Business Process Management - The Choices

Business Process Management or BPM for short has been in conjunction with SOA (Service Oriented Architecture, for the uninitiated) tom-tom-ed as the panacea of all that ails the current stack of monolithic applications that currently dominates the enterprise landscape. Well, given the history of the software industry’s panaceas there are skeptics and the optimists who both abound.

For the skeptics it is yet another way for the industry to bring in more complexity to extend and enhance the share of the customer’s wallet. To the optimist it is finally an application that delivers on its promise of simplifying IT. But the truth (as usual) is somewhere in the middle. And the truth is not universal – its different things to different people. To get there lets see what BPM is or represents.

BPM is usually used in two contexts. One is the concept of BPM, which essentially talks about a mechanism and mindset to manage your business process. It recognizes that process is a key differentiator that enables an organization to gain competitive advantage. It also recognizes that business is ever changing and so is your business process. Hence, the concept of BPM essentially defines a lifecycle through which your process needs to be managed for it to optimally deliver to business needs.

As the diagram denotes a process lifecycle follows the steps of modeling (defining and creating the process definition), deploying (putting the process to work – automated or otherwise), monitoring (ensuring that the process is delivering on its objectives) and optimizing (addressing the inefficiencies that the process has or acquires) to continuously evolve. In a way this is really at the basis of business process re-engineering as well.

The other context is that BPM is used is in the context of a software package that is called as a BPM suite. To put it simply a BPM suite is a software package that puts the concept of BPM to work. This means that it allows you to model, deploy, monitor and optimize processes.

Great! that’s one more software; but do not my existing applications and ERPs allow me to do that. Sure they do (to an extent) but BPM has caught on because it can do that much more effectively and without the baggage of the ERPs.

And what is this baggage that we talk about? Let’s understand. If you are using an ERP of managing a process (lets say the RFP process for introducing a new product variant). And you realize that there is an element of the process that needs to change. What can you do? Get a functional consultant to evaluate the process change, and then get the developers to code for the change, test it and deploy it in production. That’s probably a couple of weeks and some thousands of dollars worth of effort. Now, it’s just a process change that does not impact either the data elements or the transactional elements. What if your business user could do the change in flight that’s in real time. That’s what shedding the excess baggage, is all about. A BPM suite allows you to do just that. That is where the power of BPM lies.

So why does a BPM suite let you do it so simply. The secret is all about layering. In ERPs and other monolithic applications the process and the transactional logic is integrated together and hence every process change requires touching of the common code. A BPM suite sits on top of your applications and orchestrates the processes. Thus by separating the process and transaction components and abstracting the process layer you now can carry out process changes without impacting the transaction pieces.

That sounds cool and really closer to panacea, so where’s the catch. You must actually be a BPM salesman. Should we dump the ERPs? Are they out of date? What about the impact of layering and abstraction? Is there really a value in separating process and transaction all the time? These and many more questions would be cropping up in your mind. The long and short of this is that there are situations where BPM helps and situation where it does not.

I’m keeping the answers to the above questions and many more such questions as the topics of my subsequent blogs. So till then its food for thought.

Comments

[business process outsourcing]

Nice article. Thanks for sharing this post.

[Outbound call center]

The BPOs in India face an enormous challenge in reducing attrition rate and this being a nascent industry needs to draw parallels.Before we proceed its important to understand the underlying reasons for high attrition rates, which are pretty steep and are around 40-50%. Currently it is about 35% in non-voice and 45% in voice call centers. About 80% of them look for better careers within the same industry.

[BPO]

As top BPO companies are hiring a huge number of employee in next quarter. It seems a positive tend will start again in India.I like your post.

Thanks again!
Alex