- 16 December, 2008 12:23 PM EST
- Among Triggers to Launch BPM - Add One More: Value
"Don’t pave the cow paths" has been a good guide for application developers for many years. This implies that there are generally much better ways for getting from A to B than to follow an existing ad hoc approach - certainly a sound idea. This guidance comes up whenever an application becomes a candidate for a new implementation. The stimulus may be a simple legacy upgrade (such as a new platform), or replacement by a packaged application, perhaps moving to a shared service offering, or the need for an added feature. An important step prior to such a change is to review the actual business process itself in order to analyze it and make it better, prior to building the new system.
This pattern is of course smart and sensible, but has its own shortcomings. It is inherently restricted to those applications which happen come up for a change for some reason or other. It misses lots of other applications that could greatly benefit from a process view and a BPM initiative. The result of this behavior is to very likely miss those processes which: a) play an important role in delivering enterprise value, and b) are not done well and could be greatly improved. So there needs to be another trigger mechanism added that will identify and promote such candidate processes for consideration in getting BPM attention.
The concept to pursue to do this is one of "value analysis". This means a review of all the processes in an organization and determining which of them make a major contribution to the value added to the enterprise. Experience has shown that it is relatively easy to narrow down the high-value candidates to less than twenty-five percent of the total number of processes. Once you identify these, you need to determine how well they are currently being done - to justify action. As a corollary, this is also a strong message from Geary Rummler, the recently deceased BPM pioneer, who has stressed that it is best to make certain that any BPM project must be directly connected to the highest level of primary value in the enterprise. If this is not done, he said, you "get lost in the weeds" and make only minor improvements that do not earn the attention of the senior executives.
So always consider applying "value chain analysis".
