services. I have experienced this first hand during my stay in Dubai. See http://www.dubai.ae/en.portal
3. Application of Rule based straight through processing for high volume transactions such as Tax returns and converting them from workflow based to rules driven automated processes.
As governments adopt BPM starting from focused, small scale experiments and then trying to scale up to a larger scale, cross agency deployments, they are likely to face certain adoption challenges. Some of them we have seen already in play, many of them will emerge with time. Ones that I have experienced are:
1. Development and nurturing of skills and competencies required to manage the process lifecycle (and achieve continuous improvement).
2. Managing the impact of BPM on structure and roles & responsibilities.
3. Uniformity and consistency in terms of process modelling conventions, methodologies, tools and templates across agencies and departments.
4. Master data integration and consistency across departments. The Master data problem assumes new dimensions when we talk about entire populations of nation as target users.
5. Architectural governance.
6. Managing dependencies and process model reuse
Do share your views on what challenges you have come across while implementing BPM in government. I look forward to them.
Comments
It's fascinating to know how BPM can be useful in streamlining business operations in government run agencies or organizations. I do remember sitting through a presentation on BPM and getting to know how much time a user cuts down by using BPM suites to manage content generated by a single or a whole business process.
One of the biggest challenges I see in implementing BPM solutions in government is that the need for change itself. Especially in developing countries where the people who run the government should accept this change of streamlining their operations through the use of IT based technologies. For this to happen, the user should be computer literate and should be willing to transform the way that not only he works but also the entire organization of which he is a part of.
Posted by: Vaseem Khan | June 23, 2009 10:54 AM
As rightly pointed out by Vaseem, Organization change management is an integral part of BPM adoption. Any BPM initiative results in changes to the way users perform their work. Although the changes result in productivity gain over a period of time and simplify the work patterns, it does not come without associated pains in the short term. Leadership and clear articulation of vision is essential for ensuring the buy-in from end user in addition to enablement and training.
But the story does not end with initial enablement and overcoming resistance. On the maturity curve, the next stage is where users own and drive the 'continuous improvement' at the process level. As you can see, this touches the very core of organizational philosophy and management culture. Does BPM then need a democratic, participative and empowering environment to be really successful and sustainable? The answer is yes. The moot question is ‘Can this be pulled off in government set-up?’.
Posted by: Kapil Mishra | June 25, 2009 6:17 AM