You Need BPM - Its must have

You have to go back a few years ,when technology brought the promise of unified platforms by integrating complex systems of an IT landscape. The idea was to provide a pre-integrated solution to these and to provide a out of the box workflows to handle organizations business process, which was the next big thing at that time obviously for the IT to keep up with the business demand. This idea transformed to what many people know as ERP , and ofcourse this came at the expense of time/money/training and inability to alter the pre-built processes according to the business, inevitably the business had to adjust the way the processes was built/customized in these systems. When I say customization that also came with a lot of restrictions and increase in time to deploy… anyways result - putting IT ahead of business. Also the implementation of ERP is expensive and it obviously was not an option for small and mid size business. I have nothing against ERP, certainly it has it own advantages but should not be considered as a BPM platform.

So next pain point was how do IT keep up with the business changes and needs, as we all know the only constant thing in business is change. Enter BPM!, promising ofcourse business to take control of their processes, products and services. This is not easy thing, ofcourse my other sections in this site will provide you information what to look for in a BPM product… but if you are a C level executive please understand BPM is a not magic wand for bad business processes or the way to redesign company operations overnight. Those of us managing complex IT systems that tie into these business processes know that BPM can’t fix bad practices with the wave of a magic wand. This is a religion if practiced can provide you the right results. Small steps is what is needed for kicking off a BPM project, identify the one that is easy to implement and provides decent value to business is good starting point for a BPM project. I will also talk about that in more details in my other blogs. ( BPM is about to change, Getting started with Business Process Management)

So BPM is about translating your core business processes (that adds value to the bottom line) into executable,traceable, measurable and changeable when needed.

Standards in Human centric BPM

From a human centric BPM stand point there are few standards that are very important and should be seriously considered when evaluating for a BPM vendor.

BPMN - BPMN was developed by Business Process Management Initiative (BPMI), and is now being maintained by the Object Management Group since the two organizations merged in 2005. An important process modeling standard for representing business processes graphically in a standard way. This makes it easier to communicate the internal of the business process among the stake holders and most importantly facilitate easy hand off between business and IT. BPMN stands for business process management notation and a widely adopted standard among BPM vendors. The current version is 1.0 and version 2.0 is in the RFP stage. For more information visit www.bpmn.org

XPDL - XPDL (Extensible Process definition language a.k.a XML based process definition language) is a process definition language, objective being to exchange process diagrams between XPDL compliant vendor tools. This standard is promoted by Workflow management coalition. XPDL is not an executable programming language but a process design format for storing the visual diagram and process syntax of business process models, as well as extended product attributes. Since this defines how the process model is stored, works really well with BPMN. Some even call XPDL as serialization language for BPMN but not just constrained to BPMN. Vendors like Fujitsu Interstage BPMS provides visio plugins to conver Visio stencils to XPDL so organization can leverage what they have already created using the Visio.

More to come....