How agile are we?

I’m finally getting caught up on the emails, blogs and webinars that I missed while on vacation. One of the webinars that came up last week was Redefining Human-Centric BPM on eBizq. Sponsored by Adobe so very document-centric, but Beth Gold-Bernstein, the eBizq speaker, nicely categorized the benefits of human-centric BPM: improved quality, improved security, enforcement of business rules, and reduced cycle time. There’s a few others that I would add in, but this is a pretty good list to start with if you’re looking for ROI on human-centric BPM.

She also made a point early in the presentation that BPM is essential to delivering business agility, that is, the ability to change your business processes easily to meet changing conditions. I would have nodded my head right along with that one, except for this piece in Intelligent Enterprise last week about how companies implement one BPM project then consider their process work to be “done” rather than actually getting into that whole agility thing that they were sold by the vendor. It’s clear that agility is a both a key marketing point for BPM vendors and a key driver for the purchase of BPM systems — in other words, the vendors claim and the customers believe that business agility is important, and that BPM will help to deliver it — but the customer organizations may not be following through on the agility promise, and the vendors (having made the sale) have already moved on to the next prospect.

Process/business agility isn’t going to come about just by buying a hot BPM product (or any other product, for that matter): as usual, the technology is an enabler, it’s not the solution. Organizations need to embrace a philosophy of business agility at all levels, and not be squeamish when someone points out that “agility” is just “change” with good PR. Yes, jobs change, and that’s scary for some people. But customers (and their expectations) change, forcing the business to change, which forces the jobs to change. In order for an organization to be agile, the worker bees must also be willing to be agile and learn not just new tools (like BPM) but new ways of doing business. Just tell them that it will look great on their CV.