Process People: We frequently hear from Lombardi that BPM has everything to do with organizational culture.  Can you give us one concrete example that you commonly see which demonstrates this cultural shift?

Wesley Chung: Yes, it’s very much a cultural thing, and I would say that a big part of that is trusting the [BPMS] system.  Many organizations still rely on old-fashioned, manual status reports to track the success of a process because they don’t have any other way to know that people are getting their work done.  A traditional status report provides a way for them to monitor that.  Without a product like Teamworks, there’s no way to efficiently and effectively monitor that people are accomplishing their tasks in-line with the business process.  It’s how things have always been done.  Ultimately, they need to be willing to trust the tool if they want to change how they manage a process. The other major cultural challenge is that managers have to learn new concepts and completely alter their methodologies for managing processes.

Process People: So what is one example of a cultural difference between managing processes manually and managing them with a product like Teamworks?

Wesley Chung: The difference is really about managing exceptions.  An exception is an instance where a process was not followed in the normal case, where someone in the organization didn’t do what they were supposed to do and the process did not turn out as expected.  Once managers see that the process team can provide them with some automated reports and the managers realize that they can trust the system, then they can start thinking about managing the exceptions instead of managing the processes that were carried out properly.

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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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We just wanted to check in and report on the first day of our annual Driven User Conference here in sunny Austin, TX.

The day began with CEO Rod Favaron’s keynote, which was all about how we are now at “the end of the beginning.” The secret is out about BPM, attention and visibility are soaring to new heights, and we are now entering a new phase of adoption and maturity.

A big part of this progression is the move from Project to Program to Culture, as Rod put it — in the early days of course it was all about getting your first BPM project up and running successfully, and then it became all about growing that project into a full-fledged program. But the next phase that Lombardi customers and partners are moving into right now is one in which BPM begins to truly impact the culture of any and every part of the organization that it touches, indeed the organization as a whole. This is the true value proposition of BPM ultimately — the idea that BPM becomes part of your DNA, that process becomes an integral part of what your company does every day.

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