I saw this Gartner article a while back about a “new” BPM definition, and was reminded of it when it hit BPM.com again this week. He turns the focus from the hard technical skills required for BPM to the soft social skills required: much as I have done in my own career over the past 15 years or so: putting the “business” and “management” back in BPM, which has too long been focused on the mechanical “process” part. It’s not by accident that the small systems integration company that I owned in the late 90’s had the slogan “We Make Technology Mean Business”, and that I’m now developing a course called “Making BPM Mean Business“.
In that same vein, Gartner has recreated their definition of BPM to move the focus away from the tools and the mechanics of BPM:
BPM is a management practice that provides for governance of a business’s process environment toward the goal of improving agility and operational performance. BPM is a structured approach employing methods, policies, metrics, management practices and software tools to manage and continuously optimize an organization’s activities and processes.
Right on!