BPM’s Time Has Come
This submission was also posted to the OMG’s Business Process Management Consortium. http://blog.bpm-consortium.org/2009/09/index.html
Gartner Executive Programme – Meeting the Challenge – the 2009 CIO Agenda (published February 2009).
‘1,526 CIO’s responded to this years CIO survey, representing more than $ 138 billion (£84.81 Billion) in the corporate and public sector IT spending. Business priorities where CIO’s selected their top five priorities showed that ‘Improving Business Processes’ was top of the list, as it has been since 2006.’
They were asked two questions:
In an uncertain economy, where should the enterprise focus its attention and resource?
Beyond cutting costs, what are the enterprise goals in a volatile market?
And then asked to put down their top five. For 2009, “improving business processes” ranked number one.
In these current economic times this is not a surprise. Business Process Management is no longer a ‘nice to have’. Cut backs in spending in both the public and private sectors will mean improving business processes is now a ‘must have’.
Organisations will need to look at their past implementations and ask if they have closed their perceived ‘performance gaps’. If not, then as they start a new cycle of ‘change’ they will need to ask some of the following questions:
· What are you trying to improve?
· Are you serious about change?
· Do you really know what you need to change?
· Have all the cultural issues been addressed?
If you don’t know the answers to these questions then you may be storing up problems.
What are you trying to improve?
Too much BPR work is currently re-active rather than pro-active. As a result of operating in this ‘Panic Environment’ proper planning goes out of the window. I always ask clients “what metric are you trying to improve?” Because how you re-engineer the process will depend on what metric you’re trying to improve. Think of Fast – Good – Cheap [you can have any two but not all three]
Are you serious about change?
Just getting people out of their day jobs long enough to re-engineer their day jobs is a major reason for failure of change programmes. A lack of sustained Senor Management buy-in is also one of the reasons. Change programmes take commitment from the top down or day-to-day business will swamp them.
Do you really know what you need to change?
If the application you implemented three years ago is not being used to above 90% of its capability, then why did you buy it in the first place? Was it a slick Salesman, something you saw at a conference, a budget you had to spend or it would be taken off you what? If you don’t fully understand where you are and where you are trying to get to, how can you possibly fully understand what you need to get you from A to B?
Have all the cultural issues been addressed?
If your organisation suffers from any of the following, then a new application is not going to solve your problems:
1 No Cross Functional Communication
a They didn’t know each other
b Didn’t care about the rest of the company
2 No understanding of the end-2-end process
a Focused only on their own silo
b Key Performance Indicators only within silo not end-2-end
3 No ‘Ownership’ of end-2-end process
4 Blame culture – ‘Who’s Fault’ when customers complained
5 Resistance to change
These are cultural issues and only a cultural approach to solving these issues will resolve them.