Steps to BPM Success

I just watched a webinar hosted by BPMinstitute called “Proven Steps to BPM Success”. By the time the webinar started, it was retitled as “Breakaway BPM — Leveraging Business Process Innovation for Strategic Advantage”, although there wasn’t really a lot of content that fit that description. Unfortunately the webinar started with a (short) presentation by the hosting vendor, Metastorm, then proceeded to a presentation by AMTI, one of their partners. Basically, vendor followed by vendor. Whatever happened to having customers talk about their experiences?

A couple of good ideas and graphics from the Metastorm CEO, including this one on the evolution of BPM as driven by complex process initiatives:

However, pretty tame stuff from the “featured speaker” from AMTI talking about their process improvement efforts, like “reward success” and “process should be integral to the way you work”. And he totally didn’t understand why a recent Gartner survey (summarized in InfoWorld) showed that CIOs’ top business priority is improving processes but their top technology priority is business intelligence. Um, BPM and BI are related, dude — that’s what business activity monitoring (BAM) and corporate performance management (CPM) are all about.

You’ll be able to find a replay of the webinar on the BPMinstitute site within a few days, listed under their Round Tables section.

Multi-tasking during the webinar did give me a chance to glance through an interesting article in a recent copy of the Economist, Thinking for a living (paid subscription required), the title of which is based on the book of the same name by Tom Davenport. The article has a great nugget of truth from a consultant at Boston Consulting Group:

Mr. Morieux concludes that companies should concentrate on designing the processes that knowledge workers carry out, rather than measuring their performance.

Rather a different view on the whole BAM/CPM issue.

2 thoughts on “Steps to BPM Success”

  1. hi, dear,
    I am a student of university of WALES, I am studying on knowledge management. i skinning your blog, quite interest in your words about ” companies should concentrate on designing the processes that knowledge workers carry out, rather than measuring their performance”. Could you explain to me on more detail.
    Thanks a lot.

    Jenna

  2. Although those words came from someone else, not me, I interpret them to mean that companies should be spending their time and money making sure that they’re doing the right thing the right way, rather than measuring how people are performing in the (possibly incorrect) processes. I see it as a matter of priority — get the right processes in place first before you start perfecting the performance monitoring — rather than an either/or scenario.

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