BPM Series: Do business organisations need single process management infrastructure?

Last week, a friend sought my advice on whether her company should implement single process management infrastructure to automate & manage their enterprise-wide process management needs. The insurance company she works for is evaluating BPM system / application to automate travel reimbursement process. While doing so, the company is also exploring the possibility to utilise the same process management infrastructure to automate processes such as New Business process, Policy servicing process, Claims Management process, New Product Development process, etc.

Now the processes described above are different in nature and have different traits. I remembered having read an interesting process classification theory put forward by two wise men (unfortunately I do not remember their names) many years ago. They classified organisational business processed based on Business Value (Revenue Increase, Cost Reduction, Productivity / Efficiency enhancement, etc) and their Repeatability, i.e. their ability to repeat itself for every instance of the process that occurs.



As is shown in the diagram above, organisational processes can be classified into four areas:

• Production processes - with high business value and high degree of repeatability;e.g. New Business process, policy servicing process, claims management process
  
  
• Collaborative processes - with high business value but low degree of repeatability, e.g. New Product Development, Contract Formulation
  
  
• Admin processes - with low business value but high degree of repeatability; e.g. Travel Reimbursement process, Leave approval process, Conference booking process
  
  
• Miscellaneous / Ad-hoc processes - with low business value and low degree of repeatability

In my opinion, the same process management infrastructure may not be utilised to manage all the types of processes described above. There are two issues:

1. Is the BPM system capable to manage both repeatable and non-repeatable processes
   
   
2. Is it financially feasible for the organisation to manage high value and low value processes using the same BPM system

Fortunately, BPM systems have evolved over a period in time, and some of the leading BPM systems now possess dynamic process management capbility, which allow business users to alter the flow of the process even at run time, i.e. as the business process gets executed. Such BPM systems would address issue #1.

However, these BPM systems tend to be expensive requiring high end IT infrastructure. In such cases, software, hardware and implementation services costs tend to be prohibitively high to justify the utlisation of the same process management infrastructure for low value admin processes along with high value add production and collaborative processes.

So, in my opinion, organisation may have to settle for more than one process management infrastructure to manage all the enterprisewide processes. What do you think?

Q&A: BPM Certification

In Q&A series, Vinayak answers emails and questions from readers. For privacy reasons, name as well as any specific references which may reveal questioner's identity are not published.

Question:

I know very little about Business Process Management, but I want to be a BPM certified Professional. So could you please help me out with the procedure to prepare on the same.

Currently I am working as a Project Engineer with 1.9 yrs of experience in the IT industry. My Skills Area are: Java/J2ee, Autonomy, Plumtree.

So although in technical streams,I would very much like to be involved in Management Streams.

Response from Vinayak:

Thanks for writing to me.

There are a number of BPM methodologies such as Business Process Re-engineering, TQM, Activity Based Management, and Six Sigma followed worldwide to define, execute, manage and improve processes. However, in none of the above areas there is any single world wide recognised body offering certification like you have in the area of Project Management (PMI), or IT Governance (ISACA).

Following are some of the international agencies offering BPM Courses:
OMG's BPM certification
http://www.omg.org/oceb/oceb-faqs.htm

International Process and Performance Institute:
https://ipapi.org/

BPM Council
http://www.bpmcouncil.org/bpmc_cert_details.html

BPM Institute
http://www.bpmcouncil.org/bpmc_cert_details.html

I am not aware of content and quality of programmes offered by any of these certifications. My guess is that many of these programmes may have evolved from BPM systems or technical standards such as BPMN. The one by OMG, which is under beta testing, claims to offer Business and Technical oriented tracks as part of their certification.

My advise to you would be to go for Six Sigma in case you wish to pursue career in Business Process Management. Six Sigma is an extremely comprehensive methodology based on qualitative and quantitative tools to manage and improve business processes. So, try and participate in six sigma programme, if it exists in your organisation. If such a programme does not exist within your organisation, then read books / literature (you will find plenty on the Internet) on Six Sigma and Business Process Re-engineering to begin with and then look for opportunities to participate in such programmes implemented by an organisation. If you desire to be a recognised expert in methodologies such as Six Sigma, then certification has to be accompanied by actual experience in implementing six sigma methodology. So, certification alone in this area is not very helpful.

Some of the well known agencies offering six sigma training courses in India are:
Motorola:
http://www.motorola.com/in/sixsigma.jsp

KPMG
http://www.in.kpmg.com/sixsigma/sixsigma.asp

QAI
http://www.qaiindia.com/Certification/frameset.htm

Hope this helps.

BPM Series: Do organisations need best of breed investments in BAM?

Few days back, I watched a webinar on BAM hosted by ebizq.com - BAM for BPM Survey Results Are In! Learn What’s Driving New BAM Investments. While the webinar was good as it presented application of BAM in a number of different business scenarios, the presentation left me in doubt on whether organisations need to invest in best of breed BAM technology or can they leverage their investment in BI / Analytics / Reporting tools to achieve BAM.

BAM stands for Buisness Activity Monitoring. However, as per the presentation made by Systar's Derek E Weeks, best-in-breed BAM delivers more than monitoring of process execution real time. It also:
- Measures overall business performance
- Predicts down-stream impact of events
- Analyzes and correlates events beyond BPM managed processes
- Delivers timely leading indicators

So, BAM is not just about monitoring of process or business parameters, but also anout analysising the business / process data related to the parameters being monitored real time, assessing / predicting the impact and initiating corrective action proactively. BAM may may blossom in BPM system environments, as BPM systems would enable collection of data and initiation of corrective action. However, BPM is not a necessary condition for BAM and BAM may exist in organisations even without or independent of BPM systems.

The presentation began with a survey conducted by ebizq (and soponsored by Systar) to assess the level of acceptance of BAM by organizations. To a question on the need for real time visibility, almost 50% felt that they required real time information on their critical parameters in less than 1 hour (21% within minutes, 8% within seconds). While business users may express such a requirement, there are two important considerations:
- What is done with that exception information / data?
- Is it really worth having this information within the seconds / minute / hour?

Most of the time, when users come to know of the costs as well as impact of such implementations on production systems (in terms of performance), my experience is that they back-out.

Recently, we had a requirement where our sales team wanted to track a critical KRA on an hourly basis. We could deliver the desired visibility by leveraging our existing Reporting and Analytics infrastructure. Hence, when I went through the webinar, I had my doubts about the need for the best of breed BAM. BAM may work for those organisations which do not have BI infrastructure. For those who already have BI infrastructure, my suggestion would be leverage existing BI system and tools to deliver BAM functionality. what do you think?

BPM Series: BPTrends The State of BPM Report (2008)

For almost three decades now, business process management has been seen as a tool to achieve business excellence. Business organisations have implemented methodologies, standards & tools such as TQM, ISO 9000, Six Sigma, Business Process Re-engineering, Activity Based Management with various objectives such as enhancing customer satisfaction, reducing cost, increasing market share, improving productivity, etc. However, if you are one of those who believe that your organisation has missed the "business process" bus, then as per The state of BPM - 2008 report by Business Process Trends, you are not in minority.

The report is based on an on-line survey questionnaire responded to by members of Business Process Trends (BPTrends.com). A quick analysis of the profile of respondents reveals that the highest percentage (20%) of the respondents represented Financial Services / Insurance industry. As per the authors, the reason for this could be: "The fact that Financial companies used significantly more BPMS than other industries reflects the industry’s well-known role as the leading consumer of the new computer/software technology that provides a competitive edge. (In other surveys we have asked BPMS vendors what types of companies they are targeting or selling their products to, and Finance invariably heads the list.)". The explanation cannot be completely agreed with, especially if the aim of the survey is to gauge adoption of Business Process Management (BPM) and not Business Process Management systems (BPMS) amongst business organisations.

Following are some of the key statistics published in the report:

- 52% of the respondents believed that their organisations very occasionally or never use standard or similar processes across units that perform similar tasks.

- 66% of the respondents stated that their organisations have occasionally or never defined performance measures for evaluating the success of all major processes and sub-processes.

- 60% of the respondents stated that their organisation occasionally or never defined & documented the skills required to perform the task as part of the major processes.

- 70% of the respondents stated that their organisations occasionally or never trained managers to analyse, design and manage processes.

- 64% of the respondents felt that managers in their organisation occasionally or never used performance data to manage their processes.

- 57% of the respondents worked for organisations which have occasionally or never implemented process improvement programs.

When asked about the most important software tool for BPM initiative in their organisation, following responses were provided by respondents:
- 31%: Graphics tools such as Visio / Powerpoint
- 24%: Process modeling tool
- 13%: BPMS or execution environment
- 3%: Simulation
- 1%: Business Activity Monitoring

Key Techaways:

"The state of the BPM" report makes interesting reading because it goes beyond Business Process Management Systems (BPMS) and surveys more than 270 Business and IT professionals for the state of BPM in their respective organisations. The survey also makes an attempt to map organisations on the CMMI process maturity model.

While we know that there have been large number of organisations, which have achieved performance excellence through business process management initiative, larger number could be untouched by the wave and benefits of BPM, because Business Process Management revolution is time consuming and slow. Organisations require continuous & organisation wide efforts as well as top management support to define processes & performance measures and then implement systems to gather performance data accurately and regularly.

Lack of standardisation is not necessarily always bad. For example, New Business process followed at operational units of Insurance companies in growing economies such as India and China may be completely different from their operations in matured markets such as US or USA. In my opinion, what is more critical for organisations is to measure, review and minimise the gap between the documented and the actual process.

There is a lot of excitement in the BPMS space for last 2-3 years, and survey results indicate that this excitement amongst BPMS vendors is not misplaced. The penetration for BPMS is still fairly low and hence BPMS market space can continue to expect robust growth in next 3-5 years.

Adoption of and expectations from simulation and BAM tools is still very low. Partly, the reason for this could be that organisations are still at low level of process maturity. Organisations are still experiencing challenges in defining, maintaining & publishing process documentation. There is indeed scope for BPMS players to enrich their modelers to capture not only process maps but a lot of other key process information such performance measures, task descriptions, skills required, etc. These tools should also allow functionalities such as process documentation versioning, documentation maintenance & updation, documentation publishing and role based documentation access features.

Note: The complete "The state of BPM - 2008" report can be downloaded from BPTrends website.

BPM Series: Why do we hate process?

Mike Kavis asks a relevant question: Why do we hate process anyways? I have experienced this and I am sure many project managers and IT leaders must have found very tough to sell "process" to their team members.

Well, following process means extra efforts for people following it. And a number of times, if you are part of an industry in emerging economies, organizations are expected to achieve unachievable targets. And in such an environment I do not think it is possible for organizations (across functions not only in IT) to demonstrate delivery and process at the same time especially if resources are limited. There is always a trade-off between process and time / efforts. In the last 4 years, when I have worked in Insurance industry in India which is incidentally growing at 60%-70% CAGR, my team always questioned my wisdom for following process or doing documentation when we didn't have the luxury of time and resources. And I sympathised with them. During my consulting days, our project plan and staffing factored efforts for documentation and processes.

I always consider myself a process man, however, in organizations which value speed over perfection, one has to be a bit flexible. Also, especially IT in user organizations cannot operate like IT organizations themselves and has to be pragmatic in defining processes. Processes should not be seen as an obstructions in speed, innovation and creativity. Processes exist for bringing in standardization, minimising people dependence, and ensuring quality in organizations, and organizations do not exist for process. Processes should be simple and easy to follow. Fewer people will hate processes if we follow these principles.

James McGovern makes an interesting point. He says, "No one hates process, everyone hates bad process!"

Q&A: What is the difference between an Activity and an Event?

An activity is a sub-set of process. For example, new business process in Insurance industry can comprise of activities such as Application Data Entry, Underwriting, and Policy Issuance.

Whereas an event is an occurrence or an outcome which is of significance, and based on which typically, a business rule can be triggered. For a example, an event could be start of an activity, end of an activity, non completion of an activity within a certain timeframe, etc.

Example 1:

A workflow engine, can trigger an escalation rule, if Underwriting activity is not completed by an underwriter within 2 hours of its assignment. In this case 2 hours of non completion of Underwriting activity is an event.

Example 2:

A workflow engine can send an sms or an e-mail on issuance of an insurance policy to the customer. In this case, issuance of the policy, which is completion of issuance activity is an event.

BI & BPM Buzz - Just another hype?

Business Process Management (BPM) blogosphere is buzzing with discussions on integration of BPM & Business Intelligence (BI) infrastructure. Some of the bloggers and analysts have even predicted consolidation of BPM and BI offerings into single product.

Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) is considered to be an integral part of modern BPM systems. BAM makes BPM system a complete process life-cycle management infrastructure by enabling user organizations to manage process life-cycle end-to-end in terms of "Define - Execute - Control - Monitor - Improve". In my opinion, BAM is nothing but process intelligence functionality which is a sub-set of BI and hence I find this sudden surge in BI & BPM integration discussions indeed very surprising as it always existed.

BPM vendors have gone about addressing the BAM need of their users / customers in two ways:
1. Creating BAM functionality within the BPM system
2. Integrating their BPM system with a provider of BI system provider

The key question is as to how should user organizations enable the BPM implementations with BI capabilities? This largely depends on two factors:
1. Whether the BPM system being implemented by the user organization have BAM capabilities, and
2. Whether user organizations have implemented BI system

If user organizations already have or intend to implement BI system, then they should leverage their BI implementations by integrating BPM with BI system.

I strongly feel that in time to come large software vendors such as IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP will combine their infrastructure system offerings under one solution. Such infrastructure software will include BPM (Workflow), Business Rules, Content Management, BI, Portal, and Integration functionality. However, these offerings will be available as separate components and user organizations will have options to pick and choose components depending on their need. So do expect acquisitions and consolidations across these software domains. And hence needless to say that IT managers and leaders will have tough time in making choices while selecting systems and vendors for implementations across these software domain areas.

BPM Series: Your BPM Implementation is Bound to Fail

"Your BPM Implementation is Bound to Fail" is not what a BPM project manager would like to be told about his or her BPM project. A colleague of mine recently brought my attention to an article published under the same title by Dr Raj Ramesh, founder of Top Sigma - a consulting outfit. I am sure Dr Ramesh' objective when he wrote this piece was not to scare project managers & enterprises and discourage them from undertaking BPM initiatives. Rather through the article, Dr Ramesh discusses some of causes of BPM project failures.

The article makes an interesting reading. Dr Ramesh discusses 6 major areas of failure - Communication, Architecture, Executive Support, Business - IT misalignment, Integration and Testing. Certainly the article reminded me of our BPM project. During the implementation of which we faced similar challenges. I am sure if you have undergone a BPM project, you will be able to easily relate to the article, and in case you are about to undertake a BPM project, the article would provide you an easy checklist or CSFs to manage. The article can be read at the following url:
http://www.bpminstitute.org/articles/article/article/your-bpm-implementation-is-bound-to-fail.html

BPM Series: My first brush with IBM's WebSphere Process Modeler

Yesterday I and a couple of colleagues from our BPM team spent some time exploring WebSphere Process Modeler. The purpose of our exploration was to examine the possibility of using WebSphere Process Modeler as a process modeling tool across the organization replacing Visio.

Unfortunately none of us are formally trained to use WS Process Modeler. So, after spending almost about 3 hours we managed to define a simple 5-7 step process representing our New Business Applications process. Here are my initial impressions about WS Process Modeler:

- The most disappointing part of the process modeler is the footprint it occupies on a client machine. It needs at least 1 GB RAM! This will be the biggest obstacle in our attempts to make it as the preferred process modeling tool amongst user community.

- The tool offers 3 views - basic, intermediate and advanced. This is indeed a very good feature. For example, a smart or key user can start with basic view and subsequently the analyst can take over and build the process model further to make it ready for technical development on WebSphere Integration Developer (WID).

- The tool would score low on ease of use or intuitiveness. However, I do not blame IBM for this. WS process modeler is a fairly comprehensive tool addressing very wide range of process modeling and process simulation needs. And hence it is likely to be very complex.

- The feature I liked the most was the on-line error log it provided for users / analyst to fix the process model for syntax or grammar. This is a very useful features for beginners as it provides them help at design time itself to fix the model before deployment.

BPM Series: Process Agility - An interesting point of view from Phil Gilbert

During the panel discssion at BPM In Action, Phil Gilbert of Lombrdi Software made an interesting point about process agility. He said that process agility is not only about being able to change process on-the-fly but is infact more about bringing visibility of the process and process parameters to the process owners. Without such run-time visibility and in the absence of data, process owners cannot really control the process, manage exceptions and improve or modify the business process.

BPM Series: BPM In Action - BPM & Enteprise 2.0 - The irrational exuberance of BPM World

I am just back from a panel discussion at BPM In Action - a virual conference organized by ebizQ. At the outset, I must congratulate ebizQ for organizing this event. This virtual conference is indeed a real example of exploiting the power of the web. I and many others like me could participate in the event from almost anywhere and everywhere in the world with minimum cost.

Now about the topic of panel discussion. I cannot help but borrow the famous phrase once used by Allan Greenspan, ex-chairman of Federal Reserve to describe the euphoria in the US stock markets. Indeed there is "irrational exuberance" about BPM 2.0. Can a business process be designed and deployed in collaboration with user community at large without coding intervention and with the ability to modify the process on-the-fly? Is BPM enablement of a business process as simple as a sales manager subscribing to salesforce.com using her credit card to achieve sales force collaboration amongst her team members?

We recently deployed BPM system (along with a Content Management and Imaging Systems) to automate our new business process. The implementation involved 10 user groups, 3 office locations, and integration of process with 3 back-office systems. And guess what, it took us more than 6 months to design and deploy this process in our BPM environment in production.

While evaluating BPM 2.0, we need to really ask the following questions:
- Can a mission critical process be deployed through loose collaboration amongst business users? Business processes, as I understand can be strategic and bring about competitive advantage.
- Can a mission critical process be deployed without coding intervention such as integration developments, Form / UI customization?
- Can a mission critical process be allowed to be modified by users on-the-fly?

If BPM 2.0 is not meant for mission critical processes, then BPM enablement of which business processes are we really talking about - conference room booking process or leave approval processes. BPM enablement of such "admin" and "low value add" processes using BPM 2.0 may makes sense for organizations,as they do not want to invest huge time, money and human resources to automate such processes.

The takeaway for me is very clear. BPM 2.0 in its current "avtaar" is certainly not meant for your mission critical processes. The arguments in favour of BPM 2.0 are based on extreme optimism about the new technology rather than the reality and are made by optimists who are operating at 10,000 feet above the ground realities of the user world.

BPM Series: On Demad BPM - Another View

ON Demand BPM is a recent phenomenon that is creating some excitement and expectations in the BPM space. Essentially, BPM system offered as a subscription based service is being referred to as "On Demand BPM". So far, Lombardi software and Appian are the known BPM vendors who are offering "On Demand BPM". As per Sandy Kemsley's recent blog, Lombardi is offering their process analysis tool while Appian is offering the complete BPM suite as a subscription service. Indeed SaaS is an interesting area for software user organizations, however the road towards SaaS is of is full of challenges. As a user of enterprise IT systems, I think SaaS will kick off in a big way if SaaS and BPO offerings converge.

Now, coming back to On Demand BPM. I am not happy with the way current licensing models are being offered by BPM product vendors. BPM product vendors can certainly change their pricing model and make it "On Demand" even in their current mode of BPM as a software product. Currently the licensing for BPM server is typically a combination of server and user based license. In a such a scenario, an Indian Insurance company such as ours which experiences seasonal peaks in business in the month of March (we process 33% of our annual business in this month) have to buy licenses for this peak business period which is almost 3-4 times higher than the need for user licenses during our average bsuiness period. Thus, the licenses we buy remain un-utilized for most part of the year,which makes investment intensive initiatives such as BPM very difficult to justify. I expect a licensing regime which allows user organizations such as ours to rent rather buy peak period licenses for a month or 2. If we can hire temporary manpower, temporary office space, and temporary office equipment to process our peak business then why not have temporary software licenses?

New Year Resolutions of a BPM project manager: Resolution #3

Resolution #3: I will execute "Lean" projects!

Our BPM & Imaging project began in Jan'06 and went live in 11 months later in Nov'06. We implemented BPM & Imaging system in our New Business area integrating BPM system with our new business data entry system, core insurance system, automated underwriting system and policy printing system. Besides integration, we also had to migrate our imagebase of applications from our existing system into the new content management system. However, the biggest challenges during the implementation were not really technology challenges but rather soft issues such as managing user expectations, ever changing user requirements and overcoming user resistance. I feel we could have done a better job at managing these by keeping the project lean. By lean project I mean the project with leaner scope, leaner timelines and leaner costs. In future, I will always keep the project timeline not more than 3-4 months; i.e. divide the overall project into multiple projects with smaller scope so that each sub-project can be completed in not more than 3-4 months!

BPM Series: Certification in Business Process Management

Business Process Management Group (BPM Group) is one of the leading agencies building community of professionals engaged in business process and change management. BPM Group also offers certification course in Business Process Management. Titled as Certified Process Management - Practitioner (CPI-M), it is 5 day classroom course followed by post course work. It costs about USD 4500+.

Large no. of business organizations are engaged in implementing BPM Systems to automate their mission critical processes. However, on most of the occasions such implementations become technology initiatives ending up automating as-is processes. This happens primarily because professionals involved in such initiatives are primarily IT consultants proficient in BPM System rather than experts in process management and improvement. Hence there is a crying need for training and education in the area of BPM such as the one offered by BPM Group especially considering that there is hardly any formal courses offered in schools and universities.

And so, certification such as CPM-P has potential to become the standard for professionals desiring career in Business Process Management similar to what CPIM is for supply chain professionals and PMP is for Project Managers . However, there are two challenges. CPM-P is prohibitively expensive and requires classroom training. BPM Group needs to drastically reduce the cost and offer the certification in self learning mode.

New Year Resolutions of a BPM project manager: Resolution #2

Resolution #2: I will not be swayed by vendor "sales talk" about product features and capabilities.

During sales cycles, vendors will tell you that almost anything and everything is possible through their Business Process Management (BPM) suite "on-the-fly". Rome can be built in a day and Taj Mahal would be constructed in a matter of minutes. May be. But make no mistake, BPM is serious business especially if you are using BPM System to automate and manage your mission critical processes involving integration with back office systems.

Terms such as SOA, ESB, Dynamic Process Management (DPM), Business Activity Monitoring (BAM), Process Simulation, Business Rules are buzzwords. Treat them very very carefully. In theory, they certainly have the potential to maximize business process agility and minimize time to production (system development cycle time). In practice, the picture could be a lot different. Process modeling, deployment and system readiness for use or plug and play can be a myth. A huge amount of effort is still required in integration (BPM & back-office systems, BPM UI & back-office systems UI) and customizations, without which meaningful and "business valuable" BPM enabled processes cannot be built.

Most of the time, vendors and consultants lack understandings of real world business problems. Pre-built sample applications or process templates offered along with the product are built based on "lab environment" process complexities. BPM to automate conference room bookings and leave approval is waste of money.

If you are the first "BPM" implementation of its kind, PRAY. If you are not, talk to industry colleagues or references who have undergone similar implementations. If you have clarity about your business requirements, do not talk to vendor sales teams, get solution feasibility validated by vendor's delivery team before you begin. Ask vendors to build prototypes; ask vendors to do Proof-of-Concepts.

Resolution #1.

New Year Resolutions of a BPM project manager

Year 2006 has been a very hectic but interesting one. The year started with a very hazy picture of our BPM implementation. We knew what we wanted to achieve. However, considering the complexity associated with the project, there was tremendous anxiety about the outcome of the project. As we move into the new year, how do we feel about what we have achieved. Well, we have gone live in a pilot mode in our new business process. The reactions from the users are positive, however, they want more. I am indeed satsfied with what the team have achieved. However, we could have done more. We could have done better. And hence here are my new year resolutions as a BPM System implementation project manager. Over the next few days I will share one resolution each in my forthcoming blog entries.

Resolution 1: I will have BPM roadmap & architecture established for the enterprise.

So far, we have implemented BPM in our new business area. We will roll it out in policy administration and claims management areas in future. However, there are tremendous opportunities to exploit BPM System further to deliver business value in our current implementation. We can alter our business model to process new business applications; we can change our integrations to deliver policies at much faster TAT; we can integrate our new business process with our partners. Such changes would have radical impact on our people, and infrastructure; which are extremely critical for the successful implementation of the project.

I no longer can afford to have an ad-hoc implementation approach to roll-out BPM system across the enterprise. I need to establish a clear roadmap for implementation. Such a roadmap would include:
- identifying business process areas for BPM system implementation and defining BPM projects
- prioritising the projects with business sponsor
- designing BPM systems architecture
- formulating integration strategy
- formulating hardware and netwrok requirements
- formulating broad project implementation timelines

For those who have not yet identified BPM or process autromation software such as BPM system, content management, scanning, and integration software, it is essential to identify enteprise process automation infrastructure as part of the roadmap. This infrastructure would host and automate mission critical (if not all) business processes of the organization.

Process Matters

Jeev Milkha Singh is India's top golfer. This year he won 3 tournaments on the asian and 1 on the european circuit. This helped him move up in rankings by more than 250+ ranks to a position of 37th in the world ranking in just 1 year. An amazing performance, especially considering that his last win came six years ago. So, what's a golfer got to do with this process and technology oriented blog?

I saw his interview today on one of the Indian channels - CNN-IBN. When the interviewer asked him about his amazing turnaround in the performance, Jeev replied, "The main change I have made is that I was very result-oriented in the last six years. But I told myself after I won the Volvo China Open, ‘You just go out there and try to follow your process and routine and see what happens.’ Then I won the Volvo China that week and after that I have just been focusing on the process and routine, and that’s given me immense amount of confidence and I have gone ahead and got a lot of top-tens and a lot more wins."

Interesting isn't it? Being process oriented helped Jeev achieve the results. So whats the takeaway? Focus on your process. Perfect your process. Results will follow. Results will be more consistent.

Free Process Modelers - A new trend amongst BPM vendors!

A couple of days back, I received a mailer from TIBCO announcing free download of their business process modeler software - TIBCO Business Studio. After Intalio and Savvion, TIBCO becomes third mainstream BPM company to offer either complete or some component of their BPM suite to business users free. Models of offering from them are different. Savvion and TIBCO are offering their BPM modelers free, while Intalio is offering the complete BPM suite as an Open Source software.

TIBCO: http://www.tibco.com/devnet/business_studio/default.jsp
Savvion: http://www.savvion.com/forms1/process_modeler.php
Intalio: http://bpms.intalio.com/component/option,com_frontpage/Itemid,1

Would be very interesting to compare the three product offerings!

SaaS, Shared Services, BPO - Will they converge? - Most likely

Continued from SaaS, Shared Services, BPO - Will they converge?

Recently, we had a presentation from one of the Big 5 of the Indian IT services firms. The topic of the presentation was Outsourcing - integrated IT as well as process outsourcing. The speaker was an enterprising and enthusiastic chap who clearly oversold the service offerings from his company. At one point in time he claimed that his firm could also carry out some of the core value chain activities such as medical underwriting for us. I couldn't help but wonder if now these outsourcing service providers are going to forward integrate and set-up banking and insurance businesses as well.

On a more serious note, there seems to be a lot of value in offering and opting for integrated IT and process outsourcing services. In such a scenario, the outsourcing service provider takes care of execution of back-office processes as well as development and maintenance of IT applications and infrastructure. In a more matured model, the outsourcer or outsourcing service consumer will be transparent to (or least concerned about) what IT systems are being used by the outsourcee or the outsourcing service provider. And obviously, the service provider will charge the consumer based on transactions.

What is the merit for service consumers to go for such a business model? Outsourcing service consumers will then have to just deal with 1 or 2 strategic vendors so that they could focus on core activities such as marketing, product design & pricing, and branding.

Is this model conceptually new and never tried and tested before? I wouldn't say so. Electronics industry in Japan and US has already undergone this revolution. Today giants in this industry are just focusing upon marketing, new product development and branding, while manufacturing is completely outsourced to their vendors in Taiwan.

What to expect in future? Consolidation will continue in IT Services, SaaS, Shared Services and BPO space. Some of the IT services firms such as TCS, EDS, CSC, Mastek, Infosys already have a packaged solution for insurance &/or banking industry. Most of them also have a strong footprint in BPO space. These firms are well positioned to offer integrated IT(SaaS, Application Development & Maintenance) and process outsourcing services.

Here are some interesting developments, which confirm this theory:
- Infosys renames Progeon as Infosys BPO
- IBM Acquires Daksh To Bolster Offshore BPO Skills
- Wipro acquires Spectramind and later renames it as Wipro BPO
- TCS signs $848 Million plus deal with Pearl
- TCS acquires BPO firm in Chile

I won't be surprised if one of the big IT services firms goes ahead and acquires SaaS firms such as Salesforce.com. Will they also acquire product companies? Well, for that we'll have to wait and watch how the industry evolves.

Revisiting BPM Implementation Challenges

Just after we had started our BPM implementation in December 2005, I had written a blog entry - Challenges of Implementing BPM system - listing all our major challenges. They were:
- Change Management; Change from paper to image based processing
- Managing expectations of the users and top management
- Commitment of resources to the project
- Integration of BPM system with back-office systems
- Image Migration

I thought if we managed these challenges well; we were home. Till about a fortnight back we were on schedule to go-live in the last week of September. And then Murphy's law hit us. First the adapters which had worked fine in UT environment failed to run as expected in our Model Office Testing (MOT) environment and then the MOT environment crashed forcing us to postpone our go-live date by almost a month.

Pondering over this sudden development, I wondered whether could we have avoided this delay. Well, may be yes. Certailnly, we could have done something to prevent this.

The BPM system that we are implementing is the 3rd or 4th implementation globally after the software has been migrated to comply with J2EE & BPM standards such as BPELby the software vendor. The implementation partner although has had a long relationship with the software provider, is implementing the new version of the software for the 1st time.

The lesson: In case you are dealing with new and cutting edge technologies involve very tightly the provider of the software in the project. We now have an experienced consultant from the software vendor working on-site. We are also getting our software architecture, design and implementation configuration vetted by the software vendor.