As the manager of our BPM Consultants, I get to see literally dozens of interesting customer use cases. One particularly interesting insurance customer recently described an example of their business processes where the decision being made within the process is as important (actually even more important) than the speed at which the work is being done. That is quite an amazing testament to power of BPM when you think about it.

At Lombardi, we say this all the time. Obtaining useful data about the quality of decisions being made – as well as the patterns that drive those decisions – is the first step in realizing the promise of BPM.

However, in order for data to be turned into “wisdom,” I think it is important for companies to realize that it has to be viewed through three primary filtering principles. They are:

1. Visibility – Show me information in a human-consumable format. It needs to provide details that can be understood by mere mortals.
2. Analysis – Allow me to ‘twist and turn’ and ‘slice and dice’ the information views so that I can extrapolate information from the data and deduce higher-level knowledge as necessary. 
3. Control – Once I’ve seen, analyzed, and judged what the data is telling me, allow me to take some immediate action on the source of data (the process) in a way that lets me materially affect the outcome. 

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Like all enterprise software solutions, the person implementing a BPM strategy must contend with a chasm between the business and IT. The two speak different languages, have different priorities and tend to justify results in a different light.

So which side do you approach first?

There’s a tendency for enterprise software to gravitate to IT. And why not?  IT gets it, right? They understand the technology and the inherent benefits it brings to the table. And IT is constantly justifying new software, hardware and services through the annual budget reviews. So it seems natural for anyone wishing to see a BPM solution deployed to look at IT first.

I believe this is a mistake.

Despite conventional thinking, the right place to begin conveying the benefits of a BPM deployment is on the business side of the house. That’s because BPM has to be looked at not for the technology, features and specs, but for its ability to change and improve the business.

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Ed.: While a complete enterprise BPM roll-out is a multi-year effort, this two-part series focuses on the Pilot as the crucial first step in an enterprise initiative designed to spread throughout the organization.

In this second post (our initial coverage here) I’ll give a few practical, actionable advice and detailed recommendations around picking processes for the Pilot, staffing up, and executing in a way that will ensure success beyond this initial phase.

Picking processes

Above all else, you should be careful when choosing the Pilot processes, so that they have:

• Limited Cross-function/Cross-organization scope — this proves your ability to work across groups to define end to end processes, but don’t tackle more than a little. You want to minimize the “political” battles in these early Pilots.
• Limited Cross-system/data/information scope — this proves that you can integrate with existing infrastructure and handle complex information structures. Again, pick one or two of your key 4 systems and do one or two interfaces into them. What you want is learning. Oftentimes the integrations to systems are the “longest pole” in the deployment tent. Keep this to a minimum so that you focus on the new BPM issues, and don’t get bogged down in IT integration issues.
• Known business performance metrics — this will help focus your development efforts on driving measurable, demonstrable business benefits. It is imperative that specific and significant thought be given to how you want to manage the process, not simply how you want to execute the process.This will likely be the most wow-inspiring aspect of the implementation to the business.

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While a complete enterprise BPM roll-out is a multi-year effort, this two-part series focuses on the Pilot as the crucial first step in an enterprise initiative designed to spread throughout the organization.

On first toeing the BPM waters, there is what we call the “Startup” phase. The goal for this phase is to demonstrate that your organization can adopt and benefit from BPM on a broad scale. Your Pilot project, hopefully, is a great success – and frankly, it usually is. Why? Because you have spent months laying the groundwork, aligning the team, building the business case and acquiring the technology. Your company – at least the part working on the Pilot — is aligned, dedicated, and singularly focused on a shared and common goal.

But now, with a single successful process under your belt – what comes next?

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Ed.: In this second post in the series (see our previous coverage here), Fahad is focusing specifically on the Enterprise Plan Program. Think of this as the plan for rolling out a BPM initiative across the company in the first 180 days and beyond.

Enterprise BPM initiatives require well-defined operating procedures for selecting projects, governing delivery, staffing teams and managing infrastructure requirements. We call these procedures the Four Pillars of Enterprise BPM. The Enterprise Plan is therefore comprised of 4 corresponding sub-plans, including the:

• Strategy Plan
• Governance Plan
• Capability Plan
• Infrastructure Plan

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In this series of two posts, we’ll lay out the development of what we call the Enterprise Plan Program. Think of this as the plan for rolling out a BPM initiative across the company in the first 180 days and beyond.

The objective of the Program is to develop the plan for how the enterprise BPM program needs to be rolled out and managed past the “startup” (or Pilot) phase. This includes a consideration of strategy, governance, organizational capability and infrastructure impact. In many cases, the team driving this deliverable must also answer how the enterprise BPM initiative fits with other business and technical initiatives that may already be in progress.

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