Don’t be afraid to use FUD – fear, uncertainty and doubt – to help convince executives in your company of the importance of business process management (BPM) in helping create a competitive organization, says Gartner Research Vice President Janelle Hill.

Hill made her remarks at Monday’s keynote presentation for the business process improvement (BPI) track at Gartner Symposium/ITxpo 2006. BPI is one of the latest additions to Gartner for IT Leaders, a site that business process leaders can access for customized research, tools and community.

“Frankly, you’ve got to create FUD,” said Hill in her presentation “Championing Business Process Improvement in 2006 and Beyond.”

“Know your CEO’s pain points,” she said. “Know what keeps them lying awake a night.”

Because a process orientation will be increasingly crucial for business success in the future, she said, you’ll be doing your company a favor if you create a sense of urgency about getting away from keeping processes buried in applications. Instead, they need to be out in the open where they can be viewed and improved.

BPM shouldn’t be confused with business process re-engineering, she added. Instead, BPM aims to create transparent processes that can be readily understood at all levels and that create end-to-end value for the enterprise.

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We all know, often from painful experience, that IT architectures are seldom homogeneous and that few business processes are fully encapsulated by a single application. In the real world, processes cross application boundaries and job roles.

Providing access to and interaction with business processes spanning these boundaries is an important goal for many portal deployments. Most portal products support workflow today and a few are starting to take steps into process orchestration. Growing interest in business process management (BPM) as a discipline and in specific BPM technology solutions is leading some enterprises to examine the role their portal deployments may play in process enablement and automation.

In a presentation I will be giving on Tuesday at 8 a.m. at the Swan Hotel in Swan 6 entitled “Portals: Linking People and Processes,” I'll be examining the state of portals in today’s organizations, the state of the portal market, and how organizations are using portals to provide access to and interaction with what were previously isolated content sources, applications and islands of process.

If you would like to understand how organizations are using portals to deliver business value, including as a platform for building composite applications and process orchestration, this will be a great session to set the stage.

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I find that most folks I talk to think they have BPM efforts underway and they are probably right, however there are several flavors of BPM. We all know that BPM is a journey, but I find I do better with a map in hand. We have been compiling the results of many BPM journeys, including some of our own and we think we have a map worth considering

In a tutorial I will be giving tomorrow, Sunday October 8 at 2:30 p.m.at the Yacht and Beach hotel in Grand Harbor North entitled “Crafting a Process Managed Vision and Execution Plan,” I will be presenting a BPM maturity model that we have been collaborating on for more than a few months. It covers what we know today and can see going forward in pioneer organizations as BPM progresses. I will be discussing what the typical and progressive journey towards process excellence will likely entails. This has been a challenge for us to create and we hope you find it helpful.

If you like to get an idea where your organization stands in its progressive journey and what challenges may lay ahead, this will be a great session to kick off your thinking. We would like to hear if a maturity map helps on the journey and if we have it right after all our feedback and debate.

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Today’s content and information managers are struggling to derive greater value from diverse types of information spread across enterprises, applications and databases. Fortunately, 2007 promises to be a year in which the visions of better information and content management will become more real within leading organizations.

In August, IBM announced its intention to purchase FileNet – combining the expertise of two leading content management vendors. Microsoft is likely to gain significant traction in basic content management with the pending availability of Windows SharePoint Services v3 and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007.

And, in the midst of this, there’s considerable effort and planning going on in organizations in how unstructured data can be integrated with structured data to provide a more comprehensive view into information. How will this affect your organization? In Gartner’s Portals, Content and Collaboration and Information Management track, come hear how to intelligently plan inside of this sea of change.

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We held our pre-event audio conference last week for the Business Process Improvement Community, highlighting key agenda sessions, Gartner analysts attending, and various activities onsite. The call was hosted by Gartner Research VP Janelle Hill.

If you weren't able to join us, we have the next best thing: an MP3 audio recording of the ATC. It serves as a great primer for Symposium/ITxpo, and will help you get the most out of the event as Community members responsible for program and portfolio management in your organization.

We look forward to welcoming our Business Process Improvement Symposium Community members to Symposium/ITxpo this year.

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There is a collision coming between BI, BPM, Information Management and I for one am interested in the final outcome.

Come and see an unscripted discussion among some of Gartner's more vocal analysts. Donald Feinberg, Kurt Schelgel and Jim Sinur will be caged by lion trainer Ted Freidman without any carnage. OK, there might be some blood, but it’s all in good fun of debate. This Market Directions session will be held Tuesday, October 10 at 1:45 p.m. in the Swan's Osprey room.

So which one wins this cage match? Come and make your vote here or let me know in person.

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I always found it amusing that the hare always lost the race. BPM technology enables organizations to do things faster cheaper and better based on the results we have seen to date. In fact it’s been pretty impressive to date that even the turtles are trotting J We think that BPM technologies help both the hare and the turtle and the BPM technologies are morphing add features to embrace quality and speed. We have identified the vendors we think are in the lead right now and a good way to measure BPM technologies. We think the time is right to pick a BPM suite to gain process efficiency and effectiveness

On Thursday afternoon at 1:45 p.m. at the Yacht and Beach hotel in Grand Harbor North, I'll be presenting how to how BPM solutions are getting more sophisticated and what kind of BPM technology it takes to step up to the evolving BPM challenge. The session is entitled "BPM Technology Selection: How Solutions are Evolving?" will provide some good advice on how your BPM technology measures up or who you might consider in a new selection. What are the turtle vendors doing to catch the early race leaders in the vendor race?

In the mean time let’s ponder: Does the BPM solution need drive the BPM technology features or does the technology drive new kinds of process behavior?

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There are a number of alternative approaches to improving business processes. How do you know which one is right for you? For years, process improvement meant putting in the next version or maintenance release for your favorite application. Now not doing the process anymore might be the right decision, in which case you might be investigating outsourcing. And for still others, process improvement may mean investigating process oriented management theories (ie BPR, TQM and more recently BPM) and methodologies (ie Six Sigma, Lean, ISO). As Role Service Director for Gartner’s new BPI IT leaders, I anticipate that Symposium will help you not only identify the right path for your situation but also get you started with pragmatic tips and best practices in any one of these areas.

Personally, I’ll be presenting on BPM, focusing on the two most difficult activity phases – championing the process cause and optimizing processes. Process management in general and BPM in particular are NOT projects; they are long term programs. As such, you should NOT be competing for management attention and funding with short term (1 year) initiatives. In fact, much of the work in the Champion phase requires your full time attention and effort, but will not require a lot of upfront investment in new technologies.

Come to this session and if you haven't had a chance yet, take a look at our BPM custom agenda with sessions to learn, network and share stories about BPI initiatives. Looking forward to meeting you!

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I’m not sure whether it’s me or the topic that’s been around too long, but I seem to have been thinking about business process management in some shape or form for at least 20 years! Now, you may have recently come to a recognition of the centrality of BPM and still be feeling that flush of excitement, but I suspect many will be in my camp. But does that mean there is nothing new under the sun and that all excitement is in the past? I hope not!

In the presentation I will be giving at Symposium on Monday, 3:30 p.m. (location is Northern A-C at the Dolphin), titled “Business Processes, the Foundation Linking Business and IT”, I’ll be giving my view of why business process is the central concept we need to link IT and the business. The topic of “business to IT alignment” may also sound a bit passé – and if we assume there are easy answers to such challenges, where we can knock them down and move on, then yes, it could be time to move on. But most of the clients we talk to recognize that they are only just starting to get their arms around their processes and to understand how thinking in terms of those processes really can help link IT capabilities to business objectives. This is not easy stuff.

And if you’re one of those people who has been heads down leading a BPM initiative or implementing some of the supporting technology, you don’t need to be told it’s important – but you might need to look up and take a moment to reflect on the larger context, and why it’s important. Apart from anything else it may help make the case for continuing your efforts – whether to your boss or even yourself!

My first chart is entitled “Process – the story never ends…," and another: “Improving the Management of Process is a Journey." Where are you on that journey?

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