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This article 'Business Process Management: It’s the organisation, stupid' permalink is:
http://www.cio.co.uk/debate/3206584/business-process-management-its-the-organisation-stupid/

Home Debate
Latest debate
Business Process Management: It’s the organisation, stupid
CIO Debate BPM Part 5
CIOs Roger Scholes and Duncan Scott discuss the importance of a business focus over technology in BPM projects


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Is BPM just hype?

Engineering an approach to BPM: CIO UK Debate part 4

BPM without busting the budget: CIO UK Debate part 3




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Next month
Is BPM just hype?

Express your views on the role IT has in business process management and redefinitions around technology

To get involved, contact the CIO UK LinkedIn community
Although the idea of business process management (BPM) has been around for nearly a decade - and before that, the concept of business process re-engineering (BPR) held industry's attention for the previous decade - the market for tools, technologies and techniques to help deliver on the BPM promise is only now coming into maturity. Indeed, in the current uncertain economic environment BPM stands out as one market area where there's very significant opportunity for growth.

MWD research has found that although overall IT spending remains flat (or even declines in some cases), organisations across industries are continuing to spend on BPM. Why? Because it can both help to drive operational efficiency, and also help drive business innovation and business model flexibility.

Nevertheless there's still a significant amount of confusion about what BPM actually is, and what technology can do to support BPM initiatives. Customers are faced with a sprawling technology and services market containing a mix of very mature and immature approaches and ideas, which can cause a lot of confusion.

One of the big challenges that can be faced by anyone wanting to explore opportunities associated with BPM investment is where it "fits" - simply put, is it a business thing or an IT thing? If it's a "business thing", as a CIO you need to find ways to proactively support business leaders looking to improve their processes. If it's an "IT thing", you need to build a case for its investment and sell that to the relevant business leaders. Once you've figured that out, how can you best start to formulate a strategy for introducing it?

To get an up-to-date picture of how CIO-level figures view BPM and how it can be approached in terms of implementation strategy, I recently spoke to Roger Scholes, IT and Finance Manager for ZF Trading, the OEM and aftermarket arm of ZF, a global automotive technology supplier; and Duncan Scott, the former Group CIO of DTZ, a global real estate advisory firm. ZF Trading is currently undergoing a business change programme that is seeing part of its organisation merge with another company in the larger ZF group; process change is a key part of this. When Scott left DTZ late in the summer DTZ had no current BPM initiative in play.

Is BPM just hype? (Read Neil Ward Dutton's article BPM, hype or window of opportunity)

First of all, I wanted to see what Scholes and Scott think about the current wave of industry interest in BPM. Is it helping or hindering understanding and adoption of the concepts and technologies?

Scott's point of view is that BPM is too often seen as an IT project whereas it should be something that's more driven by longer term business needs and by teams: "There's no doubt that a BPM initiative provides an important opportunity to look at your processes and align them more effectively with business strategies. BPM isn't not about technology; rather, technology is an enabler. However this isn't how many of the business people I've spoken to see it - many of them seem to think it's about IT trying to push more technology into the business. The natural reaction is to be sceptical."

Scholes (pictured) was quick to agree: "BPM is often seen as a fashionable label that hides an underlying agenda which is about yet again throwing technology at the problem of business change. However I do think that IT is well-placed to support business-driven BPM. In our group we're a service provider to the wider organisation; in the current climate BPM is very important to us. It's about how can we increase the return we get from our business investment generally."

The importance of organisational culture

The conversation then turned to how different kinds of organisation can present different challenges when trying to introduce BPM concepts. BPM is fundamentally a particular kind of approach to implementing and managing business change; and certainly, from our ongoing case study research programme, it seems that BPM initiatives frequently have to deal with the same cultural issues as any other kinds of change programmes.


[ 1 ] [ 2 ] continued on page 2 »


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