This post is all about the cultural changes that BPM can (and needs to) drive within an organization. But it’s also about some of the ways in which processes don’t live in the clouds — they live on the ground, in real situations, with real people. I think it’s really important to remember this fact in our day-to-day work. I like telling this story because it’s from a long time ago when technology was quite different — and yet there are stark similarities to the challenges that we face today.

When I started at Sprint (my former employer), I was among the people who just assumed that when you picked up the phone, there would always be a dial tone — to me this was no big deal. I didn’t really understand all the technology, all the incredible things in the background that happen to actually put phone service in your home. This was of course ten years ago, so cell phones were popular, but everybody still had a landline, and the company overall was still focused on the latter market.

One of the first things the company did was send me out to a call center. This was part of my “process discovery” phase in my new role (though we didn’t call it that) — my goal was to see and document how things actually worked, and then find ways for us to improve.

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Recently we sat down with Rachel Aukes, a member of the Wells Fargo Financial Information Systems Continuous Improvement Team. Rachel, who plays an active role in the use of BPM at Wells Fargo, shared how Wells Fargo got started with BPM. In February, Wells Fargo received the Global Award for Excellence in BPM and workflow.

Process People: Describe in as much detail as possible the problem or need on a project level that first made you consider BPM and/or Lombardi as a viable solution.

Rachel Aukes: Our BPM program came about as a solution to organizational level needs - in fact we selected our BPM solution (Teamworks) and began to implement it before deciding on a specific project. We were challenged with increasingly complex, paper-intensive processes that had a large number of manual steps and handoffs. That was obviously inefficient and meant there was room for errors (such as bad typing, misplaced files, etc.). The idea of what BPM offers became prevalent in 2006 when most of our development staff was focused on maintaining our legacy systems while building our future systems of record. This effort was strategically important to our company; however, the business had immediate tactical needs that must continue to be met. We asked ourselves what we should do to best support our business partners, and we determined that BPM was a good solution for this. We haven’t looked back.

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Process People will be conducting a series of periodic interview sessions with Lombardi customers to provide useful insight into the BPM issues that they faced at their company, guidance for how to overcome obstacles, and to share the lessons learned during their process improvement journey. These real-world interviews will be posted regularly, so be sure and check back frequently. . .

In this Process People interview, we welcome Jeremy Kraybill, CIO for Boundless Network.

Process People: Describe in as much detail as possible the problem or need on a project level that first made you consider BPM and/or Lombardi as a viable solution.

Jeremy Kraybill: At Boundless Network, we were undergoing a business process re-engineering project at our business. We initially set out to document and analyze manual process changes that would reduce our company’s cash cycle and help us scale our back office. After the first couple weeks of the project, we realized that there were a whole set of business processes held in individuals’ heads that we could benefit from automating. Nobody at the company had previous BPM experience, but after looking at the first BPM vendor’s demo we knew that a BPM solution had great potential for our business pains. After a 3-month evaluation process we selected a BPM solution and have been very happy with the decision and how the implementations went.

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