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Social BPM – A New Name for an Old Concept

September 8, 2010

There has been much discussion lately of the momentum surrounding “social BPM” – a term loosely defined as business process management involving direct feedback from external and internal stakeholders and therefore, constant improvement. I think a much more appropriate term for the strategy would be “collaborative BPM” as it implies sustained human intervention, contribution and oversight.

IT Business Edge contributor Mike Vizard, with whom I spoke several months ago on the relationship between IT and business users in orchestrating successful BPM projects, recently wrote a post on “The Real Meaning of Social BPM,” in which he discussed the forebears of enterprise social media applications – groupware, workflow software, document management and ECM. Vizard argues that companies are now working to integrate people with business processes, as BPM has focused “mainly on machine-to-machine processes.”

I think the growing adoption and interest in collaborative BPM is great. I’ve always believed that for any enterprise system to work successfully, people must be involved in implementation and oversight. I also agree that the automation of BPM, when done poorly, can lock people out of the general process. But I don’t think the “convergence of collaboration applications…with BPM platforms” is a new phenomenon in any way. Furthermore, I’m slightly suspicious of traditional middleware stack vendors all racing to “create” collaborative BPM suites that will somehow revolutionize the way we do things.

Vizard seems intrigued at the idea that in the next few months, middleware vendors will release solutions that make business processes more visible to people and allow business users to alter processes without programming experience. Of course I’m biased, since PerfectForms was created for this exact purpose, and we are by no means the only ones. Whether big vendors will offer solutions for non-programmers in the future shouldn’t cover up the fact that there are plenty of pre-existing products that meet the same criteria already in use.

I would, however, like to leave you with an idea that both Mike, the executives quoted in the article and I seem to agree on: products are becoming less and less important to effective BPM. People define the processes that will have the greatest benefit to a company if automated, and people are held accountable for whether a project succeeds. While their role may be increasing as of late, and may be better acknowledged, make no mistake – BPM was always about the stakeholder, not the machine.

Posted by Tom | PerfectForms, business process management

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In BPM, “B” Stands for “Business” – Part Two

August 26, 2010

Last week I shared my views on a question posed by Robert Mitchell – who should lead BPM? As I’ve contended many times before, I’m of the opinion that a business user should ultimately make the final decisions and maintain executive oversight over BPM projects. To my surprise (and delight), this initial commentary sparked a spirited discussion of the roles played and resources offered by both IT and business/finance sides of an organization in regards to BPM. Several people chimed in to agree with the stance I had taken, while just as many disagreed and put forth compelling arguments to make their case.

Robert Mitchell himself wrote a follow-up piece for Computerworld deconstructing some of the points I’d brought up in an intelligent, thoughtful manner. We had a back and forth written conversation that I feel left us both with some food for thought. Robert expressed suspicion that a BPM project could succeed without any input from IT at all, which is a point I did not clearly address in my last post. I’d like to add some supplementary analysis to my earlier comments about the difference between “providing input” and “owning.”

Below are the opinions I shared with Robert as our discussion on BPM ownership evolved:

I have a huge amount of respect for the IT function and everything they can do to make every business better. My point on the subject of who should lead a BPM project is pretty clear. As you outlined in your article, “Troubled BPM Project at Chiquita International,” IT did not appear to even have an active role in the project. In my response I said “I absolutely disagree with the notion that IT should be relegated to simply providing data and possibly hosting systems.” In fact, IT’s role and active involvement in any large scale BPM system is critical for a successful implementation. As I further said “You are right, without a collaborative effort and active involvement from cross functional and business experts the project will fail or certainly be sub-optimized.”

I do disagree with co-led projects. In my experience, jointly led projects don’t work. Someone, one person, needs to be the single ultimate decision maker. It does not mean they are the one person that knows everything (that person doesn’t exist). It needs to be the person that is responsible for ensuring that all the right people are involved, that the important contributions of each area of expertise are seriously considered and included in the decision and implementation process.

In the Chiquita example, Finance is the owner of the system, the process and is accountable for the final outcome. Finance, in this example, should have been the single leader of this project and implementation. It is also clear to me, based on your story, that IT should have played a much bigger role in the decision process and implementation. Leading a project is not the same as playing a central (and very critical) role.

Robert then asked me how, in my role as CEO of PerfectForms, a solutions vendor, I’d approached IT users at companies interested in the PerfectForms Web form and workflow automation tool (which is admittedly designed specifically for business users). This got me thinking even more:

It is critical that every business and functional leader have a good, solid working relationship with their IT counterparts. Good long term decisions (technology related or not) are not made with an attitude of “just give me the data and get out of my way”. Unfortunately this behavior is prevalent and does result in project delays, cost over runs and in many cases failure to meet the objective.

At PerfectForms we are initially contacted by people with pretty specific problems that they are trying to solve. These people are from all areas of the business – people from sales or marketing, HR or operations and yes also IT. The problems run the gamut – from simple feedback forms for training that need to be routed around a training department, to very complex workflow applications that need to be used offline by agents in the field to collect customer information that is then uploaded (when connected to the internet) and ultimately integrated with a back end ERP system.

The first example can easily be designed, developed and fully deployed with PerfectForms by anyone in the training department. For these types of applications we rarely speak to anyone in IT, nor do we encourage IT involvement. Most of these customers come to us because their existing IT resources are busy managing existing systems and/or developing more mission critical applications. Not to mention the technology cost for this is $360 a year and the training department can manage, report on, and modify the system themselves. In the second example we are working directly with the IT department to get the installation integrated and running. We absolutely could not, nor would we attempt to do an integrated enterprise installation without working directly with IT.

We do see all kinds of unusual behaviors based on politics and protectionism. We see business people purchasing a cloud solution to avoid an increase in the allocated cost they get from IT. We were told by one IT professional, “If I recommended PerfectForms, what would I do?” I’m sure it’s a common concern for any IT professional that sees a solution like ours, but the truth is, a solution that helps business users help themselves, while providing the oversight that IT requires, improves relationships between the two groups (and can free-up IT’s time to work on more important tasks). On the other hand, when IT is necessary for a successful implementation, we outline the reasons for their involvement and then attempt to directly engage with them.

At its core, I’m not sure this is really a vendor problem – we try not to get involved in internal debates and politics — but Vendors can play a role in the interest of a project’s successful outcome. Through the technology we develop, or through our words and actions, we can encourage more Business leaders and Functional leaders (HR, Finance, Legal, Operations) to work more closely with CIO’s and other IT leaders and find more productive ways to grow and support customers, employees and shareholders. We live in a virtual business world that is evolving quickly.

Hopefully the healthy exchange of ideas over the subject of business-IT relations and BPM ownership will spur continued conversations in which professionals from both sides of the equation share their experiences and best practices for management success.

Posted by Tom | PerfectForms, business process management

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In BPM, “B” Stands for “Business”

August 25, 2010

“Who should lead a business performance management project: IT, finance or both?” Robert Mitchell of Computerworld asked this question in a recent article, entitled “Who Should Lead BPM?” In the piece, Mitchell asks several IT and finance tech company pros how they’d define ownership of BPM – is it a business practice or an IT practice?

This is an argument that we’ve seen debated for ages and our answer has always been the same: business owns BPM, not IT. While IT’s role is to facilitate the creation and maintenance of a company’s software and hardware infrastructure, BPM stands for business process management, and it’s the business users who create, manage, benefit from or suffer from the way these processes work.

In Mitchell’s piece, a financial planning and analysis director says flat out that business/finance should lead BPM efforts, while a senior VP at a systems integrator feels that IT should take care of initial setup and then let the business side handle all aspects of BPM from then on. Ironically, however, the CIO of the aforementioned financial group thinks BPM projects should be “jointly led, because neither finance nor IT will get it right on its own.”

While it may seem endearing to accuse both IT and finance of not being perfect, from the vantage point of IT workers having to get a BPM system up and running and then answering questions about potential technical snafus all-day every day is a nightmare. Some people say that IT relishes having control over all technological elements of a group’s operations, but as someone who worked in the trenches of IT for many years, I can tell you this is far from the truth. What IT wants is to have the freedom to focus on things that actually interest them – programming, design, communication and planning. IT won’t get a chance to directly use the data and insights that result from an automated business process – why should they be tasked with managing it?

To this same point, forcing business users to take a backseat and rely on IT’s schedule and priorities is both patronizing and wildly inefficient. BPM has advanced to a point at which it yields nearly real-time, actionable insights that can be used to improve customer relationships, flag and correct cost overruns and process bottlenecks and make entire departments and companies run more smoothly. There simply isn’t any reason for IT to swoop in and save timid business users from their own jobs or for business and IT to have to work together on something that’s totally one-sided.

If we really want IT and business to get along, let’s start by giving each their own responsibilities and control over what affects them.

Posted by Tom | PerfectForms, bpm

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Like it or not, we’re getting SaaSy

August 17, 2010

As most of us have figured out by now, SaaS is here to stay. Just in case you had any doubts, both IDC and Gartner issued reports this week chronicling the recent double-digit gains in the marketplace that we’ll continue to see for the foreseeable future.

ReadWriteWeb does a good job of wrapping-up the reports, but here are some of the more interesting findings from IDC:

  • The SaaS market had worldwide revenues of $13.1 billion in 2009; these revenues will reach $40.5 billion by 2014.
  • In 2010, worldwide license revenues will drop by $7 billion.
  • By 2012, about 85% of new software to the market will be delivered as a service.
  • By 2014, revenues from SaaS services will account for nearly 26% of net new growth in the software market.

..And from Gartner:

  • Worldwide SaaS revenue within the enterprise application software market is forecast to surpass $8.5 billion in 2010, up 14.1 percent from 2009 revenue of $7.5 billion.
  • There will be a shift in total SaaS revenue from just over 10 percent of the enterprise software market in 2009, to more than 16 percent of the market in 2014.
  • SaaS is forecast to account for 26 percent of CRM market total revenue in 2010.

Despite the fact that the IT industry is clearly moving in the direction of software-as-a-service, it’s important to remember that we’re not there yet. Issues ranging from bandwidth, to uptime, to security concerns are rightfully giving enterprise IT managers pause before adopting an all-out SaaS strategy. These issues will likely be resolved over time, allowing most, if not all systems to be hosted in the cloud. But for now, it’s important to remember that you have options. Think carefully, and do what’s right for you and your business.

Posted by Tom | PerfectForms

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As Accurate as a Weatherman from 1950

August 17, 2010

Jon Brodkin recently wrote a thought-provoking, if controversial, piece in Network World highlighting the common misconceptions surrounding cloud computing. Even though it seems like cloud computing and cloud applications affect every aspect of our business lives (which I don’t feel is a bad thing), there appears to be a lot of confusion out there amongst business users as to what the cloud actually provides. And oddly enough, I wouldn’t be surprised to find some IT users that are stumped as well – not by what the cloud can do, per se, but by what it can’t do…which according to Brodkin includes: replacing MS Office, pre-determining legal ownership of IP, and always being cheap.

Jon’s article is less of a celebration of cloud computing and more of a myth-busting “gotcha” segment. I agree that the more information we can share about the intricacies of the cloud and how it compares to traditional on-premise deployments the better, but there is one point in particular with which I take issue, and one point with which I totally agree.

Disagree: Brodkin says cloud computing isn’t as affordable as people think. He uses the example of some cloud apps offering attractive subscription prices and then requiring Internet bandwidth upgrades or bizarre contracts. While it’s up to a customer to read through the contracts they sign (and as a cloud provider I can tell you that no one I know puts out shady EULAs), the Internet bandwidth argument is a little questionable. While bandwidth upgrades can cost upwards of $10,000, it isn’t difficult to find out how much you’ll need for any given cloud app. That’s part of due diligence, and there are thousands upon thousands of cloud applications that will not hog your bandwidth.

Agree: The article’s first contention is that cloud computing will not put IT professionals out of a job and/or make them obsolete. I wish that more IT staffers would absorb this reality and stop worrying that the cloud above their heads is planning to rain all over their careers. “Moving to the cloud” does not need to be followed by IT losing their jobs, and very rarely is. While companies that have been forced to lay off workers due to tough economic times can work more efficiently with collaborative cloud-based BPM solutions (increase productivity, decrease cost) – there will always be a need for management, supervision and technical liaison with cloud vendors. As Brodkin notes, certain skill sets might eventually become less relevant, but employing people with technical knowledge will never fall out of fashion.

Posted by Tom | Cloud Computing, On-Demand, PerfectForms, SaaS, Workflow, business process management, on-premise, workflow software

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Thinking Outside the EHR Box

May 14, 2010

Electronic Health Records (EHRs) will undoubtedly improve care once we navigate the long and winding road of how to implement them. One way to make the journey easier is to realize that there will be workflows at medical practices, hospitals and labs that simply will not fit into stringent EHR systems.

Don Fluckinger, a writer at SearchHealthIT.com, does a great job at pointing this out in an article (Moving paper EHR processes to electronic medical forms) where he cites PerfectForms customer, the State of Oregon’s Office of Long Term Care Ombudsman, as a great example.

Fluckinger writes: “Every office workflow has its quirks (read: nonstandard processes). These include intake; discharge; billing information handoff; personal health record, or PHR, request; reporting; specialist patient referral — or some other real-world information-routing scenario a vendor cannot anticipate when it programs an EHR system. To solve those quirks, electronic medical forms can provide on-ramps for EHR processes into the EHR system for data presently typed or transcribed in.”

Oregon’s Long Term Care office is doing exactly that. Bill Bard, a Certified Ombudsman who volunteers to advocate on behalf of the state’s elderly, used PerfectForms to completely revamp how the agency collects and reports data. He transformed a paper-based process – where forms would be completed by hand, passed to office staff, and manually keyed into a database – into a streamlined, automated process. If one man volunteering his time can have such a positive impact on an organization, possibilities abound for other healthcare organizations as they realize the power of easy-to-use online forms.

(For more information about Bill Bard and Oregon’s Office of Long Term Care, see the PerfectForms press release issue on May 6, 2010.)

Posted by PF | PerfectForms

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No online option for the Census? Senseless.

April 7, 2010

Check out the recent post by Tom Allanson, PerfectForms CEO, on the CIO blog.

Posted by Paula | PerfectForms

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Respecting the Business User

March 19, 2010

Gartner recently released seven guidelines for business process management (BPM) success, all of them being conceptual priorities and strategies as opposed to technical specifications. The recommendations, led by VP and distinguished analyst Bill Rosser, are designed to help companies determine which BPM projects to pursue.

Of these seven guidelines (summarized here on eBizQ), amongst them “limited scope,” “high value,” “clear alignment to goals,” “the right metrics,” “goal agreement,” “enthusiastic business sponsor” and “business user engagement,” I want to focus my discussion on the last two.

Gaining the support of a “business sponsor” and engaging “business users” is integral to the success of any BPM project, but for reasons beyond those listed in the original press release. An enthusiastic business sponsor shouldn’t just be the senior executive who will benefit from the project – he should play a primary role in authorizing it, allocating budget for it and implementing it. Rather than be a “cheerleader” for the IT team presumably pursuing the BPM project in the first place, the business leader should be, well, leading it.

The second point of contention is the idea of engaging business users for BPM project success. In the press release, Gartner phrases the advantages of this course of action: “getting them on board typically means offering a fresh perspective on how to look at what they do in their jobs, and making a process view easy to understand and intriguing.”

The idea of encouraging IT to see things from a business user’s perspective is commonly advocated by a variety of BPM experts, not just Gartner, and on face it seems like a very civil, collaborative means of moving forward. My issue with IT trying to make things simpler and more “intriguing” for business users, however, is that it elicits at the very least a mild sense of condescension.

Forgive me if I’m examining this from too granular a perspective, but the vision that comes to mind when imagining IT professionals trying to position the jobs of business professionals in an interesting way is that of a big brother guiding his smaller, less experienced sibling and showing him how to tie his shoes (except in this case, the younger brother is 37 with a master’s degree in marketing). Ultimately, the idea of asking IT users to design a process view so that business users – those who directly drive the creation, implementation and successful resolution of business processes (and therefore BPM) – can understand them is patronizing.

This is the counter-productive result of putting one group in charge of addressing the needs of an entirely different group, and by no means is attributable to any one organization or influencer. I have a special appreciation for business users and their needs because I see the level to which they’re disenfranchised; it’s why my company’s focus is on serving the needs of business users by letting them build and automate every process, saving IT from having to pay a house call and letting both groups focus on their own jobs. The presumption that IT should influence BPM in any way is damaging for both IT and business users because it’s convoluted. Those who need the solution should be able to create the solution. IT professionals will welcome the freedom to focus on things that actually affect them.

In implementing BPM or any sort of organization-wide project, please remember that “business users” are simply professionals whose expertise is in a subject other than programming.

Posted by Tom | Cloud Computing, On-Demand, PerfectForms, Workflow, bpm, business process management, on-premise, workflow software

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Go with the (Cash Flow)

March 19, 2010

In an interview with Victoria Barret of Forbes this week, IDC Senior Vice President Frank Gens predicted that 2010 would be “a transformational year for IT.” In particular, Gens discussed a potential economic rebound that would see IT growth return to 2007 levels, and a technological renaissance of sorts – “the basis for new leadership around mobile computing, cloud computing and emerging markets.”

I completely agree with Gens’ expectation that 2010 will be a watershed year for priming the future of the IT sector, but not necessarily because of stellar software sales or a new widget. In the wake of a unparalleled recession, preceded by more than thirty years of vendor-driven autocracy, we’re now wise enough – and some would say disillusioned enough – to realize that maintaining a herd mentality when it comes to product adoption and deployment is counter-productive. For years we were sold on huge, enterprise-wide solution suites (ERP comes to mind) that sent our data to silos and hundreds of thousands of our dollars to vendors up-front, even though we knew inside that not all of these applications were necessary, that some of it was merely bloatware. We feared becoming beholden to large vendors and their suite upgrades but we went along with it because that’s just how it was.

Well, in 2010, that’s not how it has to be. Gens likened the old-school model of on-premise installations to pouring concrete and letting it set “for four or five years” as opposed to the cloud computing model, in which you can pay as you go, consume only the elements of a product that you feel you need and execute your company’s objectives with some degree of freedom. Of course it’s a monumental financial relief to not have to pay for unnecessary add-ons, but more importantly, using on-demand solutions is testament to our level of engagement in how we run our businesses.

The good news is that in today’s environment of cloud computing you don’t have to be a fortune 500 company with a multimillion dollar IT budget to get the benefit of the latest revolution in computing. All you need is a little time to put together the list of companies that best suit your requirements, a web browser and you can get started paying as you get value right now. If the past decade has taught us anything at all it’s that everything in IT is transitory – as soon as something is determined as the “new ideal,” it is on its way to being dethroned.

Posted by Tom | Cloud Computing, PerfectForms, bpm, business process management, on-premise, workflow software

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Evolving Roles and Responsibilities

March 19, 2010

Connie Moore of Forrester Research posted a fascinating introduction to the firm’s 2010 BPM areas of focus shortly before the holidays. In her post she discusses Forrester’s “Role Deep Dives” experiment, in which Connie interviewed business process professionals at 28 large enterprises across nine countries and five continents.

The findings were extremely interesting and illuminated the differences between various business process roles and responsibilities, regardless of how similar they may have initially appeared to the unfamiliar eye. ebizQ’s own Ian Louw does a good job of summarizing the findings here.

From various BPM-centric roles Forrester devised thought-provoking – if not slightly harsh – classifications, including “stakeholders,” “change agents, “gurus,” “wannabes” and “prodigies.” The key message I took from Moore’s research was that job roles (and, of course, titles) within BPM are highly transitory and that business process professionals are seeing significant evolution in their relationships with the two strange bedfellows of the enterprise – IT and business users.

Not surprisingly, therefore, is Moore’s contention that business process managers should aim to support “cross-functional and departmental” processes by adopting packaged solutions like CRM, ERP and PLM while integrating data from BI and/or predictive analytics into their existing BPM framework. Nothing quite screams “I’m a mediator and I’m asking you to collaborate” quite like the marriage of unstructured data integration and business analytics.

Even though it won’t be an easy transition for us as business process professionals to embrace the role of business-IT coach and referee, the benefits of such successful mediation can completely revolutionize the way your company functions. Speaking to the needs of two very different groups while short-changing neither is a delicate balance but it is expected of us in 2010 and beyond. After all, we are becoming increasingly interconnected in both form and function.

I encourage all of us to heed Connie’s insight and to embrace our inner “change agent” and “guru” and lead our organizations into a more collaborative and efficient new year.

Posted by Tom | PerfectForms, Workflow, business process management

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