A common view of Business Process Management (BPM) I’ve encountered in IT people tends to describe it in terms of service delivery projects. When the need for the development of an application component is identified, someone might say: “we should use BPM – we won’t have to write code”. In such cases, the project team proceeds to analyse the requirements and shop around vendors for an automation platform that fits within their budget, the buying decision resting entirely on time savings compared to software development. Having stretched their resources as far as possible, they proceed to execute the project according to established delivery norms, balancing potential productivity gains against the need to retrain their staff and/or hire external consultants, while acquisition and maintenance costs create a significant drag on the overall result.
This narrow view of BPM needlessly imposes limits on the value created for an organization. Instead, business iniatives should always strive towards a significant, yet sustainable, Return on Investment (ROI). How can BPM help achieve this?
Managing one’s processes is about empowering business people to create successful outcomes for their customers. The BPM discipline creates awareness throughout an organization that constantly assesses and improves the way work is carried out. The associated technology supports this through repositories, metrics and analysis tools that extract processes out of legacy systems and individuals onto a flexible virtual canvas, where they can be collaboratively re-aligned with business objectives. Application components expand capabilities and internal breakpoints are eliminated or automated so that employees can focus on real value-added tasks. Each interaction with a customer becomes an opportunity to underscore one’s value proposition.
To arrange all of the pieces in this puzzle, it helps thinking of BPM as a set of capabilities that improves an organisation’s agility (responsiveness to change) and customer centricity (alignment with a customer value proposition). Projects represent the initial efforts to deliver such capabilities, where the overall ROI is defined by the organisation’s ability to capture and sustain these strategic benefits. Indeed, most of the value is derived in what IT delivery methodologies call the “maintenance phase”, when capabilities are leveraged and extended to create a competitive advantage.
Growing the business capabilities to deliver customer outcomes
In practice, this means that ROI estimations need to focus more on business aspects:
- Increases in customer service and brand value, rather than on reduced touch times during customer interactions (see example).
- Acceleration of time-to-market for new competitive products and services across functions, rather than productivity of IT personnel only.
- Work automation which better allocates employee time to support growth, while reducing risk and training costs.
A good initial approach to BPM, then, is to conceive a project that targets a quick win that re-aligns an existing business process to deliver a superior customer experience, building buy-in for BPM as a tool for customer centricity. At the same time, the project delivers a foundation on which the business can implement further initiatives with a reduced dependency on manual software development, extracting, as a result of this business agility, much more value from the investment, than if each evolution had to be formulated as another IT project.
Following this approach and the estimation methods above, the ROI for BPM is significantly better than what was presented in the IT view at the beginning of this article. This is turn helps getting people on board and mitigates the risks faced when introducing new technologies and approaches. With better results, less risk and a sustainable strategy, there’s really no reason to keep BPM in the IT’s closet.
