I’ve been speaking at BPM conferences for – well, too long, probably – but long enough to see the evolution of BPM’s essential value proposition, as expounded by consultants, industry analysts, and BPMS vendors. Consistent with Darwinian theory, this evolution has not followed a simple linear thread but has branched into multiple lines, some destined to die out and others – hopefully – to flourish. Today I would say there are three distinct branches, three different statements of what BPM is and is trying to do. Each has its own natural constituency and ardent advocates. But if BPM is actually one thing, and I think it is, the fact that these three value propositions have not been successfully synthesized in the public consciousness is hampering fulfillment of BPM’s promise, both as a management discipline and as a category of enterprise software.
The oldest of the three value propositions emphasizes improving human work – understanding the handoffs and doing the “right” thing, enforcing global consistency and adherence to policies and business rules, and perhaps even automating manual tasks with shared queues and deadline-triggered escalation. The chief sponsors of this view are BPM consultants and practitioners in end user organizations – the folks that most clearly define themselves as “doing BPM” today. To them, business processes are fundamentally about the daily work of company employees, making them more productive, their output better aligned with corporate goals, and their lives somehow more fulfilling. From a technology perspective, this group emphasizes modeling tools and workflow automation. From a business benefits perspective, they talk about cost savings, compliance, and cycle time reduction.
About three years ago, when BPM began to assert itself as something “different” from plain workflow, a new value proposition emerged: agile business integration. Workflow automation, ran the argument, was something enterprise applications already provided within their own domains. What was needed was software that glued those domains together into cross-functional business processes that could be assembled quickly in software implementations at low cost. Leveraging the new technology of web services and service-oriented architecture (SOA), BPM became a new way of building applications by orchestrating reusable software components.
In a sense co-opted by the SOA tidal wave, BPM’s basic value turned into that of SOA itself: the ability to compose new applications easily while leveraging existing IT investment, and to recompose them quickly in response to the changing business environment. The business benefit is agility – saving time and becoming more responsive to the external environment. The chief sponsors of this view are IT infrastructure vendors and the IT industry analysts and thought leaders who typically keynote BPM conferences. For example, at the Brainstorm BPM Conference series, Peter Fingar talks about time as the new competitive advantage and Janelle Hill talks about becoming an “adaptive organization.”
In the past year, we’ve seen a third value proposition for BPM emerge: business performance optimization. Business processes are defined as sets of related activities that determine the value of measurable key performance indicators (KPIs), and the primary value of BPM is the ability to monitor those KPIs and make the necessary adjustments to maintain their optimum value. In some ways this view is a synthesis of other first two. It values human work, but only to the extent that the performance metrics associated with that work are strategic. And it values the new integration possibilities enabled by SOA, but mostly as a way to aggregate performance data from diverse business systems. Its sponsors so far appear to be primarily software vendors selling business activity monitoring (BAM) and business intelligence (BI) technology.
The BPM value proposition evolution began with cost savings, moved to agility, and now has been raised to maximizing strategic performance metrics. But if BPM is looking to stand on a single, strategic, unifying theme, performance optimization seems a thin reed. The reason is that the “process” part is really optional. By combining business modeling tools with BI and BAM, you could analyze business performance and measure KPIs without BPM or even without any concrete notion of a business process – as any number of BI and modeling tool vendors are only too happy to tell you. BPM’s answer is that when BAM signals a problem with a KPI going off the rails, BPM provides an integrated platform for escalation and remediation on the spot, while BI just gives you a dashboard to look at.
Is that a compelling argument? I think it could be, but to do so requires elevating the importance of BPMS within the BPM value proposition. Modeling and measurement are not enough. You need to turn the model into an executable implementation in order to improve human work, integrate the enterprise, and optimize business performance. That’s what the BPMS does, and it’s critical to the value of BPM as a management discipline. Instead of pursuing their separate agendas, this is what BPM consultants and practitioners, IT industry analysts, and even BAM missionaries should be talking about.
