BPM Skills And Roles

It’s day 2 at Gartner BPM 2013, and after a fun night out at a Pegasystems customer dinner, then breakfast hearing about Oracle’s new BPM release, I’m in Bruce Robertson’s session on skills required for BPM, and the roles that require developing. Again, this is a “crossing the chasm” issue, where you just can’t get to level 3 in BPM maturity unless you deal with any BPM skills shortage that you have, and build out your BPM center of excellence (or competency center, as Gartner calls it). Based on Gartner’s research, BPM is a part-time job for most people related to a BPM project, with 74% spending less than 50% of their time on it across both business and IT. This is not surprising, since this includes subject matter experts, technical experts and others whose main job is not BPM, but provide some specific non-BPM expertise on the project.

So people are doing their regular day job, then also need to have some combination of operational skills to identify and execute process change, technical skills to build and evolve software solutions, and (most importantly) transformational skills to motivate people to change. A lot of organizations focus on building the operational and technical skills since that’s a bit more straightforward, but are lacking in the more evangelical transformational skills such as business vision, communication and change management. Some of these skills will be grown internally by training your existing staff, some may be available in other parts of your organization (such as HR), some will be acquired with new hires, and some will be rented from consultants like me.

Robertson showed a good chart of basic, intermediate and advanced skills for each of the operational, technical and transformational categories; he advises getting some of the advanced operational skills in as soon as possible to provide overall guidance. He listed the key BPM roles — BP director, BP architects, BP analysts, process owners, BP consultants (internal or external), subject matter experts — and listed what they do and why they’re important to your BPM efforts. There are a number of other roles, but these are the critical ones; he did, however, highlight the growing importance of data experts for both developing metrics and ensuring that analytics are properly in place. I’ve been talking about the necessary integration of process and data for some time, and fully agree with this; there’s a talk later today on BPM and MDM that I’ll be at to see more of what Gartner is seeing happening here.

He went back to the survey data that he showed at the start of the presentation indicating what BPM skills were most lacking in organizations, and overlaid the roles that would meet those skills on the chart: a good indicator of what roles you need to develop in order to address your skills gap. Skills might be in different roles, or combined, depending on the size of your BPM efforts and the skills of the individuals involved. He showed a sample RACI chart cross-referencing roles with specific BPM activities; again, a good tool for ensuring that you have all the activities covered by someone, and that they’re assigned to the right people.

He then pulled the skills/roles ideas into the need for a BPM COE (BPCC) as you gain process maturity as an organization; this has been covered by Gartner and many others (including me, at a presentation at DST’s conference last week) so I’ll just sum it up with Robertson’s top-level benefits:

  • Internal consultancy and expertise focal point
  • Improve project results
  • Better and more repeatable skills
  • Focus across business boundaries
  • Improved technology investment leverage

Only 34% of organizations surveyed have a BPCC, so it’s not surprising that 80% of organizations have not achieved level 3 maturity in spite of stated objectives to become process-driven. He presented some best practices for getting started with a BPCC — targeted around sponsorship, staffing, communicating, methodology and services — and a map for growing the BPCC over time from supporting/guiding projects to defining programs to providing input to strategy.

This presentation was a good refresh on some of the Gartner BPM skills/roles/COE discussions from past years, which had seemed a bit stagnant lately.

Banco Supervielle’s Excellence Award: Business Outcomes Driven By BPM

In the last session of day 1 at Gartner BPM 2013, I sat in on a case study by the Argentina-based Banco Supervielle, who won a Gartner excellence award for best business outcomes driven by BPM. They were experiencing poor quality of service, and having to deal with changing regulations and a complex systems integration environment. They had no process models for what they did, and were too focused on products rather than customers.

They laid out goals for their process-centric transformation: improve customer service through quality-oriented processes, including organizational changes and linking of process models to corporate strategy. They wanted to bring in innovative technologies to support this process-centric view, and strive for continuous improvement. they looked at different ways to do this: bottom-up, through more of an iterative process improvement methodology; and top-down, through complete process redesign with the processes linked to corporate strategy. Daunting as it might seem, they went with the top-down approach, similar to that described by Elise Olding earlier today from a program versus project standpoint, but also with some of the same goal-linking between processes and strategy as Betsy Burton discussed this morning. They used a combination of internal and external methodologies to help guide the program, and implemented using IBM BlueworksLive and IBM BPM.

They experienced a number of challenges:

  • Change management, from the board of directors through the project team to the end users, to have them take on a process-centric view
  • Anxiety control (an excellent descriptive term!) through the same levels, with the particular admonishment to not let your board of directors have lunch with the vendor sales reps since all the BoD will remember is that the vendor said “new process = 2 months” 🙂
  • Sponsorship, and the necessity to get as senior a sponsor as possible in order to provide the best level of air cover
  • Denial and negative influencers, often due to people not wanting to change

They had a number of results: some that they were expecting, some that they were not expecting, and some that just didn’t happen the way that they wanted. In the “expected” category were the usual items of flexibility, cost/time savings and automation, but I always find that the interesting benefits are those that were not expected. In their case, that including moving their business architecture team from a documentation role to a high-value provider; faster adoption with remote than central office users; and a single process to sell all products to all clients through all channels (a dream of all of my financial services clients). What didn’t happen on schedule was mostly the change management and adoption. It’s necessary to constantly communicate throughout the project in order to sell the ideas and the organizational change that’s required, and do everything possible to change the mind of the negative influencers or get them off the project.

Making Process Governance Work

Samantha Searle presented some of Gartner’s research on how to set up effective process governance and ownership. She started with the definition of a process owner, and reinforced that it’s necessary to have someone accountable for delivering the business outcomes of an end-to-end process. A process owner is typically at the executive level, but doesn’t necessarily have all process participants reporting up to them; they’re not the process police, they’re more like an orchestra conductor, guiding skilled professionals to work together.

She identified a number of best practices for process ownership and governance:

  1. Identify clear responsibilities for BP owners, setting expectations, establishing objectives and agreeing on key responsibilities.
  2. Establish BP governance for a BPM decision framework, creating a RACI matrix (for example) mapping actions against roles.
  3. Set goals and gather data to improve process decision making, using a BP analyst in a support role.
  4. Get commitment to process ownership through incentives, since these people are rarely fully dedicated to that role.
  5. Assign collective responsibility for business outcomes, empowering the community and having each person understand their contribution.

[My formatting is a bit primitive here at Gartner BPM since I’m on the Android tablet with the WordPress app, and there’s no easy way to add lists. Update: hacking lists with direct html tags.]

SAP BPM At Bank Of America

At Gartner BPM, there are always a few sessions given over to the sponsors and their clients to present case studies; since it’s been a while since I looked at what SAP is doing with BPM, I decided to sit in on John Cuomo from Bank of America talk about what B of A is doing with SAP BPM.

SAP NetWeaver Process Orchestration includes BPM and business rules, but also UI composition, monitoring and analytics, SOA governance, EAI, and B2B collaboration. When I initially reviewed SAP BPM a few years back on its release, I said that it isn’t the most innovative BPMS on the market (although it’s quite good), but their goal is to be the best BPMS for existing SAP customers through direct integration with their ERP solutions. B of A uses SAP ERP for their invoice processing with BPM on top, with the classic A/P drivers of integrating multiple systems, having flexible processes and providing better control over processes and rules. They receive over a million invoices per month, but only 2% require human intervention/approval and are escalated into BPM. They make heavy use of business rules to dynamically assign approvers to any specific invoice depending on the content, rather than having an identical process flow for every invoice or requiring manual assignment.

They started their SAP BPM initiatives in 2010, working with their process flows that had been defined in ARIS and moving that into the BPM automation environment. It’s pretty common for organizations to have some process flows mapped out already, but no automation.

They’re now expanding their BPM use outside of invoice processing, although all surrounding their SAP ERP usage, including general ledger, fixed assets, provisioning point, and audit processes. In short, they’re using SAP BPM for doing the exception handling for SAP ERP, providing a much more flexible and rules-driven approach to exception handling processes. This is a perfect use case for SAP BPM in conjunction with their ERP; now that SAP BPM is allowing much better access and orchestration of granular ERP functions, they should be able to expand the usage further to deeply integrate the two systems.

Peter McNulty of SAP provided some additional information on some of SAP’s newer capabilities, specifically their Operational Process Intelligence that monitors process events from a variety of platforms, both theirs and third-party, uses HANA to do the big data analytics, then displays in a consolidated dashboard.

Continuous Innovation With A BPM Program Wins Over The Sporadic Tinkering Of Projects

In her presentation at Gartner BPM 2013, Elise Olding addressed an issue that ties in with my presentation last week on BPM maturity and centers of excellence: BPM’s real value is in becoming an enterprise capability, not through occasional BPM projects. From a BPM maturity standpoint, that means getting beyond levels 1 and 2, where you’re just doing isolated projects, and crossing the chasm to enterprise BPM initiatives that permit greater innovation.

She gave the audience a quiz on how BPM is being adopted within their organizations: Is there a 2-year vision for BPM? Is there a link between BPM and strategic vision? Are your projects focused on delivering measurable business benefits? Are you communicating why process is important? Are you constantly tweaking your BPM techniques? Are you innovating and constantly improving? I’m not sure how much of this is just because I’m firmly ensconced in the BPM echo chamber, but I’m really seeing BPM being put forward as a driver for innovation; this is the “big picture” BPM that is really about the methodologies and mindsets, not just the technology, but technology plays an important role. If you’re stuck on projects and technology, then BPM just becomes another silo.

Olding is much less focused on BPM technology and more about organizational change, so she brings an important point of view on the mindset of the individuals and the organizational culture required for change. Her suggestion is to start thinking like a startup (presumably a startup that is not wallowing around in a glut of VC cash), where every effort has to be directly linked to some value to the organization. To ensure that you don’t get trapped in the project mentality, don’t just solve the immediate problem: drill in to find out the motivations behind those problems or desired changes to see the bigger picture. Her technique involves asking “why” several times in succession (which appears to be effective but does remind me of someone’s five year old), moving from a tactical problem such as “we need to reduce costs” to a more strategic “we need a better strategy for integrating our recent acquisitions”. Also, consider that best practices are really standard practices, and you don’t have to slavishly do what your competitors do, especially if you want to differentiate yourself in the market.

She finished with some case studies of companies that have gone beyond BPM projects to full-on programs, such as multi-nationals that were able to leverage locally-created solutions worldwide, and had some final recommendations:

Stop driving efficiency, tinkering, and mapping all processes.

Start enabling effectiveness, innovating, and defining outcomes.

Business Architecture Bridging Strategic Vision And Operational Excellence

I made it to the Gartner BPM Summit 2013 in Washington DC today just in time for the 11am session that Betsy Burton gave on bridging the gap between strategic vision and operational excellence with business architecture (BA). I like her view on this: strategic vision really isn’t much good unless you have a plan (or at least a direction) for how you’re going to do it. She points out that most organizations don’t execute on their vision — only about 10% if you believe the studies by Hammer and others — and you’re not going to get there unless along with vision, you also define implications, constraints, risks and interdependencies. Business strategy, which is a big part of business architecture, requires a diagnosis, guiding policy, coherent actions and target outcomes. I also like her distinction between “deliberate strategy” (that which is foreseen and planned) and “emergent strategy” (that which happens in response to actual conditions, a.k.a., “how we get stuff done”), although I’m not sure that I’d consider the emergent part to be strategy, strictly speaking.

She showed a good example of a business capability model that had been developed for a financial services firm, where capabilities are “things the business does”, not processes or departments. Overlaid with that was color coding showing the level of investment to each capability, and bolding to show the capabilities with strategic importance, plus physical grouping of capabilities related to a specific business goal. This gives a view, on one chart, of how the business vision is aligned with capabilities and spending. For example, in the group “Self and Service Products” were six capabilities. Once of those was “Onboard Customers”, which was bolded to indicate that it’s of strategic importance, but is white to indicate that it is getting only a minimal amount of investment. Then, overlaid on that, she showed how processes intersect with capabilities by adding numbered bubbles to indicate which process impacts each capability. Keep in mind that a process can span multiple capabilities, and a capability may require multiple processes. So that Onboard Customers capability intersects with A1, an account management process, as do 10 other capabilities. Next, she overlaid information sources and consumers and their linkages, that is, which capabilities create or consume information from other capabilities. As you add in the application portfolio, the inconsistencies in the architecture start to emerge, and low-risk, non-strategic capabilities are exposed as targets for cloud or outsourcing.

Gartner provides a classification for applications (their Pace Layering): they’re there for innovation, differentiation. or for record (commodity). Extending this to the capability map allows the processes and capabilities to also be categorized this way. To quote her presentation notes, “processes associated with innovative business capabilities will be more likely to change, will be more complex and potentially high value.” This identifies processes that really drive the business growth and goal achievement. Making the link between capabilities, processes and applications, the impact on people and processes of changing capabilities and swapping out applications becomes obvious.

Since this is a BPM conference, she has to make links to what this means for BP professionals, and ended up with some specific recommendations for BP directors, starting with “work with your EA team to understand the role of business architecture”, and understanding the link between BA and BPM. I’m impressed with the level of integration that she’s made between BPM and BA, and provided some good ideas on how to connect these up as part of the business strategy.

Maintaining Ethical Standards As An Industry Analyst And Enterprise Consultant

Every once in a while, someone suggests that vendors pay me for coverage. The latest accusation actually used the term “pay-for-play”, which is a derogatory term for industry analysts who require that vendors be their paid clients before they receive any coverage by the analyst, and is often considered to be unethical. Vendors who work with me know that’s not true, but I just wanted to sum up how I work with vendors.

Unpaid Work

  • I will accept a briefing from any vendor whose products that I find interesting. I might also write about an interesting piece of news, a webinar that I watched, or information about upcoming events. If I choose to write about any of this here (which I sometimes don’t, due to time constraints or lack of interest), the vendors do not have review/edit privileges before I post: they see my review the same time as all other readers. This last policy, by the way, has resulted in some vendors shutting me out of their analyst programs, since they want to control the message; needless to say, I don’t write about them much since all they give me is the same information as you could find on their websites.
  • I will attend a vendor conference but must have my travel expenses reimbursed since I’m an independent and would have to pay these costs myself.

I know that a lot of analyst firms charge for merely attending briefings and conferences, and maybe I will start doing that some day, but I want the freedom to write (or not) whatever I want about what I see without any sort of oversight or censorship, since I think that’s important to my readers. If there is information presented that’s under embargo or NDA, I always honor that. Note that in both of these cases, I give up my time – which could have been spent on revenue-generating work – to attend events and briefings, so if you’re envious of all my “free” trips to exotic locations, remember that I don’t get paid while I’m there unless I’m doing paid work.

Paid Work

My website describes the types of paid work that I do for vendors, but to sum up:

  • I consult on strategy, including product and go-to-market strategy. When I do this, you’ll probably never hear about it since anything I produce will be under NDA to my client.
  • I give webinars and conference presentations, and write white papers. Although I choose my subject to be of interest to my client (the vendor) and their audience, what I write is my own opinion: the fact that a vendor pays me to write a white paper does not mean that I am endorsing their product, even though they appear as a sponsor of the paper. If appropriate, I will mention their product as an illustrative example. I upload my presentations and papers and link to them from my blog because people always request copies, and because these materials form part of my online portfolio to allow other prospective customers to understand what I can do for them. When doing a (paid) conference presentation, I may also be blogging from the conference, which is covered under the unpaid work section above.

Regardless of my relationship with a vendor, I am never compensated for product sales, nor for blogging about them, nor for giving a positive review about their product. I have a disclosure statement that summarizes these principles and lists current and recent vendor clients. It would be fair to say that vendors who take the time to cultivate a relationship with me and invite me to their conferences tend to get more coverage because I’m exposed to more information about them, but it’s not necessarily favorable coverage.

Since most of my work is for enterprise clients – primarily helping financial services and insurance organizations with BPM implementations – I follow strict ethical guidelines, including disclosing the names of my vendor clients to my enterprise clients at the start. Since many enterprise clients use my blog and white papers as a way to get to know my work, it’s important that I present unbiased information of value.

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Thinking Beyond Traditional BPM Webinar Replay And Slides

The webinar that I did on Smart Process Applications (a Forrester term, but one that is being adopted by a number of case management/application development vendors) was broadcast today, sponsored by OpenText, and is available for replay here.

You can also check out my slides below:

AWD Product Madness With @lw927

I finished up my day at AWD ADVANCE in the product roadmap session held by Lisa Williams and Mike Lovell. It’s March Madness here in the US (that’s some college basketball thing) so they kept with that theme with mini basketballs and some yearbook pics of Lisa on the court.

Like any vendor’s product management group, they need to consider (and anticipate) the market for their products, and spend their resources most wisely to add capabilities that will be of most value to their customers while supporting or deprecating existing features. Here’s what’s coming:

  • Dynamic case management in v10.7, expected at the end of May; we heard about this in detail from Judith Morley this morning and will include mobile capabilities in a future version
  • Seamless installation process (this tweet from the hands-on labs here says that’s probably true)
  • Overall usability including people/roles administration in v10.9; they have a lot of new plans for user portals
  • Enhance monitoring capabilities and deprecate the existing BI client
  • Process design and orchestration
  • Communications service for multi-channel correspondence management

There was a laundry list of features coming up, and some audible approval in the room for things that sound small but I know can be huge for reusability, such as variable timers and support for localized business day calendars.

Dates beyond v10.7 are not announced, although likely they will not meet their past targets of two releases per year with some of the major changes in progress now. I think that they’re also challenged somewhat by a customer base that is dragging their feet moving off the legacy platform – still about 1/3 on it – and then start to take advantage of the new functionality once they’re on the new platform. It’s hard to be completely forward-thinking when there are still active instances of your software that are old enough to vote.

Looking to the 3-5 year horizon, it’s about creating products that allow their customers to adapt to changing business environments: primarily, shifting from “imaging and workflow” (which is how many of their customers categorize what AWD does for them) to “customer event management”. They talked about some of the areas where this innovation is likely to happen: capture, moving from paper to direct data entry by the customer, and mobile check capture; predictive analytics and simulation; adaptive case management, as opposed to the production case management that’s launching soon; work allocation to support collaborative/team work; user experience; and more. Nothing specific here, and also nothing that’s groundbreaking from a market perspective, but will likely shake things up for their conservative customer base.

That’s it for me at AWD ADVANCE for 2013, it’s been a great day of presentations following a fun customer advisory board dinner last night that included discussions of my cat on Twitter. I’m on a plane again next week – third week in a row – to the Gartner BPM show in DC.