Companies turn to Business Process Management (BPM) to improve overall efficiency. BPM increases the productivity of an organization by improving the way people work together using systems to orchestrate their operations. BPM can sometimes be perceived as hard to implement because it affects the way people and systems work together. By nature, people desire change and resist change at the same time.
What is great about BPM is that we can tap into those qualities in human nature to help companies reap big rewards from process changes. One key is to make changes incrementally and with flexibility, so the organization can realize meaningful ROI quickly and the people affected can feel good about how their roles change and grow. This is part of our methodology around BPM implementations.
Another key to reaping big rewards is how the BPM system itself is planned and architected. Consider that application development has already benefited from certain kinds of architectures. For instance, software applications are written using Object-Oriented Design (OOD) and Aspect Oriented Programming (AOP). Enterprise designs use architectures like Model/View/Controller (for web applications), SOA for Enterprise scaling/re-use of services, and Service Buses for back-end integration of disparate systems. BPM builds on these architectures and adds process simulations, process modeling and process automation so that the entire organization’s efficiency is improved by coordinating people and processes into a coherent whole.
There is exciting new thinking on how to build BPM systems that can produce a whole new level of efficiency and cost savings. I will be sharing some insight with you about this in my next entry.
Next week: Process Oriented Architecture (POA)