Don't get me wrong on this; as the solution we delivered was highly configurable and business process driven and the solution lasted for nearly 6 years before getting decomissioned.

The point I am trying to make out here is; BPMS tools adoption itself has a wide range of benefit associated with it but BPM as an area has far reaching impact in shaping up IT to deliver business value. To realize business value organization should make serious consideration on the following aspect of BPM

• Improve Business operation efficiency
• Business process performance measurement and continuous improvement
• Drive business innovation by linking business processes across boundaries within and across enterprise
• Increasing organization Process maturity
• Enable categorization of processes for agility versus standardization to support outsourcing decision
• Enable Process governance
• Manage IT changes using Process views

This is not an exhaustive list but gives a good start for any organization to start looking at BPM from a larger perspective.

So, let us begin from where I left in part 1 Telecommunications industry…..Basics…..part 1. Here, I shall attempt to touch upon the various telecom technology phases without going into the nitty-gritty's. You can find tons of technical details (for each technology) on the internet. My aim here is to highlight all the relevant technologies -at one place, in one blog.

And this has not been the only unique or isolated story that I have come across. Specially with rapidly changing and evolving IT organizations, this has been a common struggle to break the current mindset and conventional working patterns and move the entire organization toward a new way of doing things. It typically will involve the business app teams, infrastructure team, business owners and managers, vendors and all other parts of the eco-system that are involved in making service delivery work.

"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.

Introduction
Industry analysts have repeatedly pointed out that technology is a beguiling proposition and businesses invest expecting to save money or increase revenue, but rarely realize either benefit. 
The rapid investment over the first half of the nervous nineties have placed the CIOs under enormous pressure to  become “Value Creators” and  produce or increase profit from existing company property rather than investing further.  This may be connecting the enterprise's data in new ways to give new insights and improve decisions. However, there is an added mandate to be thrifty and manage internal costs to free dollars to create innovation and value. With highly compressed decision cycles and the need for faster recovery of IT investment, consultants are increasingly being asked for recommendations with ROI cycles in months rather than years.
It is in such uncertain times, that the Enterprise mashup has presented itself as one of the promising technologies for the next decade. Let us take a look at what the mashup is and why do analysts think it will be the growth engine for Enterprise 2.0.

So we can see it like a classical 2x2 matrix  between process type and state of the management of the process. We will end up with 4 classes:

1. Structured process – well managed
2. Structured process – unmanaged
3. Unstructured process – well managed
4. Unstructured process – unmanaged

As I see, BPM is all about business and hence it needs to be grounded on what’s most valuable to the business – ‘Business Value’. For the rest, neither the business people want to understand really nor they care about (BPMN, SOA, XML and the endless list that all of us know) it. That’s fair I suppose. How many times people really care what technology the digital camera or mobile phones work upon when they buy it? How many times do we bother about the technical wizardry of microwave ovens when we buy it and use it? So we all need to listen to the message.  No point in wasting time in selling technology nuts and bolts to business. We need to take the business realization to them. I will be surprised if that is a news to anyone.

This blog series is on building the future with BPM so we must realize with clarity why we believe BPM is going to be critical for the business in future. This realization is important because this is what will drive your investments, strategies and core values adopted for the BPM program. Here I’m not talking about basic need or fundamental business case for BPM, I’m sure most of you understand that very well. Instead what I want to share are some of my observations and perspective of the global trends that mean a lot for BPM going forward.

• Minimize environment management overhead
• Uniform configuration accross environments 
• Basic integration platform QoS is delivered to all business initiative including capacity management
• Automated deployment of services with minimal intervention by Integration team
• Optimum utilization of hardware infrastructure 
• Apportion Integration Platform cost based on 
• Integration solution complexity
• Solution type
• Volumetric
• Application to be integrated
• Usage of Integration Platform

Considering Integration platform forms the enterprise backbone, the motivation presented above becomes the key input for architecting & engineering Integration Platform for deriving better ROI using a private cloud based hosting model

Various sources on the net estimate that 60-70% of the business processes in an enterprise are unstructured or ad hoc unfortunately. Can’t really say how much true that is because no reliable study or research is available to make conclusive view on it. But at least there is fairly reliably observation that reasonable part of the business process today apparently is what we call unstructured. Hang on with me, I will come to elaborate on what an unstructured process is if you have not been initiated into this new fancy stuff so far. Do we really consider the segmentation of structured and unstructured processes in the BPM strategy today? Largely not and that’s because they way BPM programs are run, there is hardly any visibility in most of the organizations about all the business processes in totality. So default assumption is that processes are all well structured. That may be the reason when some time unstructured processes are picked up for BPM implementation that see great challenges meeting the requirement. Irrespective of who is finally blamed for the failure, just think about it…it something new, something different, something we really didn’t pay much attention to...

In the series of business value focused blogs, I’m starting a new one for BPM since that is possibly very close to business and business value (in principle at least). I also felt that despite it being so close to business value capability, most of the BPM programs unfortunately are not so much business value driven today. I do not mind if BPM implementations are driven by technology capability deployment, even for those cases, it must have a clear view of what business value it is going to deliver. So with that emphasis, I’m picking up this chain of 6 bloglets. For me blog is really a thinking process, its thinking aloud, it’s lab to present the seeds and test their viability in an open platform. So feel free to drop in your side of story that will collectively help all of us to evolve together.

In the first bloglet of this series, I would like to just focus upon getting arms around what really BPM is. It may be basic stuff for some but I think creating that baseline is important before value creation is spoken for BPM.

"If you consider the end to end business process as seen by the business process owner, 60-70% of the process is currently encapsulated in ERP or certain be-spoke applications which are performing well, so how can I continue to utilize these investments and also adopt Business Process Management".