Taking BPM to the civil world

In recent years, the BPM (Business Process Management) market is gaining adoption. Due to high cost and complexity, the adoption of BPM technologies has been primarily limited to the Fortune 500; however, there are initiatives to broaden the target market of BPM. For example, Microsoft Business Process Alliance (BPA) extends the benefits of BPM to the SMB market and offers enhanced functionality to existing Microsoft customers. Which makes me wonder, why not take it one step further and use BPM technologies in our day-to-day civil life?

The main building blocks of a process - people, applications and information, exist in civil life as it exist in a business environment. For example, in a business environment, customer service representative would use CRM application to save customers information. Similarly in civil-life, one would use her bank web interface to check credits and debits.

Moreover, now it is more feasible than ever before. With Web2.0 technology, people involved in civil-life processes - our friends, family members and even our banker are accessible through social networks. WorkLight enables corporate (e.g. banks) to securely collaborate over social networks with customers (as well as partners and employees). Moreover, the increasing embracement of SOA technology, makes the applications we consume available. For having managed civil processes, all left to do is to connect the dots...

Now you probably say "Why would one bother managing his civil-life processes with dedicated technology?". Fair question. But think of it - few decades ago no one thought she would use a word processor to write a letter or a spreadsheet to calculate her debt. Now imagine your life today managing your personal information without it! The same will happen with your personal processes.

In a business environment, BPM technology benefits are reaped when used with repetitive processes. When you repeat a working procedure many times, you have an interest to automate it, execute it in a valid manner, monitor its progress and continually improve its performance to gain operational efficiency and eventually save money.

In civil life, as processes are usually not repetitive, the benefits and usages of BPM technology are yet to be discovered. Would it be worth the effort of the BPM define-develop-deploy-execute-monitor life-cycle? Intuitively, the answer is no. Furthermore, how people will handle technical aspects? It is clear that it would need much more easier methodology and simpler tools to use it for civil needs.

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Are BI tools a trusted advisor?

In order to take decisions people get advised with someone or something they trust and feel comfortable with, a 'trusted advisor'. BI tools are mainly deployed to support corporate end-users taking business decisions. Do end-users perceive BI tools as trusted advisor? according to recent Forrester research, most of them not.

This research is an example to the point I made in my last post, that vendors should build products customers want to use. According to the research, more than half of IT managers said their end-users reverted back to individual tools, such as desktop spreadsheets, to get data or reports they couldn't get through the BI applications. Two-thirds of respondents said their end-users felt the BI tools were somewhat or very difficult to learn.

In the quest for a good advise, you often need a middleman to connect you with the right trusted advisor or communicate with her for you. Corporate use middlemen to analyze needs, deploy and implement BI systems, generate reports, guide end-users and more. The research shows that we still far from self-service BI, as three-quarters of respondents said most reports and dashboards are not created by end-users.

Corporate may choose to use an internal (i.e. IT department) or an external (i.e. BI consultancy service) middleman. In general, the more your business environment is turbulent, the more likely you will need to adapt your BI implementation to new business decision needs. In that case, you may want an internal IT resource that give you the needed flexibility.

Whether you use internal or external middleman, it is clear that one is needed. Corporate leverage their BI investment by finding their end-users a trusted advisor.

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Build products customers want to use

Common knowledge is that companies should build products customers want to buy, products that solves their problem. However, making customer buy your product is not enough. The product must be built in a way that will make its users actually... want to use it.

Sound obvious and simple, right? However, many vendors believe that top-notch technology or cool features would make their product best-seller. Reality prove they wrong, especially when thinking of management software products that users should elaborate on a daily basis in order to drive business value.

For example, BPM suites may have best-of-breed processing engine technology, but without friendly process designer that make it simple to design processes, users will avoid implementing new processes. Another example are BI products; as BI implementation projects take weeks or even months, users don't have the flexibility to leverage it for short time-to-market needs.

If we already made the deal, why should we care if users actually use the product? Satisfied users are great reference for recurring revenue and new deals. In case of web-based products that generate their money out of advertisements, active users are your power in negotiation with advertisers. Moreover, active users - satisfied or not, serve as great source of product feedback.

But important of all – it is the great feeling that you changed the world a bit... or at least helped a user achieve her goal easier, faster, or better than she did without you. Many times users have the frustrating feeling that they are for working for their product ('I must enter yesterday data into the system'). Why not give the user a feeling the product is working for her?

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Decision-driven Information Management

You enter the office, thinking what expecting you during the day, taking your time before you get to your desk and you know why. You nervously login into your email application and find out that you have 651 emails to read! and all you wanted is to have a short vacation with your wife and the kids... In the information age, we sometimes challenged with having too much information and limited capacity to handle it. But how can we make sure that we consume or produce only relevant information?

In a business environment, information is only relevant if it supports taking decisions. Why is that? workers has their responsibilities and personal objectives they should achieve (e.g. achieve 20% market share). They do it by taking decisions (e.g. buy/build decision). In order to take good decisions, they need good information (e.g. how much it will cost the company to build a new product). Thus, generated information must be driven from business decisions needs.

To have an efficient decision making process, we need to focus on relevant information. In the industrial age, we produced physical goods (outputs) out of raw materials (inputs); we considered this process to be efficient if, “a given quantity of outputs cannot be produced with any less inputs”, according to Wikipedia. Similarly, in the information age, we make decisions (outputs) based on given information (inputs), and focusing on good information will promise efficient and productive decision making process.

So what makes information relevant? First, as mentioned above, it must be relevant and driven from decision making needs; if the information does not support taking the decision, than it is redundant. It also must be complete with enough details but no more than needed. The information also must be accurate in a satisfying manner. Finally, it is better that the information will be simply represented so it can easily be consumed by others.

Managing information with a decision-driven way-of-thinking can be clarified by revisiting the way corporates analyze their Competition Landscape. Usually what happens is that they research every aspect of the competitive landscape (holding a full-time geographer for that...) – from distinctive competence to SWOT analysis, from product lines to customer base, etc.. Is all the explored information support decisions that should be taken? probably not. Instead, they should retrieve information which is required for specific decisions, e.g. In which market segment I can play the leader? Which of my competencies is perceived as unique and I should focus on?

Next time you get or generate information, ask yourself if it support a decision you or one of your colleagues need to take. If the answer is no, you can throw it away.

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Revisiting business process boundaries

Business Processes Management (BPM) is, according to Wikipedia, "aligning organizations with the wants and needs of clients". To achieve the required alignment, an organization iteratively design and model a process which addresses client needs, then process participants (i.e. IT systems and/or people) execute and monitor the defined process, and finally the organization optimize the process for better alignment.

Managing business processes with BPM systems is become more and more common. The BPM systems market has more than 30% annual growth, according to IDC. The benefits are clear: automation (at least partial), increased operational efficiency, reduced costs and higher transparency for different process stakeholders (process participants and managers).

Today, the common usage of BPM systems is managing processes within the boundaries of the organization, involving only inter-organizational process participants (i.e. organization IT or employees). A good example is a telephone company internal process which handles a technical problem of a customer; customer service opens a case, customer information is retrieved from database, technical staff handles the problem and close the case.

However, business process may involve external participants as customers or business partners. In the above example, the customer (the one the process is for...) is an important stakeholder of this process. The customer may need to supply additional information after initial research by the technical staff, or would like to monitor the case status.

When the process involves external participants, the required alignment is extended beyond the boundaries of the organization. This insight requires an holistic approach to business process management - where all process stakeholders - internal and external, take part. The process execution will be more efficient and take less time, thus reduce costs involved throughout the supply chain. Customer satisfaction will increase due to efficient and transparent service. One example for this approach is the increasing buzz around the integration of CRM and BPM capabilities.

If your organization operates in a competitive environment, with high sensitivity to customer satisfaction or to integration with business partners, it should start identify business processes with high impact on growth and manage them in a more holistic manner.

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