Business Process Improvement

05 December, 2008 01:26 PM EST
Will You Take the Challenge?
Posted By: Elise Olding, Research Director

Do you believe BPM can produce results? Are you willing to put your livelihood on the line to prove it?

I saw the following when perusing the news today:

DETROIT - Ford Motor Co. will tell Congress that it plans to return to a pretax profit or break even in 2011 when the Detroit Three automakers' CEOs appear before lawmakers this week to request $25 billion in government loans.

Ford CEO Alan Mulally said he'll work for $1 per year if the company has to take any government loan money. (Associated Press Writer Alex Dominguez in Baltimore contributed to this report.)

I strongly believe that BPM should produce results. When I think about results, I consider the cost of doing the work vs. the outcomes. Think about talking to your CFO. What would she/he consider as results? Those are the kind of results I'm talking about. This is especially important when BPM is still in the phase of proving its value.

Perhaps we need to up the ante! I suggest following the lead of Ford. BPM projects should target a minimum of four times the cost of the project (resource salaries, consultants, technology, etc.) If not, then perhaps they should not be undertaken. Are you ready for the challenge? Will you declare victory over analysis paralysis, miles of process models and endless meetings? Will you cut through the political obstacles and engage your organization to develop a collaborative solution? Will you deliver meaningful results?

And if not, will you work for $1?

Let me know your thoughts.

26 November, 2008 02:00 PM EST
Gartner Symposium Sydney - November 2008
Posted By: Elise Olding, Research Director

This was my first trip to Sydney and there could not be a more spectacular place. The sun was shining and the waters surrounding the harbor provided an enticing backdrop. The conference kicked off with a keynote that portrayed the economic climate lined with a ray of hope for the AsiaPac region.

On the first day I presented "Rethinking Change" which seemed to be a theme that resonated with the audience and was carried out in my 1:1 meetings with the attendees. There was a small BPM community amongst the 1000+ attendees, but the ones that attended my sessions were astute and mindful of the cultural and political implications of the BPM journey. The majority of the meetings were with leaders charged with implementing BPM in their organization or dealing with large scale business transformation.

Many of the attendees were well versed in attending to the cultural change that is associated with business change, but felt that they were alone in seeing this need. Questions focused on how to talk about the need for change management and gain the funding necessary to secure resources on the communication and change management planning and execution with executive IT and business leadership. It can feel like a lonely road when you are one of the few who understand this need.

I was surprised at the number of leaders I talked with who had this issue. Not necessarily that this was an issue, but the fact that this is a "techie" crowd was asking about the "soft stuff" and that they resonated with the need for organizational readiness and buy-in for their business transformation efforts. These were stimulating problem solving sessions and ones that left me feeling encouraged that IT leaders will step up and do the right thing to ensure that business transformation is a success.

IT talking about change management, that's a breakthrough!

25 November, 2008 02:05 PM EST
Ten BPM Adoption Tips from Down Under
Posted By: Elise Olding, Research Director

At the recent Symposium in Sydney I facilitated an AUR (analyst/user roundtable) discussion on the topic of BPM adoption. The small group was well versed and provided a number of insights that I thought would be useful to share.

Critical success factors:
1. Engagement of executives – ensure executives are bought in and supportive of the transformation or process improvement work.
2. Ensure that governance is in place to provide the guide rails for the process improvement work.
3. A BPM methodology is more important than the tool.
4. It's important to build the needed skills in the organization to support BPM. It takes time to build these skills
5. Find "versatilists" in the organization and train them in BPM skills this is a good early adopter group and can help gain momentum.
6. There is always a "viewpoint" when modeling – consider whether you are looking from the customer, supplier or internal customer and design your processes based on this view. This framing helps management to understand what problem is being solved and how to assess the impact. (In his personal blog, David McCoy has written on this very topic – called Weltanschauung).
7. Find a "pain point" and target this as a proof of concept (POC). One attendee realized a 45% increase in productivity in the selected IT operations area. Proof drives adoption.
8. Iterate the design of the target to be model with users to achieve the best future state model. The iterations made a connection between the business and IT and fostered teamwork.
9. Gathering current state metrics and showing the target "to be" improvement is a key to adoption. Then be sure to clearly communicate the improvement results.
10. "Shadow" people doing the actual work. Observe what they are doing and ask questions to really understand the current process and validate models. Solicit ideas for improvement directly from the workers. This creates engagement and adoption at the worker level.

Words of Advice
There were also some lessons learned that were shared:
1. Don't implement BPMS tools without a full understanding of the methodology, discipline, governance or any concept of what a process is. Without this perspective the tool effectively helped one organization "make mistakes faster" to quote one attendee. The scenario left a bad taste and now the leaders charged with BPM in the organization are left with a lot of baggage and struggling to recover.
2. Don't present your business users with models developed in a tool. They don't want to review the diagrams in excruciating detail.
3. Don't jump to designing the future state. Failing to understand the current process may not allow adequate benefits quantification (because there is no baseline) and often overlooks the opportunity for quick wins.

18 November, 2008 10:50 AM EST
Forty-Nine-Year Mortgages: Think Your Processes are Any Safer?
Posted By: David McCoy, VP and Gartner Fellow

Scenario: Driving home from lunch; passing by that really expensive new neighborhood that tried to leapfrog the normal market price by about $200K in one swoop and fell flat on its face. Lot after lot sits unoccupied. Now, I see a new sign in big bold colors:

49-Year Mortgages Available!

Almost half a century of mortgage payments? So if I took out one of these mortgages today (assuming I could find a lender), I would be 97 when it gets paid off? Notice the yucky passive "when it gets paid off" construct there? I know for a fact that I'll be long gone from this life before I reach 97. I won't be paying anything off, not in any active-voice-kind-of-way. Even a typical, upscale 35-year-old buyer would be 84.

Who are we kidding? No one stays anywhere for 49 years. This is just an arbitrage game to get the monthly payments lower and move these houses. More power to you - you people who don't own amortization tables. Just pay a few bucks a year in principle (or whatever it works out to). All that interest is deductible, right?

I'm sure that 49 year mortgages will have a ripple effect throughout the lending process: origination, underwriting, funding, servicing, issuance of mortgage backed securities, private lender terms, documentation, etc. If nothing changes other than a variable named TERM_OF_LOAN, it's not the mortgage industry I once knew. But the point of this post is not to single out the changes that this will bring to your basic mortgage processes. It's just to say this:

If you have been dawdling and not paying much attention to BPM disciplines and values, what happens to you when everything you took for granted about "business as usual" is suddenly up for grabs? Do you think you'll have time to play catch up as all of your traditional processes are forced to embrace change, all at once?

49 year mortgages - that's just a small example of the change to business as usual. Better get some of that BPM religion now while you still can.

11 November, 2008 03:32 PM EST
EA/BPA Tools or BPMS?
Posted By: Janelle Hill, Research VP

At our Cannes Symposium, the most frequent questions I heard were, "Do I need both a BPA/EA tool as well as a BPMS? Why?" "What are the best practices for using such tools in conjunction?" The short answer is that organizations adopting BPM as a program will need a full EA/BPA tool and may also need a BPMS for model-driven execution of some of their process designs. EA/BPA tools support the modeling of processes in far greater detail and in relationship to other enterprise assets much better than the modeling layer of a BPMS.

Many aspects of how processes work and how they impact other areas of the business must be understood by stakeholders, even though some of these aspects have no automation impact. An EA/BPM tool supports stakeholder needs for shared process understanding and analysis (such as impact analysis, critical path analysis, what-if scenario comparison, etc). The purpose of the modeling layer of a BPMS is to capture those aspects of processes that have execution consequences. Thus, organizations adopting BPM as a program will likely chose the BPMS implementation approach for those process designs and implementations that have requirements for visibility and end user involvement in change management of the process to better meet business agility demands.

Many understood the risk of EA models getting out of synch with process execution models and asked about vendors that could deliver full roundtrip support from the higher level plans and designs built in their EA/BPA tool to their execution environment and back. My conclusion is that demand for full model-driven architectures is increasing. Organizations that have been on the cutting edge of BPM are clearly in a good position to capitalize on completed work and apply the lessons learned to even more complex process challenges.

10 November, 2008 05:25 PM EST
Fight back! BPM Shouldn't Be BPR All Over Again!
Posted By: Janelle Hill, Research VP

At our Cannes Symposium, in our Mastermind Interview with Ian Livingston, CEO, BT, he mentioned that, in his opinion, reducing headcount is definitely going to be one of the core approaches CEOs adopt to deal with the economy and that it's inevitable. Nevertheless, he also feels that acts of "random violence" in the name of cost cutting are not the right approach. Instead, he - and Gartner! - suggest using technology and process to reduce failure, work on increasing agility and ensure customer experience is at the forefront of each decision. In my view (and I acknowledge being the eternal optimist!) this has to be the answer; making the organization better able to realize opportunity and delivering to customers more effectively.

Many times, economic downturns cause organizations to become more concerned with the efficiencies that can be gained through greater process automation. In the days of business process engineering, gaining efficiencies often took the form of automating human efforts and then laying people off. BPR ultimately became associated with "downsizing".
However, equating process management with layoffs seems less likely this time, because many of the most successful BPM initiatives are attributed to better coordination of people and information assets as contributing factors to creating higher customer value, not just to better task automation.

Furthermore, BPM adoption is strongest in services-based industries (ie. banking, insurance, telco) in which the "product" is largely a commodity and in which higher customer value is created more through human interactions and expertise in servicing the consumer than through the product itself. In comparison, past process management approaches were largely practiced in manufacturing industries where value is attributed more to the product itself rather than to the servicing of the product. Some of the most notable past process management success stories have been from manufacturers (for example GE, Intel, Motorola, Toyota, Ford Motors, Allied Signal, Cemex and Dell.)

Given today's greater reliance on human creativity and insight, think about where social networking technologies, cloud computing, SaaS and remote working can make life better for the business and for employees and use the technology to serve those ends. Make people want to use the new approaches to enhance their effectiveness.

10 November, 2008 05:18 PM EST
Impressions from Cannes Symposium
Posted By: Janelle Hill, Research VP

I just returned from our Cannes Symposium and thought I'd share some impressions. In preconference surveys, Business Process Improvement was ranked the second most important topic for the conference. Thus we had four BPM analysts participating and all of us were quite busy both presenting and meeting with attendees one on one. Personally, I met with attendees interested in BPM from approximately 36 different enterprises, both commercial industries and government, from all over Europe and also a few from the middle east and Africa. I spoke with individuals from hospitals, life sciences industries, banking, automotive, insurance, telco, energy (oil, gas and electricity), tax agencies, immigration services, social services, conglomerates and even a membership-based association.

Similar to my experience at our September BPM Summit and our Orlando Symposium, I was really struck by the growing maturity reflected in my discussions with attendees. Of course some are just beginning their efforts, but 2008 overall has marked a turning point for business process management as a discipline. Organizations are scaling up their business process management (BPM) efforts to establish BPM as an enterprise program - not just apply its methods and technologies to one-off projects. For the last eight years, financial services (retail and investment banks as well as insurance) has led the BPM charge, implementing multiple projects and often using multiple vendors' products. Many clients mentioned having 3 or more BPMS tools. With the current financial crisis, Gartner expects that in 2009 many of these organizations will consolidate their BPM technologies while at the same time expanding their efforts. Clients with whom I spoke clearly demonstrated this direction. In many instances, process improvement leaders that have process initiatives underway don't expect those initiatives to be heavily impacted by the economy, mostly because their organization has invested sufficient time and money in them to make stopping now unattractive.

Establishing a system of governance, including BP competency centers, continues to be a major concern for organizations trying to advance process maturity and discipline. For maximum effectiveness, stakeholders from both business and IT should work together to create a process-driven organization.

And lastly, as always, I met at least 4 new technology providers that I had never heard of before! The market interest in BPM continues to attract many new technology and consulting services companies, many bringing new innovations to the market.

04 November, 2008 05:47 PM EST
Greening the Business with BPM
Posted By: Jennifer Kenny, Senior Director, Consulting

Business Process Management - the design, implementation, management and ongoing improvement of business processes - has the potential to make very substantial contributions to the measurable impact of any Green or Sustainability program.

Green initiatives face a huge task to educate people on the "what," the "how" and the potential relative impact of their contribution to the initiative. Power management and materials innovation will impact the data centers, R&D and the supply chain. What are the rest of us supposed to do - take shorter showers? Turn off our PCs?

Let's take the simple example of travel. The airline industry accounts for 2%[1] of our annual global carbon emissions, or 544,915,160 metric tons of CO2[2]. This is equal to the total carbon emissions for all IT. At least16%[3]of this is business related travel. In addition to this, the average American contributes approximately 22 metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions each year[4].

Historically, we have redesigned our business processes to improve customer satisfaction, reduce cycle time or align process and strategy. There is now an opportunity to redesign our processes to accommodate all of the aforementioned and to balance that with the goals of our Green Initiatives.

The introduction of web-based collaboration tools and social media software gives us an opportunity to leverage e-work and telecommuting and redesign our business processes to add green-friendly business value while improving the collaboration and coordination both inside and outside the firewall.

We still don't have solid numbers for the total carbon footprint for all of the "people processes" in business. However, we can rely on common sense to inform us that by educating people about their role in their business processes' impact on an organization's carbon footprint, we can encourage them to reduce their carbon impact in the redesigned processes and make them aware of other wasteful practices and missed opportunities for carbon reduction both at home and at work.

Systems thinking is a requirement for effective Business Process Management. The global warming crisis is a systemic problem that we will not be able to solve until we can teach a critical mass of people to think systemically about sustainability. This way of approaching business process design is an inherently "Green" approach and therefore has an increased chance of adoption by any company or group seeking to achieve Green goals.

References
1. "Europe Must Abandon 'Tunnel-Vision' on Emissions Trading," International Air Transportation Association (IATA), June, 2008.
2. "Global Carbon Emissions," Wikipedia.
3. "Business travel is 16% of all US long-distance Travel," Bureau of Transportation Statistics, October, 2003.
4. "Public Transportation's contribution to Greenhouse Gas Reduction," American Public Transportation Association (APTA), September, 2007.

04 November, 2008 04:14 PM EST
A Tribute to Dr. Rummler
Posted By: Elise Olding, Research Director

Today I learned that Dr. Geary Rummler passed away. I was so very saddened by the news. He was a wonderful visionary man and a pioneer in the field of process improvement.

One thing that is so wonderful about working at Gartner is that I have the privilege to meet some extraordinary people. My interactions with Dr. Rummler are certainly a highlight in my career. We had the honor of having him keynote at our BPM Summit in Las Vegas in February. His low key presentation style, simple message and dry wit delighted and energized the audience. The halls were buzzing with enthusiasm as attendees poured out of his closing keynote. As conference chair one could not hope for a better outcome.

Daryl Plummer and I recently spoke with him. When asked what he thought about the current state of BPM, he told us he was "under-whelmed." That is because many companies are down in the weeds, doing small projects to improve low level functions and he is not seeing the value and outcomes that he envisioned. He believed process management should be a key strategy, because all enterprises are fundamentally a collection of processes and these processes generate value. The discipline needed to be elevated to this strategic management level - that was his original intention. This message so clearly resonated with me. I have shared it in presentations and with many clients.

He has made a difference and his philosophies will continue to make a difference. His vision will continue to set the mark for our progress with process improvement. His words have made an impact on me. I for one will continue to promote his vision of BPM as a strategic advantage and continue to work with clients to take their BPM efforts out of the weeds in order to realize the full potential of process management that Dr Rummler envisioned.

My sincere condolences to his family and colleagues.

31 October, 2008 04:53 PM EST
Innovating Human Resources
Posted By: Elise Olding, Research Director

When you work in a large company, everyone likes to "rib" HR. They are often the only group that takes more heat than IT! But a company called Kenexa is changing that view. I just finished reading an article in the current issue (November 2008) of Fast Company (www.fastcompany.com) under their "NextInnovation" segment and I must admit I was compelled to read further.

We are all familiar with employee surveys. Those gems rolled out once every couple of years by HR that reports back everything we knew already, right? There's a lot of attention on the survey results but never much success with the projects that are aimed at fixing them. Why? Because often there is little understanding of what the real causes of the survey results are. That's where Kenexa comes in. Their approach is to marry interviews and surveys with sophisticated technology that doesn't just spit out a report with lots of tallied results, but looks for correlations and possible causes.

This reminded me a lot of the basic construct of process improvement. Assess the current situation, benchmark and then perform analysis to determine the course of action to improvement. In the case of Kenexa, this approach of linking the current state with an action plan of next steps has resulted in tripling their revenue since 2005.

There are some interesting by-products here too. They have an extensive data base and one of the correlations shows that companies with higher employee satisfaction scores had 700% higher shareholder return than companies with low scores. Another factoid stated that manager turnover is 21% lower among managers that were proud of their companies. This results in solid impact to the bottom line and productivity. The power is in linking the current state with an action plan and next steps.

All this still sounds like BPM to me and I'm pleased to see some solid analysis of the people side of the equation - one that is often considered to be a "squishy" and difficult subject area in which to demonstrate significant, tangible results.

28 October, 2008 04:20 PM EST
The Path of Least Resistance: A Road Well Traveled
Posted By: Jim Sinur, VP Distinguished Analyst

Often it's easiest to take the path of least resistance. Today it seems that survival is on everybody's mind with all of the economic malaise that's surrounding us. Unfortunately, the path of least resistance when an organization is in survival mode is usually to cut the number of employees and try to move forward until conditions improve.

We think that the better path that should be considered should be "doubling down" on the bet to eliminate and/or improve processes and redistribute the employees, especially in the knowledge-intensive, service-based industries that have led this wave of adoption of BPM!" We think the best way to accomplish this is to take talented key personnel and charge them with process discovery on a programmatic basis. This process discovery effort would be best led by a business process competency center (BPCC), but if that smells of a staff target then it would be important to make sure they paid their way through savings and/or distribute the key people in areas of opportunity.

There are two basic ways to discover process. One is to model them and look for low hanging fruit. The other is to instrument processes and measure them. There is a new healthy sector around automated process discovery that instruments existing processes to look for better behaviors. There has been debate around which approach is better, but both have proven successful. Organizations that have planning cultures tend to lean towards modeling and results oriented cultures lean toward monitoring.

Really smart companies also look for downturns as an opportunity to introduce process innovation. They quietly build new processes that please clients and/or value chain participants and tune them during these down times. This keeps critical talent focused and ready to launch when times move us into better growth conditions. Aggressive firms will unleash these better processes to steal business away from companies unwilling or unable to change.

Bottom Line: The road to perdition is a wide and paved road. It's time to embrace new explicit process management techniques; not shrink away from them.

27 October, 2008 12:05 PM EST
In Times of Economic Crisis, BPM Enables Innovation to Emerge
Posted By: Bill Rosser, VP Distinguished Analyst

In times of severe economic downturn, it might be tempting to defer any BPM effort - but this can be a serious mistake. BPM is precisely aimed at making visible and direct improvement in business performance - with cost a number one target - which is exactly the right thing to do now. Furthermore, BPM can make a major contribution by enabling more people to see and understand just how things work - so that they can readily identify the best opportunities.

If cost is the issue, there are three obvious immediate targets - examine labor costs, examine purchased goods, and examine possible waste. The discovery process used to examine the relevant and high-value processes, can trigger attention to concentrations of labor and how things could be changed to cut the costs in innovative ways. It is the BPM visualization and understanding via a fresh process perspective that can stimulate innovative ideas - especially when under pressure.

For purchased goods, is it possible to accept your vendors' own inspection as adequate and forego incoming inspection? Can you tighten up the supply chain in terms of smaller releases of needed products to cut down on consumption of working capital? Can you break shipments up and route them to where they are used rather than ship them yourself? Your vendor may be willing to do more on your behalf because of their own pressures. Naturally all of these ideas may have been explored before - but BPM can stimulate new ideas as well as provide a chance to review old ones that might now work.

Regarding waste, re-examine some of the end-to-end processes. Look at the interchanges and handoffs: often these spots are potential goldmines for making things work better when looking at improving the end-to-end outcomes. Now everyone needs to work together to get the right outcomes for your end customers. Can you avoid steps currently taken?

At a recent conference, Janelle Hill mentioned a company that had inserted an interim report for some projects - yet it was discovered, by a process review, that the interim report often came out after the project was already over. This was useless and a direct waste that could be eliminated or greatly tailored in order to be useful.

BPM and the process perspective gives you a chance right now to look at things that have been taken for granted and, under economic pressure, be stimulated to think of more radical process changes and innovative ideas to be able to survive. Don't defer BPM, get people using it right now.

24 October, 2008 10:20 AM EST
Process Visibility and Customer Service
Posted By: Elise Olding, Research Director

I had an experience recently with an airline that caused me to reflect on how process visibility can enhance or detract from the customer experience.

I was flying home and had done my normal routine - check-in online. As I was in my hotel room, I did not print out my boarding pass. A little later in the day, I called the customer service line to change a request for an upgrade. The service agent politely handled my request and I completed my call in about 4 minutes.

Something did not sit right with me and later in the afternoon I decided to check my reservation. I was mortified to see I no longer had a seat assignment and was not checked in. The flight was full - all the seats on the flight were taken. I tried to secure a seat, but was blocked out of the system.

I again called customer service, only to be told by the agent that I indeed did not have a seat and I must have been the one who removed me from the flight. I explained to her that I would have no reason to do that, given that I wanted to get home and this was the only direct flight to my city that day. This did not seem to matter. I still had no seat and the flight was full from her perspective. Upon insisting to be assigned a seat, I was put on hold for about 7 minutes. She came back and offered me a middle seat for my five plus hour flight. I tried to explain that this was not something I had done, that I was a frequent flyer with the airline and that I had booked my seat well in advance. Still no success and no apologies. At this point I was just glad to have a seat.

The fact that this airline was not able to see the call I had made to them just hours earlier was troubling. Perhaps it is a way for them to pass off poor service, make the customer wrong and then seem like a hero when coming up with a seat on the plane. The funny thing was, when I got to the airport, my original seat had magically been restored and still no one could tell me why or what happened. This situation is not a win for anyone - I don't know how to avoid this mistake in the future and the airline likely will not learn from this error and have the opportunity to fix it.

Moral of the story: If you can't print out your boarding pass - at least save a copy of it! It may be your only line of defense when a lack of process visibility results in poor customer service.

22 October, 2008 11:00 AM EST
A Business Rule Management Tutorial: Call for Input
Posted By: David McCoy, VP and Gartner Fellow

Jim Sinur, Marc Kerremans and I are about to create a nice, new tutorial presentation on Business Rule Management (BRM). This is being done for our London BPM conference next February 23-25. We know what we think should go in a BRM tutorial - one that will cover both the concept of BRM and the technologies/practices that make it work. We always know what we would say - but, we want more.

What would you add to a BRM tutorial? What are some of the things that vex you or your clients? What topics or concepts need clarification? We might reserve a few slides to address these concerns, or we may create a list of "watch out!" topics based on your input. Here is your chance to speak up.

Leave comments here, or email me at david.mccoy at gartner.com. Note, email address harvesting forces me to write my email in pictograms. We look forward to your input.

21 October, 2008 01:57 PM EST
Orlando Symposium: My Top BPI Takeaway
Posted By: Elise Olding, Research Director

I just returned from the Gartner Symposium in Orlando. It was well attended, with one of the roles being business process improvement. I had lots of opportunities to interact with attendees - informally and in one-on-one sessions, "Team Send" sessions and an analyst-user roundtable. The topics covered ranged from initiating a process program, to solving specific stumbling blocks with an existing BPM program. The majority of discussions involved how enterprise architecture and BPM worked together.

Earlier in the week, Janelle Hill and I gave a presentation on EA and BPM - "Making the Synergy Work," so it was interesting to discuss the different facets and nuances of this topic in more detail, specifically focused on how to do this given the unique situation in each enterprise.

One trend in the discussions was that those who were enterprise architects saw the value of BPM and how it related to their goals to develop enterprise business architecture. They realized that the results focus of BPM meshed nicely with the more strategic focus of EA and could be a way to "operationalize" EA roadmaps and link those to results. Linking BPM and EA provided an "end-to-end" view.

One framework from the presentation Janelle and I gave seemed of high value to the attendees I met with. That framework was a model that laid out the steps in a strategic planning cycle and used a RACI model to define a collaborative framework to perform the work. (RACI is Responsible, Accountable, Consulted and Informed). One thing this framework does is to identify the roles involved in each step and clearly define accountabilities. It is a way to move from a waterfall view and siloed accountability to a collaborative model of shared accountability.

This shared accountability is the key to connecting the business strategy to the needed change (led by EA) and the work that will be performed to achieve the change (led by BPM). Putting the disciplines into perspective and identifying the synergies is a powerful way to achieve relevant, meaningful change in an organization and demonstrate the value of each of these disciplines. In our EA/BPM research we view EA as the mechanism for defining the change needed. BPM then gets brought in as a method to implement the change. I know - this is not the way many BPM experts think of it, but if you have a good EBA it would work this way.

21 October, 2008 12:06 PM EST
BPM in Russia
Posted By: Marc Kerremans, Research Director

Recently Garter held its first conference in Russia. I gave a presentation on BPM and then held one-on-one discussions as part of the program. This gave me a first-hand opportunity to examine the status of BPM in Russia.

It was clear that there was a kind of polarization of the landscape between organizations that had international contacts (subsidiaries, international partners) and those organizations that operated predominantly in Russia and its closest neighbor countries.

• The first group had staff aboard that understood English and was aware of the vast amount of written material on BPM. They considered BPM as a collaborative initiative between business and IT (organizational behavior), they had a competency center approach (governance), and they mastered sophisticated engineering driven techniques (methods and techniques). What made them different from most Western organizations was their reduced interest in employee participation - "they have to do what is required from them" (human resources) - and the fact that they were very keen on supporting systems that they themselves had been developing (technology).

• The second group looked at BPM from an almost exclusively IT point of view and applied their initiatives on a project basis.

In assessing the next steps to gain maturity in their BPM initiatives I always got the same reply. They considered themselves to be at the right track, having in mind exactly the same steps and felt they would even exceed expectations, although I never got a clear answer on the "how" question. This reminded me of when I was working with Russian and Czech software engineers. They always "improved" the requirements we sent to them, and they delivered a solution that "blew us away," but didn't match the original requirements.

After this encounter we can summarize that Russian organizations can still learn from our Western experiences of collaborative models, organizational aspects, and the leverage of existing technology, but that we can learn from their creative aspects and techniques, coming from their strong engineering driven background. Almost all of the business and IT people I met - predominantly C-level executives and program managers - had engineering backgrounds.

20 October, 2008 01:59 PM EST
Enter - the Versatilist
Posted By: David McCoy, VP and Gartner Fellow

Gartner uses the term "versatilist" - as distinct from generalist and specialist – to describe an emerging skills paradigm. From our research (specifically Diane Morello and Ed Holub's piece entitled: "Inside the Concept of Versatilists: What Are They and How Do CIOs Develop Them?"): "Versatilists tend to assume challenges at the intersection of business and IT - for example, industry-specific software components, business analytics, business process modeling and extended enterprise alliances." The research further states: "Leading-edge companies will adjust the workforce balance between specialists and versatilists, going from 90% to 10% today to 60% to 40% by 2011." That is an aggressive prediction for leading-edge companies.

My colleague, Janelle Hill, likes to point out that the Business Process Analyst (BPA) is the prototypical versatilist. I agree. The versatilist will be commonplace within BPM, even extending beyond the BPA role. Isn't it mandatory for BPM experts to "assume challenges at the intersection of business and IT?" The answer is, "Of course! That's what we do."

Here are a few points to consider:

• Do you have an explicit plan to develop versatilists? Or are you going to let them emerge in a grass-roots fashion? You should make this effort explicit and guided; you should not treat it as a hands-off phenomenon.
• How can you shift some of your specialists to become versatilists? Skills development, motivation, rewards – these are critical decision points.
• Are you a versatilist?

As to that last bullet point, in the current nasty economy, the versatilist may just be a pretty safe career bet. Versatilists blend deep skills with a broad spectrum range of capabilities. Those skills are always in demand. Embrace your inner versatilist - and test your skills in the BPM arena.

14 October, 2008 09:00 AM EST
Natural Language Business Rules: No Panacea
Posted By: David McCoy, VP and Gartner Fellow

In Q1 2008, Jim Sinur and I will release research on the different approaches to business rule representation. This is going to be a fun research effort - lots of theory, lots of hands-on testing. This is also a misunderstood area. For instance, some users think that a natural-language (NL) approach to rule representation is the only way to go. NL is great and has its targeted applications - which we will discuss in the research - however, NL is no panacea. This is where those same people get concerned and say, "Hey! Don’t we use natural language all the time? Isn't that what you're writing in right now? How can there be anything wrong with natural language?"

My usual research response has been to remind you that your tax code and all your laws are written in natural language. ("Oh - I see your point. I never could understand that deduction for the profits on excess mineral rights that can be claimed by part-time fishermen who install solar panels on their second homes in July.") No, I won't go there. Instead, let me tell you about some tires I bought.

The tires are great! My wife and I love them. And we thought we loved the financing scheme the company gave us. Here is what it said on the contract: "6 months no interest/minimum payment required."

Wow! Six months and we don't have to pay interest or make a minimum payment. I like those terms. Well, we threw away the first bill and when we got the second bill, there was a charge for failing to make the minimum payment. "Come again?" I called the bank behind the promotion and they said the rule should be read as (a) 6 months no interest but (b) a minimum monthly payment is required. This is the natural language pitfall - semantic interpretation.

Folks, where I come from, a slash tends to be read as an "or" and distributes the verb uniformly. This is equivalent to the airport warning, "no knives/handguns allowed." No one in his/her (I had to do it) right mind would interpret that to mean: (a) no knives but (b) handguns are allowed. Try explaining the logic behind that interpretation as you wait for your orange jumpsuit and a new roommate at the nearest prison.

In a rare stroke of customer service luck, the agent immediately agreed with my interpretation. Perhaps he is a closet linguist. He waived the fees and in return, I am just going to send in the whole payment and pretend this event never happened. I love those tires. I no longer love the financing scheme.

In defense of NL, if you allow poor or ambiguous grammar, you are asking for trouble. The NL rule tools do a great job at clarifying the ontology and enforcing proper grammar. And NL has its place. But my point is simple. If you think natural language is a universal panacea, you are in for a surprise. We learned too much from the days of AI to forget that.

Watch for our research in Q1. NL is just one of the rule representation approaches we will be reviewing in detail.

10 October, 2008 09:00 AM EST
Using the 'My Library' Feature in the Gartner for IT Leaders Portal as a Role-Based Syllabus
Posted By: Michele Cantara, Research VP

I spent last week visiting a number of clients in the San Francisco Bay Area, and a consistent theme emerged. Most of these clients held positions in the enterprise architecture (EA) group. The EA group was typically the champion of the BPM initiative. Despite being fairly heavy-duty technical people, the EAs desperately want the business analysts to get up to speed on BPM and on business process modeling. They also want more business stakeholders to understand how to use diagramming tools and to appreciate the high-level benefits of BPM. Naturally, I took them through our Gartner for IT Leaders business process improvement portal. Now, this was "my BPI portal," and I've made lots of use of the new "my library" feature. As I showed the EAs how I used the "my library" tags, it occurred to me that this feature was a great way to establish a recommended reading list for members of the BPM team. The EA responsible for BPM could establish a list of "must read" reports for business process analysts, business process architects, business process consultants and executive sponsors. The EAs I talked to last week loved the idea, and I helped them create some shortlists. If you need help setting up a customized role-based syllabus for your BPM team, just let me know!

09 October, 2008 09:00 AM EST
Use BPM to Cope With Volatile Processes: A Message That Resonated With BPM Summit Participants
Posted By: Michele Cantara, Research VP

The Gartner BPM Summit (10 September 10 to 12 September) in Washington, D.C., was a great venue for illustrating the "sweet spot" for BPM. During the keynote address to the more than 600 attendees, Janelle Hill and I identified key findings from our second-quarter BPM adoption survey. From May through June 2008, we conducted a primary research survey done with more than 300 Gartner and non-Gartner clients in large and midmarket companies in North America and Western Europe.

The survey showed that two-thirds of the companies that use BPM disciplines and technologies do so to cope with changing business processes:

- Minimally, these companies change business processes several times per year.
- Monthly and weekly process changes are not unusual.
- A few companies change processes daily!
- Accelerating ad hoc process changes in response to unforeseen events is critical.

Not surprisingly, our survey indicated that most process change came from external-facing business processes, CRM processes, partner-facing supply chain management (SCM) processes, or regulatory processes. Typically, companies do not have complete control over these external-facing processes and are at the mercy of process change.

During the keynote address, heads nodded in agreement with these survey findings. A series of one-on-one meetings and hallway conversations with attendees made it clear that seeing BPM as a vehicle for coping with frequent process change was an "ah ha" moment. Our advice to conference attendees was to evaluate their companies' business process portfolios. Figure out where process volatility causes the most pain, and target BPM to those processes first. It may not be necessary to apply BPM to every single business process you have!