Contributed by:Alan Ramias, Partner,
Performance Design Lab
A question that forever nags at thinkers and practitioners of BPM is its relationship to strategy. In a recent book entitled Questioning BPM?*, one of 15 questions explored in the book was “Is BPM a strategic tool?” Eleven authors agree there is, or should be, a strong relationship.
The most common viewpoint among them is that BPM is necessary to an organization’s ability to execute its strategies. No matter what the strategy is or how it came into being, it simply sits on a shelf gathering dust unless there are actions taken to carry it out. And as soon as you enter the realm of action, an organization’s business processes are essential in executing the strategic intent. To carry out a corporate-wide strategy necessitates doing so through a company’s large-scale end-to-end processes, and that in turn requires recognizing, designing and managing those processes, which is the essence of BPM.