BPM-EAI

Before I begin this bloglet, let me close something from the last bloglet of this series. Here are set of clarifications based on questions/suggestions from the readers who reached out to me:

• Is Policy/rules execution as mentioned in my blog is same as BRM? – Yes, it is indeed the same. Business rules management is integral part of the BPM even though some organization chose not to focus on externalization of BRM within scope of BPM. Nothing good or bad in that, its just that organizations need to have clarity on the impact that BRM-less BPM will have. To read more about externalization strategy, you can refer to my another blog that I wrote recently: Externalization based design strategies - another angle for SOA principles?
  
• How is process scenario intelligence different than the performance monitoring? – I think that was a great question, I’m glad that some cared enough to think about it and asked. If I were to give simple analogy, I would say it is the same difference as how BAM and BI are different. Focus of the process scenario intelligence is more about getting to know the business insight through the patterns of the business events/activities/behavior and use that in the decision making (operationally and strategically both). At the same time, performance monitoring is more about monitoring the pre-defined KPIs of the processes, measuring and monitoring it against the service levels defined and if service levels are not being met or there is a warning of SLAs not meeting in future looking at the performance trends then taking appropriate measures/actions to address the performance bottleneck.  Hope that clarifies. There is detailed blog by James Kobielus, Forrester on Predictive power of the enterprise (read it here and you will find some interesting details that James has highlighted in the context of BPM)
  
• Does the diagram shown in the blog signify low level of human intervention for the ‘document centric processes’? – not really if I were to be honest. As I had mentioned, this is generic representation. As I see, we could have scenario (and very valid scenario like insurance claims) that are heavy document centric as well human activity centric. Trick is that in that diagram, focus is on the pure process type as described. So you will see that in the document centric process, document administration is very high while other characteristics are moderate. In real life, what you may find that some processes have hybrid characteristics, especially when part of the process is heavy on one characteristics while other part could be heavy on some other.

So thanks to those readers who bothered to reach out to me, that helps a lot to bring some important points in the light. So let us move on to the next segment.

To start with, one of the major change that we see in the business processes of today and tomorrow is the sheer complexity. Due to evolution of global standards in the businesses and their practices, entire eco-system that makes up the business process for an organization has complicated stuff inside including various roles that interact, multitudes of policies and rules, duplicate/redundant processes, overlapping department activities and what not. (on lighter side, it just reminded me of a good article on difference between complex and complicated. Did you think they were different? Read on here if you want to explore). This complex as well as complicated network of processes is a direct hindrance for the business innovation. In one of the Harvard business review articles, professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter (read her article here) says “...The world is complex enough without human actions making it more so. We have been paying a price for too much complexity, creating -- or allowing so much variety that it is hard to sort through it, and adding so many loops to the chain that no one feels personal responsibility for the whole system or even comprehends it fully..”

• BPM is an answer to simplify the chaos and complicated web of processes by bringing an overarching control and boundary view of the processes. So basically it will allow us to first create large end-to-end processes so that overall chaos is broken down by those large segments. And then complications within each end-to-end process is further attacked to simplify through externalization, service orientation etc. This will help organizations to bring back the process efficiencies (in their otherwise complicated world of business) and create greater capability of decision making in terms of speed and strategic impact through accuracy and timeliness of what’s happening in the business process.

Next very important shift in the businesses is an attitude towards ‘change’. Those who have been on receiving ends in the business organizations, they know how much really they hated all sorts of change all along, be it people change, vendor change, software change, product change etc. Everyone ran away as much as they could from the evil of change but with changing times what businesse are realizing that this is the change that will drive their opportunity and competitiveness. So more you run away from it, farther you are getting from the chance to succeed in this unfair marketplace. Today’s businesses are being built for the change and not just barely managing the change. You need to halt on this sentence and spend some time on it, its so important. Business find that they need to build more processes, more often and change them even more often. Consider it inevitable till we see next wave of market transformation (may be another decade).

• Consider BPM as a good foundation to ‘deliver’ the change (once again, I’ve carefully and deliberately avoided to write ‘manage’ the change). A properly designed BPM framework to deliver end-to-end business process will simplify the process of change and decouple the complexity of technology change from business change to some extent (not entirely of course). Externalization brings flexbility, configuration driven systems bring ability to change on the move what we may call as dynamic process management.

And now the IT side of the story. Today IT is a a great dependency for business performance, fortunately or unfortunately. Variability and flux in the IT landscape  seems to be worsening every year and that raises singificant challenge and threat for business. Given that majority of business today is executed in the machinary of IT and is embedded inside the complicated network of systems and data hubs. As systems change and the IT landscape changes, how do we protect the ‘business process’ that is implicitly residing somewhere in the fabric of IT?

• BPM allows a top down business view to be built, managed and protected from the impact of flux in IT fabric. BPM (partially if not fully) allows to secure the state of the business process knowledge decoupled from what otherwise will be fragmented inside system. I know BPM possibly is not a complete solution to this problem, but surely is very important part of the solution.

Last but important aspect to consider is the rising trend of the business process outsourcing. BPO in my view is really all about process management at its core. As BPO is becoming inevitable strategy for enterprises to improve the process efficiencies (and to reduce costs), BPM will get its play stronger. BPM has promising capabilities to make BPO transformation, transition and management simpler and faster, both for the organizations as well as for the BPO companies. In the context of organizations, BPM enabled oranizations will find a great deal of relief while integrating the BPO-enabled processes to rest of the processes in the organizations. In the context of BPO companies, they will be able to create a great deal of efficiency and reduce the risk of managing business operations through BPM enabled processes (and systems). There is a nice article in ciozone.com (you can read it here) that elaborately talks about role of BPM in BPO context. Check it out.

So if you look at all four forces that I tried to present from my perspective here, its very clear to me that investing into BPM and investing strategically now will be on the charter for most of the organization (if not already) by middle of 2010. And as it gets serious, focus on value-driven BPM will become more and more important both for the organizations as well as for the IT service vendors. In the next bloglet of this series, I will break into the focus of ‘business value’ for BPM to explore why to take business value focus and how to go about it. Till then, may be read my bloget once again and let me know what’s going inside you.