Gartner have published their highlight report from the BPM conference earlier in the year. I think one of the interesting observations is that in these times of recession, professionals from 34 countries attended the conference. This demonstrates its importance to the industry. It was also rated the ‘most useful’ Gartner conference in Europe.
I think one of the most important findings was:
‘Adopting BPM technology is not the biggest challenge to BPM success. Clients still struggle with the “softer side of BPM,” such as communication, change management and program management. However, few have established a business process competency center.’
‘The Business Process Competency Centre or BPCC’. It would seem inconceivable now to have an organisation without an IT department, if the function wasn’t outsourced. Yet you don’t have to go too far back in time when a organisations just had a ‘couple of techies’ that would be holed up in a broom cupboard. People would never be expected to ‘get on with it as best as they could’ with It support. Yet we do it with business process management. Few have established which part of the organisation that is responsible for the implementation of ‘Change’ outside of IT.
Some organisations will undoubtedly see the creation of a BPCC as an additional cost that cannot be justified when the main driver is to reduce cost, but this can be a false economy. If an organisation cannot carry out analysis on itself then it probably has no idea what its ultimate ‘cost of delivery’ is; and therefore, will not understand its ‘Cost of Non-Conformance’ or to put it another way – if you don’t know what it costs to do it wrong, how will you know what to put right?
It will be interesting to see how many of the 3,000 to 4,000 CIO’s that Gartner interview in the next 12 months will have the courage to invest in a BPCC.
Full article: http://www.gartner.com/technology/events/roles/business-process-improvement-events.jsp?WT.mc_id=News0609BPI%20HTML%20Research