The BPTrends survey, The State of Business Process Management, has just been published and is available free (registration required). Half of the 348 respondents to the survey are process practitioners or business analysts, with the remainder split between business, IT and executive management.
The survey asked some interesting questions, such as the meaning of BPM (only 16% identify it as the BPMS software, whereas 40% see it as the methodology) and the current committment of their organization to BPM (split pretty evenly between “major/significant” and “limited/just looking/no interest”). And although reducing costs is still the biggest single driver, agility, compliance and customer satisfaction are gaining ground. There are also a number of interesting results on how consistently processes are performed within the organization.
Not surprisingly to me, although it may come as a bit of a smack to BPMS vendors, is that over half consider their most important BPM software tool to be a modeling tool, either a purely graphical tool such as Visio, a repository-based tool such as ProVision or an organizational modeling environment. In fact, BPMS only scored 12% of the votes on that question.
Unlike many of the other BPTrends reports, this appears to be vendor-neutral and not “pay for play”, so may carry more weight than some of their other reports that I’ve written about in the past.
It’s not like Visio is a new technology, enables new thinking or new methodologies in process development. The centralized repository of the ProVisions of the world is a bit of a content management improvement. Of course, if you think that BPM is just a methodology, modeling is certainly where to start. Getting everybody on the same page in terms of process is crucial.
Working for a BPMS vendor, I find it difficult to believe that people expect a massive improvement in using the same disparate tools and coding technologies that are rigid and technical that they have always used for application development. Is it really just an “Aha moment” of “wait let’s think about this as a process”?
Is there benefit to a single platform for managing human and system workflow, reporting and analytics, embedded simulation and optimization? Or would you rather have seven different tools patched together?
What if it were all graphical so the business could participate in the development in an iterative fashion? What if it enabled 90 day deployments and 60-90 day improvement cycles?
What if it were consistent across all processes: a single management portal, a consistent set of best-practices analytics, consistent process improvement tools for the business, and you can reuse any asset you build?
Or you could give IT a new Visio diagram in swimlane format …
– The diatribe of a BPMS product marketer