Hello, I’m Veronica
The sky is not completely dark at night. Were the sky absolutely dark, one would not be able to see the silhouette of an object against the sky.
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Gartner Reveals Five BPM Predictions
With Gartner kicking off its Business Process Management Summit yesterday in Vegas, I thought this article on their predictions for BPM in 2010 and beyond would be appropriate. To summarize, five of the key predictions for BPM are:
- By 2012, 20 per cent of customer-facing processes will be knowledge-adaptable and assembled just in time to meet the demands and preferences of each customer, assisted by BPM technologies.
- By 2013, dynamic BPM will be an imperative for companies seeking process efficiencies in increasingly chaotic environments.
- Through 2014, the act of composition will be a stronger opportunity to deliver value from software than the act of development.
- By 2014, business process networks (BPNs) will underpin 35 per cent of new multienterprise integration projects.
- By 2014, 40 per cent of business managers and knowledge workers in Global 2000 enterprises will use comprehensive business process models to support their daily work, up from 6 per cent in 2009.
These got me excited, but left me wondering why adoption over the next 4 years is still predicted to be so low. Only 20% use BPM technologies? 35% use BPN, 40% use process models? OK, so the 20% is for adaptable processes that that “self-adjust based on the sensing of patterns” – pretty cutting edge stuff. And, while model usage will still be less than 50% in 2014, that’s almost 90% growth every year for the next 4 years. OK, I’m still excited.
Buried in #5 is the recommendation to “accelerate skill development by implementing a business process competency centre.” They must have heard me.
And, in case your wondering what’s a BPN, Wikipedia has a pretty good definition (I hope Gartner is not referring to VAN’s.) Check out the full Gartner article for more substance.
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Lean BPM
According to a recent Forrester presentation, Lean is the way to promote BPM. One statistic that surprised me from that is that Agile, while the most common method for delivering BPM initiatives, still comprises only 34% of the approaches. Also surprising is that 20% still rely on Waterfall.Forrester suggests all should use agile. I would say they should at least start with pilots, mockups and trial implementations on a limited scope and deliver value quickly. This seems obvious given the BPM tool set, yet many organizations still work with less flexible approaches.
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Business Process as a Service
Despite my assumption that cloud computing will take some time for larger companies to adopt, I do believe we are eventually heading there. But can BPaaS replace BPMS’s? David Lampers has an interesting take on the idea that allows for a business process ecosystem built around cloud-based business processes. Still a few years out, but interesting to contemplate.
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Don’t make Resolutions – Plan the New Year
I am deep into my annual planning process for the New Year. I just reviewed a post from Chris Guillebeau over at the ANOC blog that lays out his process for year-end planning. In short, he advises the following steps:
Step 1: Review the Previous Year
Step 2: Outline Goals and Overall Focus for Next Year
Step 3: Make Decisions in Support of the Goals and FocusHis explanation of the steps are well worth a deep read. I think, however, he misses an important step which is to prioritize the roles you hold. The role construct has helped me focus during this process. I make a list of what roles are important to me. They can be specific or generic: Father, Friend & Family Member, Self Developer, Business Owner, Writer, Leader at … I scrub the list to ensure they match my overall mission, commitments and values and to determine if any need special focus in the coming year. I like to then picture where each role will be 5 or more years out and in the next year. With this list, I then set long and medium term goals similarly to how he describes step 2. Thinking in terms of roles also helps in planning each week to ensure you make progress toward each role’s goals.
I’d love to hear what you use to plan – please share in the comments.
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ROI Calculator Defines Business Value
I recently updated my ROI Value calculator. I first discussed this calculator and the approach for quantifying value in the presentation linked to in Creating Value Stories. Since then, I’ve refined some of the categories and identified additional strategies for generating benefit from process improvements. Modifications bring the benefit strategies to 29 across the categories in the benefits tree above. Process improvement from BPM, Lean, and other initiatives generate quantifiable business value through one or more of these strategies.
This calculator is currently deployed to support sales at a BPM software vendor. Three of their new customers have signed up for projects based on using it in assessing their processes. A financial services COO recently commented during a value review that process improvement was the only way they would survive going forward as their margins continue to be squeezed from every direction. Especially in today’s environment, I suggest all sales processes start with this approach if serious about moving discussions forward.
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The sky is not completely dark at night. Were the sky absolutely dark, one would not be able to see the silhouette of an object against the sky.
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