Business process architects who can turn BPM strategies and stakeholder requirements into real deliverables have become valuable resources.
By Chandler Harris | March 2008
With an eagerness to get their hands dirty with the latest, well, stuff, IT professionals and business managers can sometimes put technology before process. To avoid such situations and successfully integrate new solutions, more are turning to Business Process Management (BPM), a discipline that enables process-oriented change supported by enabling technologies.
Although specific definitions vary, BPM is generally considered to be a process-oriented management philosophy that uses a new breed of systems and technology to help manage the entire business-process lifecycle. It includes the discovery, modeling, execution and monitoring of business processes from beginning to end.
BPM was developed in response to the unpredictability of current global markets, according to the tech research and advisory company Gartner. Since companies need to be more agile in adapting to changes in their markets, BPM's focus on process-oriented change has become an important, sometimes necessary, tool for businesses competing globally.
"One of the things is to look at what process improvements can do for a company in general," says Tom Dwyer, editorial director of BPMInstitute.org, a Westboro, Mass.-based exchange for BPM professionals. "It allows them to be more responsive to customers, take bottlenecks that are in the way of currently doing things and remove them."
Big Business
BPM is roughly a $1 billion industry, with numerous large and small vendors offering software and services. In the private sector, Dwyer says BPM is used by all major insurance companies, all major banks, and numerous companies in the manufacturing sector. In government, BPM practices are key components of many eGov initiatives. Fans of BPM say it has helped transform the labor- and paper-intensive inefficiencies of government into faster and more efficient processes, reducing paper use as well as administrative overhead and resources.
Because of all this, business process architects who can understand and implement BPM strategies and turn stakeholder requirements into real deliverables have become valuable resources. However, business process architects are in short supply, notes Michele Cantara, research vice president of BPM for Gartner.
"I would say one of the biggest things to think about when looking for a job is can you play a liaison role between business stakeholder and IT," Cantara says. "The biggest job gap is people that can do that."
The BPM institute claims business analysts will need to evolve their field of knowledge and become business process analysts, or process owners, who can align methodology disciplines with appropriate technology to improve a process or introduce innovative business models. "That's got a lot of managerial impact to it because you can tie performance measurements and business objectives to process improvement," Dwyer says.
Executive Challenge
One challenge companies face is that most executives understand their organization as a collection of functions on an organization chart, but have little or no understanding of how business processes are organized, says BPMInstitue.org. This way of thinking prevents executives from improving the flow of cross-functional activities that creates enduring value for customers and shareholders, the group says.
"Senior-level executives need to learn how to manage the productivity of processes and how to introduce an organization that's more process-centric and process aware," Dwyer contends. "How do you view your company as a set of processes that ultimately serve the customer?"
Chandler Harris is a California-based writer.