Tom Dwyer of BPMInstitute.org/BrainStorm Group finished up today’s formal sessions with Enabling Business Process Innovation.
As he pointed out, innovation is what drives company growth, and he listed the types of innovation that can be seen in organizations:
- Business model, e.g., use of shared services centres
- Process and services and markets, e.g., electronic channels
- Operations, e.g., self-service
He covered a number of good examples of some strategic industry initiatives in a number of different industries, and discussed innovation concepts in general before drilling down to process innovation specifics.
He spent some time discussing process-driven companies, which is a topic that everyone seems to be talking about lately: not just analysts and vendors, but customers are starting to ask about this as they see the advantage of managing end-to-end processes rather than chopping them up into functional silos.
He moved on to redefine the acronym “BPO” — universally recognized to mean “business process outsourcing” — to mean “business process organization”. Yikes. There were some great points here for process-driven companies, but the BPO acronym was completely distracting. He had a graph that charted the course to business process excellence, which was a sort of maturity model: “just get by”, “look for efficiencies”, “drive business agility” and “leverage process capital for market leadership”. He also listed some of the artifacts and results of becoming process-driven, from documented process flows, a rules repository and process metrics to customer satisfaction measures. As the scheduled end-time passed, the presentation dove into a discussion of SOA and attendees started to bail out, but Tom wrapped it up with some useful summary points on how innovation helps to create a competitive edge.
The presentation was much too dense with text and statistics for any time of the day, but especially for the last timeslot of the day — the energy level in the room was pretty low. It’s too bad, because Tom had a lot of great information here.