BPM book extract 2
BPM book extract 2
Here is part of the second chapter of Mastering Your Organization's Processes: A Plain Guide to BPM,  published in January 2006.
If you'd like to read the whole chapter, you can download it in Adobe PDF form here.
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Chapter 2: Business processes and their management
Business Process Management explained -- in one minute 
Business Process Management is the use of a particular kind of process automation software, typically within the commercial and administrative operations of an organization. This software does five main jobs; it:
Puts existing and new application software under the direct control of business managers
Makes it easier to improve existing business processes and create new ones
Enables the automation of processes across the entire organization, and beyond it
Gives managers 'real-time'  information on the performance of processes
Allows organizations to take full advantage of new computing services.
The result is an improved ability to respond to or anticipate changing business demands. Making processes run faster can be beneficial in areas such as customer service. Also, the organization saves money whenever it changes computerised working methods -- usually an expensive and protracted rigmarole. It also is able to extract more value from its existing IT investments by putting them to broader and more intensive use. As a bonus, the organization becomes better fitted to exploit future business and computing opportunities, including business process outsourcing (BPO) and Web services.
The success of all this depends on how managers introduce and use this new kind of software. Business Process Management is as much about organizational design, human communication, people's viewpoints and mutual consideration as it is about technology. It is not just a matter of optimizing computer programs.
We cover all these matters in the pages that follow.
Oh no, not another book about Business Process Re-engineering
You can relax -- it's not. Business Process Re-engineering (or Redesign) achieved some good but has had its day. To its credit, it popularized process-based thinking and the explicit ownership of processes. Against it are its association with job losses, skill depletion and factory-style thinking. A slash-and-burn approach, as some commentators styled it.
Its founders say that people expected unreasonably much from Business Process Re-engineering or did not do it right. Possibly that is true but too many unhelpful or downright harmful actions were taken in its name for it to be credible any longer. One widely quoted article criticized it as 'The fad that forgot people'. There was even a semi-humorous alternative expansion of the BPR initials -- 'bastards planning redundancies'.
Justified or not, these opinions were influential. Business Process Re-engineering's central idea -- 'don't automate, obliterate' -- is now damaged goods. Its 'big bangs' too often turned out to be damp -- and damaging -- squibs.
Organizations no longer want risky, all-or-nothing approaches. They prefer something more sensitive to the needs of the whole business, that embraces continued change and that consequently has a greater chance of success. Business Process Management (BPM) offers all these.
So it's a book about TQM, then?
No, it is not about that either. Quality management schemes such as Total Quality Management (TQM) and Six Sigma deal mainly with continuous improvement, team working and interpersonal communication. They do not explicitly deal with computer-based process management. The table below sets out the major differences between BPM, TQM and Business Process Re-engineering. It was inspired by a table in Michael Youngblood's quirkily-titled book on process change, Eating the Chocolate Elephant.
Table 2.1: TQM, BPM and BPR compared
Aspect
TQM
BPM
BPR
Primary objective
Better products and services
Greater responsiveness
Streamlining
Focus
Problem solving
Opportunity seeking
Reinventing
Scope
Micro
All-embracing
Macro
Style
Analytical
Analytical and creative
Creative and destructive
Progress
Incremental
To choice
Dramatic
Duration
Perpetual
To choice
Usually short
Change agents
Whole workforce
Project teams plus rest of workforce
Project teams
Use of computers
Incidental
Fundamental
As an enabler
Control of processes
By managers
By managers
By managers and systems staff
Quality marks such as ISO9000, the EFQM Excellence Model and the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award in the USA all explicitly include process quality in their scope. Business Process Management software makes it possible to extend the human and technical reach of these ideas and schemes.
The main constituents of BPM
The diagram below shows what BPM consists of when applied fully.
Figure 2.1: The main constituents of BPM
Moving clockwise from the upper left circle, there are these elements:
Process automation. This is, in effect, workflow automation. Some people feel that workflow automation is not adaptable or versatile enough because of its technical foundations. Such 'religious' disputes are not relevant here, so instead we have labelled this aspect 'workflow +'.

Making application software work together is a primary task in organizations. This is often referred to as enterprise application integration -- EAI -- to stress its importance (and, often, to help try to justify its expense). Business Process Management software should be able to integrate any other application software, however labelled. Also, it should be able to integrate software that runs in other organizations. We therefore call this element 'EAI +'.

Business rules govern the way an organization works. Where these have been written down, in words, diagrams or mathematical formulae, they are often incorporated in the application software that organization uses. Finding out later what those rules are and making them explicit is hard work. One of the jobs of BPM software is to make that easier, so they can be placed under the direct control of business managers. This is important because business rules change more frequently than the underlying software tasks do.

We mentioned the need to be able to integrate software outside the organization's boundaries. This arises from the fourth requirement for BPM, which is managing processes across their whole length. This applies wherever those processes arise and wherever they end.

An often overlooked aspect is how a business process management system is created and improved on. Traditional system design approaches are unsuited to this; adaptive and inclusive techniques are needed.

Finally, but only because that is how we drew the diagram, comes real-time overseeing of processes. The fashionable term for this is business activity monitoring (BAM). This simply means that process managers see measures of performance and reports of errors or out-of-limit deviations in a very short time. How quickly the manager then responds is his affair but the software usually also allows the equally rapid sending of corrective information.

[Extract ends]
For the entire chapter in Adobe PDF form, click here.