Dr. Ketabchi, who was CEO of Savvion before the acquisition and is now a chief strategist at Progress, presented a breakout session on using RPM to enable enterprises to improve their top and bottom line. BPM isn’t just about cutting costs and improving quality any more (although those are still important, and expected), it’s also about increasing revenue by taking advantage of opportunities as they arise.
He gave another version of what I saw in Wilner’s presentation on the justification for BPM (explicit business processes leading to agility, visibility and better business understanding of processes) which really drives home that I’m not at a BPM vendor’s conference, I’m at an application development tool vendor’s conference where they are introducing this hot new technology called BPM. This is, of course, the stage that most of the business world is at with respect to BPM understanding; I’m just so used to being in the BPM echo chamber that I rarely hear these messages unless I’m delivering them to a client.
Dr. K pointed out that BPM isn’t enough to increase revenue, although it obviously pained him to say that; business event processing (BEP) and embedded real time analytics are also required. Revenue generating opportunities are always customer-facing and situational, based on time, location, occasion, connection, exceptions and/or actions. This requires understanding the customers’ situations, analyzing those situations, and delivering (or offering) services and products that they need immediately. Sensing and understanding the customers’ situations requires the processing and correlation of events from a variety of sources using BEP, extracting information from the context of those events, and triggering actions and events as a result. In part, it’s about recognizing patterns and exceptions.
He went on to discuss these functionalities in the context of the Progress RPM suite, and some customer examples of using RPM to take advantage of revenue generating opportunities as they arise, such as a mobile phone company pushing offers to their (opted-in) customers based on their location. No real new information here, but showing a realignment of the focus of RPM to be as much about improving the top line as well as the bottom line of business.
Dr. K will be speaking at the Forrester BPM event here in Boston on Thursday, along with Progress customer Reliance Capital.