“BPM-Ripe” Processes?

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. 

In my mind, the three points made above are the key stepping stones that separate workflow automation from BPM. In fact, I think of automation as merely the “step zero” that must to occur in the sequence above before I can get any real insight into my processes.

Now, in contrast to my insurance customer example, there are also other many other business processes where the primary purpose of automation is to drive repeatability, and to deal with exceptions in such a way that it ultimately turns those exceptions back to repeatability. In essence, I’m talking about the industrialization of human decision making.
 
These processes do exist (for example, customers doing processes such as vehicle registration renewal, product returns, shipment re-routing, and even HR on-boarding) and in isolation, the biggest benefit that our customers derive from a BPM tool in this instance is the automation of their workflows. But in this case, the process reports that they receive either measure efficiency of the industrialization (rework, time spent, etc.) or only hold business value when taken in context with a higher-level parent process.

Perhaps the distinction between what could be referred to as “BPM-ripe” processes and “BPM-ambivalent-but-automation-ripe” processes is an important factor in determining an organization’s BPM Maturity Level.  

One of the mantras of the BPMC team here at Lombardi is to help customers understand that the difference between these two distinctions. This is really important, because it can mean the difference between companies doing the right thing for their unique BPM project starting on “day one” versus having them realize what the right thing is – much, much later in the project (such as during the third playback).