Can BPM align Enterprise IT systems with business?
It's been an interesting journey in BPM space for me, starting with BPMS for application development to utilizing BPM as a mean to manage and control business process and IT investment.
"BPM aligning Enterprise IT systems with business" seems to be a silver bullet for IT, but an appropriate approach to BPM can actually yield the said alignment.
Here when I am talking about alignment, I am not talking about the typical benefit preached by BPMS product vendor like ability for business users to modify process, or ability for user to manage business rules or ability for business to define the requirement better. These are the typical benefits you will be promised by any BPMS tool vendor. But the alignment I am talking about is much for than these mere tool specific benefits.
BPM addresses business process as a whole and does not merely limit itself to process automation, but a way to manage your end to end business process. Today any IT system an organization implement such as package application, ERP, CRM or bespoke applications is typically a response to business value improvement, subsequently which is attributed to improvement of business process an organization deploy.
Now the issue is these investments are based on certain pre-assumption made on the end to end business process improvement, without clear baseline. This sometime results in not realizing the business benefit from ERP, CRM or any bespoke investment.
This is where BPM plays an important role in identifying the areas for business process improvement, with right amount of quantification of goals.
- Any end to end process in any enterprise would have ERP, bespoke application, legacy application and manual process
- It is important for any BPM adoption to understand the end to end process, divide the process into critical process area (Process breakdown) and baseline process performance (KPI)
- Utilize baseline business process performance to identify end to end process improvement though
- IT Resource leveling
- IT system upgrade
- Any legacy modernization
- ERP rollout
- Utilize BPMS capability for legacy modernization
- Then subsequently monitor the improvement to ensure the identified goals are achieved
Important aspect of BPM is that you can bring in BPM in an enterprise at any given point and start reaping the benefit, and it is never too late for BPM adoption.
Comments
Manas,
BPM as you mention plays a critical role in the organizations ability to improve business process across IT and application environments. My experience with BPM tools is they provide a method for a business to identify, map and monitor these processes across an enterprise. What is missing is the ability, as you say, to identify key measurement points for actual process improvement.
This is where I see BI and BPM coming together to provide the business the ability to measure and perform analysis on business process across the organization.
With the identification of key data points within a process, but across the organization, data can be collected within a BI system. This will allow the business to perform analysis of business processes across time. Identify trends and basically develop KPI. This also allows for the “subsequent monitoring and improvement” of the business process as a whole. Bringing these two technologies together will enable Intelligent Business Processes across the enterprise.
Posted by: Mike Orist | March 4, 2010 12:09 AM