• 19 December, 2008 10:50 AM EST
• BPM Initiatives Don't Seem to Be Getting the Axe
• Posted By: Michele Cantara, Research VP

Over the past few months I've been sure to include the following question in every customer interaction. "Are you being pressured to reduce your BPM budget or disband your BPM initiative as a result of economic pressures?"

I've talked to scores of customers during this period. And so far, those that have BPM initiatives underway have escaped the axe. In fact, most have reported that there is even more management support for BPM than ever. Here's what they had to say.

• One executive sponsor from a global discrete manufacturing company, said "The current economic downturn is BPM nirvana."
• An enterprise architect at a large investment company, said "BPM is not a luxury."
• A CIO at a large insurance company, said, "We're going to reduce costs by 30%, but triple output, and BPM is key to making this happen." He also noted, "I don’t have to budget extra for BPM. BPM is actually a better way for me to reach my IT goals."

What do these customers have in common? They all have successful BPM projects to point to as successes.
• These projects were tied to solving critical business problems; they were not just skunk-work pilots to test out technology.
• Most of the business benefits related to eliminating process redundancies or automating manual processes and saving on labor costs.
• Business users were actively involved in constructing and validating models. Active involvement did not necessarily mean that the business users were actually constructing business process models on their own. Instead, something akin to a "pairs modeling" approach was used. Business analysts or process architects from IT worked closely with specific business stakeholders when developing the models. The process models made the solution tangible to business users. As result, business users were as committed to the solution as IT was.
• IT made heavy use of the "playback" capabilities of various BPMS tools in order to get business user input and validation. Playback lets users walk through the process using the process model as a visualization tool. Users can see process steps, paths, and the user interfaces they would encounter if they were using the solution in production. This greatly speeded up development and reduced the gap between IT's solution design and business expectations.

What's going on with your BPM projects?

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Comments

• 19 December, 2008 10:28 PM EST
• Scott Francis wrote:

We're seeing much the same with our customers. Not every BPM project is getting approved at each customer, but none of them are canceling their BPM initiatives wholesale, and though we've seen some projects postpone, we haven't seen anyone cut their BPM staffing yet.

I think it reflects a realization that BPM projects are more likely than the average IT project to elicit a real, measurable, return on investment (and, btw, the implementation itself will likely help you measure that ROI).