BPM in 2011 Paul Harmon Executive Editor BPTrends

Transcription

1 BPM in 2011 Paul Harmon Executive Editor BPTrends In this Advisor, we want to briefly consider what happened in 2010 and then shift and look forward and see if we can anticipate what might happen in The economy in 2010, at least in the US and Europe, was recovering from a recession and a bad economic shock. At the beginning of 2010, things had become so slow, and conferences so poorly attended, that there were several online discussions about the demise of BPM. As 2010 progressed, however, things seemed to gradually improve. The London BPM conference in September, and then, a bit later the Business Competency Conference that combined Process, Rules, and Business Analysis, were well attended and people began to talk as if BPM was growing. Still, 2010 wasn t what one would call a great year most organizations, it seemed, were waiting to see what would happen next. It would be nice to be able to say that 2011 will enjoy an exuberant economy. It may in some areas, but in most areas, including the US and much of Europe, 2011 will still be a year of recovery and rebuilding, although hopefully a bit better than Many companies will still be focused on cutting costs, while others will be cautiously beginning to expand and explore new options. The Economist suggested that most of the growth and expansion in 2011 will occur in the developing economies, especially in Asia and South America. If that s the case, large, internationally focused US and European companies will do best, as they were best positioned to serve those areas. Beyond these generalizations, let me summarize what seem to me to be the major developments, or emerging trends in some specific areas. Enterprise Level Process Work Although most organizations currently lack well-designed business process architectures, there has been a lot of interest in defining what a good business architecture might be like and developing tools to help companies create good architectures. Established consortium s like the Supply Chain Council (SCC) and the Telecom Management Forum (etom) continue to provide outstanding examples of architecture templates, and new groups are joining them all the time. The APQC, for example, has worked with IBM to release a series of new architecture templates (e.g. for petrochemical companies). The Object Management Group (OMG) has also launched standards efforts to better define concepts like value chains and business architecture. A few mature organizations made significant efforts to develop and align senior managers with business processes in 2010, and we expect more will make similar efforts in 2011.

2 Process Redesign and Improvement Projects Lots of organizations pursued projects to cut process costs in 2010 and many will continue to do so in The integration of business rules and business process continues to pick up momentum. Most BPMS products now have a business rules component, and most BPM conferences include tracks on rules. At the same time, there has been a slight shift within the rules community, and more emphasis is being placed on decisions and various techniques for decision making. At the same time there was a lot of interest in dynamic or complex processes driven in part by the OMG s efforts to define on a case management standard. This focus on complex or dynamic processes won t be of interest to most companies, but it is of vital interest to more mature companies that have standardized their basic processes and are increasingly focused on processes that are high value-add, but difficult to formalize. As companies shift to services and outsource mundane tasks, it is increasingly the tasks performed by knowledge workers that provide companies with a real competitive advantage. Hence, interest in more complex processes is bound to grow in 2011, especially as BPMS vendors begin to promote modeling features designed to support the capture and automation of more dynamic processes. Another interesting discussion within the BPM community that got a lot of attention in 2010 was where one gets people to do process work. Some process people lost jobs in 2010, but overall the job market for process people continued to be strong as other companies launched new cost savings initiatives. Some process groups emphasize recruiting business people while others stress that IT people make good process analysts. In 2010 there was a lot of talk about the possibility that business analysts would provide the next generation of process professionals. This idea had already been promoted by SAP in 2008 when it launched a BPx site (a site to promote the idea that business analysts need to evolve into business process experts a new job title that puts more emphasis on helping business people understand their problems.) and it gained more emphasis in 2010 as the International Institute for Business Analysis (IIBA) put a lot of effort into promoting the same idea. Howard Smith has continued to develop P-TRIZ (and the associated tool, Southbeach), a next generation approach to innovation that has excited a lot of people. Resource Support for Process Work BPMS products first began to appear in 2003 and the market has yet to settle down. The original vendors focused on workflow-like tools to manage the execution of business processes, and proceeded to acquire modeling vendors, business rule vendors, and business intelligence vendors. There has been a lot of consolidation as large companies like IBM and SoftwareAG bought up smaller vendors, but so far this consolidation has not resulted in significantly improved products. Most interesting non-event in 2010 was SoftwareAG s acquisition of IDS Scheer. One might have expected to see lots of exciting results from this merger, but so far it seems the two companies are still engaged in trying to figure out how to fit the two companies together. Hopefully this combination will start to drive some interesting initiatives in 2011.

3 One exception to this generalization was IBM s introduction of BlueWorks Live a set of complementary tools that company employees or business analysts could use to develop -based processes. (BlueWorks is based on a product created by Lombardi, a company IBM recently acquired.) It s easy to recall that CASE, in the late Eighties promised non-programmer programming, and that Smith and Finger, in 2003, promoted BPMS as a technology that would let business managers control their own processes. Not much of either has been delivered to date. If anything, the BPMS tools have grown ever more technical, incorporating EAI, Business Rules, and Analytic Engines in the past few years. Don t get me wrong BPMS tools are getting better and better, but most are clearly evolving into powerful platforms for IT developers to use in support of business process initiatives. But most BPMS products aren t something a business manager can use. BlueWorks Live, however, makes some real progress in that direction. Imagine that each month the head of the sales group wraps up the month by sending an to the regional managers requesting certain information. Once each manager has responded, the head of sales sends the information to an assist for a summary that she then approves and forwards to the VP for sales and marketing. In other words we have a process that is structured around a series of s that are exchanged each month. Now, using IBM s BPM BlueWorks, the head of the sales group, or more likely a business analyst, can create a very simple program that creates a package of linked s. Now the head of sales simply clicks to send the first , which arrives with slots provided for information, and a box to click when it is complete. Each regional manager fills it out, clicks the box and relaxes as the is forwarded to the assist for a summary, and then, when the assistant has clicked yet another box, the results are sent to the manager. Once the manager clicks an approved box, the message is sent to the VP for sales and marketing. This isn t rocket science it is simply a tool for automating some formats and arranging to forward messages when boxes are clicked. What s interesting is that IBM s research suggests that a huge percent of the activities in many large companies now involve just this type of process people sending more-or-less standard s about to accomplish well-understood tasks. By offering the BlueWorks Live product, IBM may actually kick off some serious manager/business analyst process development. Moreover, if enough of these small processes are semi-automated in this manner, organizations may actually become a bit more efficient. This, in turn may stimulate some of the other BPMS vendors to think about how one might develop simple BPMS tools that business managers can actually use to solve day-to-day problems. In other words, the BPMS market is far from consolidated. New vendors continue to innovate and even the major vendors are still working to determine what kinds of BPMS products will prove most effective. Expect a lot of interesting BPMS announcements in Standards Efforts and Certification 2010 may go down in history as the year of certification exams. Several existing associations put a lot of emphasis on certification offerings in Indeed several associations were formed, seemingly just to make money offering professional certification. There are now associations offering certification for business architecture, for BPM and for various technical BPM standards. Most of the offerings are arbitrary devised by small groups rather than resulting from a well established body of practice and experience. By far the most interesting effort launched in 2010 was the Process Knowledge Initiative, sponsored by BPTrends among others, that seeks to define some truly broad-based process standards. The PKI initiative, which we described in an Advisor in December, 2010, seeks to draw many different process groups into a common effort to define open process standards. In 2010 the effort was mostly involved in organizational concerns, but starting in 2011, it will be publishing proposals on a website and inviting international comment in an effort to create a broad consensus. With

4 some luck, this effort might get ahead of the various commercial certification efforts and establish some broad standards that will guide other groups in the years ahead. Academic BPM Whatever may be happening in the commercial BPM arena, BPM in academic is well and growing rapidly. There are more university BPM programs every year and the best of them are doing very well. Clearly the idea that BPM offers a structured approach that helps business and IT to work together to solve organizational problems is an idea whose time has come. BPM2010, the leading academic BPM conference that was held in the New York city area in 2010, was a well attended and enthusiastic event. Most graduates of university BPM programs are probably going to work in research labs and at other universities, but they are, at the same time, doing serious research that will advance out understanding of process technologies and will eventually become the basis of better commercial methodologies. What Conferences Will Be Important? Obviously we are not completely objective about this, as BPTrends is involved in sponsoring conferences and what one prefers in a conference reflects one s idea of what process is and what one wants to learn from the event. Our strong preference is for a balanced conference that focuses on how businesses use processes and how various groups, ranging from IT to Lean and Six Sigma, support business process efforts. Similarly, we prefer a balance between a focus on redesign, a focus on techniques to automate process and to fix human performance problems, and a focus on enterprise problems and process management. We believe the most interesting BPM conference in Europe, for business people, will be the BPM Europe 2011 Conference, which will be held in London in from June 8-10, This event will be co-located with the Enterprise Architecture Conference, Europe 2011 and those attending can attend sessions from either conference. For more information, please check In the US, I think the most interesting BPM conference will be the Rising Media s Building Business Capability (BBC) conference that will take place in October of This conference will combine three separate events: Business Rules Forum, Business Process Forum, and the IIBA s Business Analyst Forum. Each presents a complete program and attendees can move from one session to another. A lot of networking and cross fertilization occurred at this conference last year, as well as some 600+ attendees. For more information, please check For those with more interest in IT, Gartner s BPM conference will be a key event. For researchers and academics, the 9 th International BPM conference to attend will, once again, be BPM2011, which will meet, this year, in Clermont-Ferrand France in late August. The major event in North America for those interested in Lean and Six Sigma will be the ASQ s Lean and Six Sigma Conference that will take place on Feb. 28-Mar. 1 in Phoenix Arizona. The major conference for business process practitioners in Australia will be Leonardo s Process Days Conference, which will be held in Sydney on July in TMForum and the Supply Chain Council will both hold multiple conferences for those interested in their frameworks.

5 At the same time, as BPM continues to gain recognition, it will be featured in special tracks or presentations at industry specific conferences. Thus, expect BPM talks at leading banking, insurance, healthcare conferences. Summary Although the economy was sluggish in 2010, a lot happened. Companies were acquired and a variety of BPM standards initiatives were launched that will drive still other activities in We expect 2011 will be a better year than 2011, especially in the less developed countries. But even in Europe and North America, we expect there will be lots of exciting developments as companies adjust to the continuing changes they face and seek to prepare for an even better year in In any case, we hope individual readers have a great Paul Harmon and Celia Wolf ABOUT PAUL HARMON Paul is a Co-Founder, Executive Editor and Market Analyst at BPTrends, (Business Process Trends), the most trusted source of information and analysis on trends, directions and best practices in business process management, ( He is also a Co-Founder, Chief Methodologist and Principal Consultant of BPTrends Associates, a professional services company providing executive education, training and consulting services for organizations interested in understanding and implementing business process management. He has worked on major process improvement programs at Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Prudential and Citibank, to name a few. Paul is the Co-Author and Editor of the BPTrends Product Reports, the most widely read reports available on BPM software products and the author of the best selling book, Business Process Change: A Manager's Guide to Improving, Redesigning and Automating Processes. He is an acknowledged BPM thought leader and noted consultant, educator, author and market analyst concerned with applying new technologies and methodologies to real-world business problems. He is a widely respected keynote speaker and has developed and delivered executive seminars, workshops, briefings and keynote addresses on all aspects of BPM to conferences and major organizations throughout the world. BPTrends Associates is partnered with Boston University to develop and deliver the BUCEC BPM Curriculum and Certification Program.