Process People Q&A with Raju Oak, Kleinwort Benson Private Bank, Part 2

In part one of this two-part Process People interview, we welcomed Raju Oak, head of process services at Kleinwort Benson in London. Raju is part of the transformation and systems services group within the company. Kleinwort Benson is a provider of banking and financial services to corporate and private clients in the UK and Channel Islands. In Part 2 we hear more about Raju’s key learnings from his BPM implementation.

Process People: How did Kleinwort Benson determine the metrics by which the company deems the project to be a success, both initially and on an on-going basi?

Raju Oak: It is important to note that our initial project was a pilot designed to first prove out the potential of the BPM approach. We faced several challenges during the pilot project that we had to negotiate along the way. Perhaps the biggest issue was that the pilot was being introduced through IT, and at that time IT did not have strong credibility with the business. At the same time the business did not recognize the connection between the challenges that it faced and the absence of a managed process infrastructure. We also had a strong skepticism about BPM within some parts of IT as well, based upon an earlier failed attempt to implement a workflow tool from another vendor as a point solution. There really was no experience of process engineering within the business. These challenges made it a complex and vulnerable project, with a long gestation, and its success depended upon strong leadership from the CTO.

Because of this, we ran the BPM pilot as a “skunk works” project so that we could bring business “a success”. The metrics for the pilot were defined and agreed upon with the CTO and focused on the ability of the solution to address many of our challenges. The success of the pilot resulted in us taking the process live to the business with considerable success. While we don’t like to share specific numbers, I can tell you that our metrics for the live production process were focused around the areas of visibility, manageability, through-put, level of process integration, transaction times and overall effort.

Process People: What are some key learnings that you would offer to IT people just getting started with BPM at their companies?

Raju Oak: Senior business management must be convinced of the approach, the methodology, the technology, the solution and you have to have the ability to generate support for the approach from within IT.

You need to introduce business modeling skills and methods to IT (in addition to application development-oriented methods they already use) and make staff aware of the distinction between each.

It is a good idea to construct a process model that solves a ‘real’ business problem using business vocabulary, and demonstrate what a ‘managed’ process infrastructure means in your environment. This includes building a method for process analysis and deployment appropriate to the level of maturity within your organization.

Companies need to create a BPM champion from within their IT staff who is capable of communicating the distinction between workflow and business process management to the rest of IT.

And last, but certainly not least you need to be able to get the IT staff and business users to jointly show to senior management that BPM is a viable approach. This includes explaining the solution, methodology and of course having an implementation and change management plan to take the solution live

Process People: Where do you think that BPM is moving over the next 5-10 years? What changes are going to really push the technology forward?

Raju Oak: BPM is currently crossing the chasm between being a specialist toolkit adopted by visionaries as a means of differentiation and competitive advantage, and that of being a mainstream management approach within an industry ecosystem that assures those who apply it a degree of success. As more examples of comprehensive BPM implementations by successful role models [e.g., companies] emerge, the take-up will increase even faster. I think as the market matures, the focus will change away from implementing and managing portfolios of processes, to one of managing an integrated enterprise process governance framework. This will require a step change in the scale and sophistication of technology, not unlike the step up from point applications to ERP systems.