BusinessProcessManagement, BPM for short, is concerned with the integration of work processes that have evolved separately to serve functional needs in the enterprise. At times, the lesser used term
BusinessProcessIntegration (BPI) is employed to stress the importance of "integration".
This approach focuses on needs of the company to constantly evolve its processes to respond to changes in the business environment (regulatory and legislative requirements, competitive forces, partnering opportunities, etc). See
http://www.bcs.org/BCS/Products/Publications/Books/BySeries/Other/BusinessProcessManagement/ for a new book from British Computing Society.
Another related term is Business
Process
Improvement. A classic (1991) book on this is ISBN 0070267685.
See also
TheBusinessOfBpm and
TheTechnologyOfBpm
BusinessProcessManagement is not really new, according to
http://bpm-today.newsfactor.com/story.xhtml?story_id=24304. It cited
EnterpriseResourcePlanning as an example of software that already incorporated process management, before the term has been adopted widely. And in business the concept of
SupplyChainManagement has been around for a while.
BusinessProcessReengineering can be one approach used to addressing the needs of
BusinessProcessManagement. In these instances, the project scope will invariably be crossing existing organization boundaries. OTOH, some felt
BusinessProcessReengineering is not
BusinessProcessManagement, see
http://www.darwinmag.com/read/030103/wavehistory.html.
The authors of
ComponentBasedBusiness provide a conceptual framework to building an organization that is inherently agile.
Standards organizations have already made progress in defining building blocks for IT solutions. An example of this being the
ExtensibleMarkupLanguage based BPEL (
BusinessProcessExecutionLanguage).
One vendor consortium is BPMI, which has produced several specifications. See
http://www.bpmi.org/specifications.esp.
The Strategy dimension
Need to link to StrategicPlanning for larger projects
Nick Carr, author of
DoesItMatter, said in his May03 article at
http://www.dataframeworks.com/pdfs/R0305B.pdf titled "IT Doesn't Matter", that former Strategic investments could and would turn to becoming a strategic liability. He suggested American Hospital Supply innovative use of IT in the 70s locked out competitors, but that system was viewed as a "millstone around their necks" by senior management in the 90s.
It is therefore within the mandate of
BusinessProcessManagement to examine whether process improvement efforts will create a longterm liability that may exceed the benefits that can be realized within the planning horizon.
SystemsThinking - a "core" competency
Peter Fingar said "General System Thinking" is a required
DomainKnowledge for BPM practioners, because BPM is about the business of managing complexity. See Sep05 article in BPTrends.
He said this as a description of
SystemsThinking
- Systems thinking is a discipline for seeing wholes. It is a framework for seeing interrelationships rather than things, for seeing patterns of change rather than static snapshots.
BPM related programs and initiatives
SixSigma - not business focused
A few years ago,
SixSigma was leading the
ChangeManagement drives in many organizations. People were getting certified by consulting firms, statistics were collected and interpreted, and a few good things emerged.
An article called BPM 101, at
http://www.buzzle.com/editorials/3-24-2006-91846.asp, written by the president of
SixSigma in 2006, have all these engineering based terms like "benchmarking", "diagnosing", "base-lining", "measure", "data-driven" etc embedded throughout his thesis.
- I tried in vain to search for words like communicating, negotiating, etc., but it is still good to have his perspective.
Resources
Lombardisoftware has a survival guide at
http://www.lombardisoftware.com/library/BPM_SurvivalGuide.pdf.
Tibco sponsored paper on BPM user guide at
http://www.tibco.com/resources/mk/tibco_white_paper-bpm.pdf.
A 2003 book called "The Third Wave", co-authored by the BPMI co-chair Howard Smith, can be viewed at
http://www.fairdene.com/. The viewpoints expressed elicited a large body of comments on the subject, implementation and impact of
BusinessProcessManagement.
For people interested in the history of
BusinessProcessManagement, see a multipart blog in 2006 at
http://www.ebizq.net/blogs/column2/archives/2006/06/a_short_history_7.php.
A widely read blog on the technical dimension of
BusinessProcessManagement is available at
http://itredux.com/blog/.
BusinessProcessReengineering resource site
http://www.prosci.com/reengineering.htm
Two of the larger websites dedicated to
BusinessProcessManagement concerns are:
International Institute of Business Analysis has a 200page Book of Knowledge to download.
PeterSenge book on Dance of Change -
http://www.fieldbook.com/DoC/DOC.html.
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