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. 

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I and several of my colleagues will be in London next week (Feb. 23 – 25) for the Gartner Business Process Management Summit. We are an event sponsor of the three-day event that is themed “BPM: Thrive, Survive, Capitalize.”

We are excited that two of our customers have been scheduled to present at the summit.  If you’re there as well, please stop by see their presentations.

Toby Redshaw, CIO at Aviva plc, will provide a BPM end-user case study entitled “Aviva End-User Case Study: Modern BPM – Doing More for Less.” Toby will share his insight on how companies can get started and grow fast with BPM, and offer lessons from what he’s learned from four years in the trenches with modern BPM.

Raju Oak, Head of Process Services at Kleinwort Benson Private Bank, will present his company’s BPM experiences in a case study entitled “How Kleinwort Benson Delivered Clear Results with BPM,” Raju will review how Kleinwort Benson improved the efficiency of their deal settlement processes by 60 percent while at the same time reducing its complexity by nearly 30 percent.

Come out and see us, if you’re at the conference.

I’d like to share with you a little set-piece that I often use with clients as a learning aid.  I call it (rather unimaginatively!) my “Google Maps exercise” and it makes some very neat points with regards to process decomposition and modeling best practices.

A common challenge I encounter is that people get bogged down with figuring out the level of detail they should go to. This isn’t because of the lack of a definitive standard for process levels – I think the root cause of the difficulty is simply that process modeling is not an exact science.  In fact, much of it is quite subjective.

So, the exercise usually goes something like this…

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Getting started with BPM makes many people nervous, and for good reason.  Change can bring uncertainty and fear – and hence often generates resistance.  In response to this type of internal skepticism and unrest, I frequently recommend conducting a 2×6 workshop when initially analyzing your processes to engage and excite the people who live the processes every day.

But before I tell how to run a 2×6 workshop, I would like to put it in context:

BPM is first and foremost a discipline to improve the efficiency, effectiveness and agility of a business, from a process viewpoint, to deliver real business value.  That being said, you have to do a certain amount of rewiring PEOPLE and your organization before you can start worrying about the software.

To really drive BPM in your organization, you need strategies in place to make the shift a bit easier for your workers to consume.  People don’t want change to be forced upon them.  But if you present them with an opportunity to help drive that change, then they can become fully invested as participants who help shape their own future.  So when you begin your initiative and need to take stock of where you are, you do some process analysis.  How do you get started?

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When your organization’s products are intangible, like an investment CD or a retirement plan, it’s sometimes difficult to identify waste or inefficiencies in your business.  Today I want to discuss some of the unique attributes of financial services organizations and how to look at these businesses through the prism of process to find problems that are often overlooked.

Financial services often tend to think of themselves as very different from other types of organizations.  For example, many firms have organically grown along the lines of “functional silos” based on different types of product, reinforced by separate IT applications supporting these product categories. Yet, every organization shares similar horizontal functions such as human resources, finance or accounting.  These functions alone offer more than enough opportunity for delivering business value through a BPM initiative.  But, I promise there’s more!

Financial services companies are generally very IT-intensive, and open to new technology and approaches to problem solving.  However, it can be difficult for these organizations to determine which solutions fit their needs the best – or even which problems to address – since their products are not tangible like a car or any product that you can hold in your hand.  If you can’t see your product, it can be difficult to see your problems like “defects” and “waste”.

Furthermore, regulatory monitoring & reporting requirements such as Sarbanes Oxley and Basel 2 have weighed heavily on this industry. Combined with global economic factors such as the credit crunch, there’s huge pressure on financial services companies to increase visibility, transparency and controls whilst reducing costs and simultaneously improving customer service.

In steps BPM…

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The best description of “executive level buy-in” that I know of is only 7 letters long:

F-U-N-D-I-N-G

Maybe that doesn’t help you as much as you had hoped, so I’ll provide some additional color around this one.  Funding is the absolute bottom-line when we talk about executive buy-in to a BPM initiative.  But funding has to reflect the iterative approach, which means that the project isn’t over when the process is deployed.  The project is really just getting started.

Funding has to map back to the methodology required to do the project right.  It has to reflect all three phases of a proper BPM methodology.  We’ve discussed this methodology on Process People before, and if you haven’t seen some of those posts, I recommend that you read one first!

In reality, executive buy-in also means you have to have an executive who’s willing to get up on a podium and endorse the process improvement program organization-wide.  It means that the executive has to be willing to commit funding in every manner necessary – money, people, time and so on.

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In a previous post I said that it should go without saying that you have to showcase your initial BPM project if you want to drive adoption across the entire organization.  I focused on metrics.  Although other areas of the business might not understand the functional process implemented, they will find interest in how you are measuring the process for improvement.  This can correlate to other areas of the business as well.

Today I want to address the folks out there who don’t feel comfortable showcasing their project because they don’t have the biggest ROI numbers yet.  Maybe it has only been in production for a couple of weeks.  What else can you focus on?

The Before and After

What did the process look like before the solution and how has it changed?  Were there lots of manual hand-offs, faxes and emails?  Did participants have to log onto four different systems just to review a work item? Was there inconsistency in the way people executed the process?  How much time did managers spend building and running reports before status meetings?  What does it look like now?

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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.

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Driven 2008 has come to a close, and we’re really thrilled with this year’s event. Many of the conference attendees stayed for the Lombardi golf tournament yesterday, which took place on the beautiful Fazio Canyons golf course at Barton Creek Resort and Spa. The weather was perfect and the golf was great.

On that note, I thought it might be timely to provide a quick recap of a session that Toby Cappello hosted on Wednesday. The session was called: “The Monday Morning Quarterback Discusses 10 Painful Lessons Learned.” Toby started things off with a golf analogy – one which he lived up to on the course yesterday!

The analogy went something like this: “BPM is like golf – you need to build muscle memory if you want to develop consistency and achieve success.”

In all honesty, I can’t really think of any other combinations of a technology (BPMS) and a discipline (BPM) that fits so perfectly with this analogy. It cuts to the core of Lombardi’s methodology. In fact, if you break it down even further you’ll see more uncanny parallels that help to visualize what exactly you’ll need to do to achieve success with BPM.

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It is tempting to go on and on about the relationship between business and IT. Here at Lombardi we like to instead talk about effective cross-functional teams that can build the end-to-end process together. And we practice what we preach – this is why we have BPM Analysts, Consultants and Developers on our delivery teams. Note this does not mean companies have to fundamentally re-organize, but they do need to be able to create dedicated cross-functional teams if they are going to be successful.

That being said, I think that user interfaces are key to how these cross-functional teams can work together effectively. This is something that I touched on briefly in my previous post about Web2.0 and “making BPM cool again.”

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