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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There’s a great piece up on Forbes right now, titled “The ABC’s of BPM.”

The article is part of the very well-informed “JargonSpy” series, whose goal is to educate the publication’s audience about the business value behind some of the technology world’s more opaque acronyms (let’s be honest, BPM isn’t exactly swimming in sex appeal is it?)

The author is Dan Woods, who is also the CTO at Evolved Media and the author of the book Process First: The Evolution of the Business Process Expert.

In the article, Dan talks in depth about the coming of age of the process expert, especially vis-à-vis the translation task that is “needed constantly between the business as it defines the process and the IT staff as it communicates what functionality is needed.”

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The other day SearchCIO published a feature on BPM that included two Lombardi customers, Wells Fargo and NACCO Materials Handling.

The piece is notable as a case study because of the quantifiable successes it reports - for example, the $250,000 savings realized on a project with the centralized loan disposition group at Wells Fargo, and the cost authorization system that Bob Shallow and his team over at NACCO implemented in an unprecedented 15 days.

The author, Sarah Varney, is right in pointing out the many challenges companies face along the way - everything from internal politics, to an inherent distrust of IT tools on the part of the business, to issues of bandwidth and a lack of resources.  But as Wells Fargo and NACCO have shown, anything is possible with the right team and the right solution.

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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