Why do I think BPM could take off like ERP and CRM
The LinkedIn BPM groups is a good place to find topics to blog on. I just look for those with lots of comments and it sparks ideas. This question had more the 62 comments added in a few days and I thought I’d add my few cents. I also decided to post my comment to this blog as these groups don’t have open access. The question was : “Why do you think BPM could not take off like ERP or CRM?”. Here was my reply.
Well I’d like to rephrase it for myself to “Why do I think BPM cloud take off like ERP and CRM”. It also pre-supposes that CRM has taken off (which is a different debate).
I believe BPM will take off but not in the form or shape that we understand or think off today. I wrote a blog post on my BPMJournal blog titled “On Evolution, Darwin and BPPM” and no, BPPM is not a spelling mistake, it stands for Business Process and Performance Management. In the post I discuss the Richard Koch’s theory on “Evolution by Natural Selection” and how it applies to business process management and the “Progress from Order to Chaos”.
In summary (and I suggest that you read the post if you want to understand the context) it states that there is variation (we breed new adapted species), then selection (only a few make it in the new conditions), then more variation based on those that survive, the selection and so on. Being successful or “surviving” is based on fitting the “conditions of life”.
ERP systems in particular didn’t just arrive overnight. It evolved into the technology based systems that we see today through the same natural selection process. It is interesting if you trace the history of the double entry accounting system that a transactional ERP system is fundamentally based on.
In 1494 Frater Luca Bartolomes Pacioli, friend of Leonardo da Vinci, published his fifth book, Summa de Arithmetica, Geometria, Proportioni et Proportionalita (Everything About Arithmetic, Geometry and Proportion). It was written as a digest and guide to existing mathematical knowledge, and bookkeeping was only one of five topics covered. The Summa’s 36 short chapters on bookkeeping, entitled De Computis et Scripturis (Of Reckonings and Writings) were added “in order that the subjects of the most gracious Duke of Urbino may have complete instructions in the conduct of business,” and to “give the trader without delay information as to his assets and liabilities.” He acknowledged in his book that thirty-six years before him Benedetto Cotrugli wrote Delia Mercatura et del Mercante Perfetto (Of Trading and the Perfect Trader), which included a brief chapter which described many of the features of double entry.
The point I am making is that ERPs evolved over an extended period of time and will continue to change in future. ERPs didn’t start selling that well in 1500 or 1700 or 1900. I remember large Kalamazoo hand written “accounting systems” in my dad’s offices in the late ’60s, early ’70s. Today we wouldn’t contemplate starting his type of business without at least the standard modules of a manufacturing ERP. We just won’t be competitive and survive. I think the shortcomings of ERP have spawned the “next generation” and growing emergence of BPMS systems. But is all part of the evolutionary process.
BPM systems are evolving in a similar way to address ad-hoc, dynamic process requirements. The emergence of systems like Facebook disrupts the behaviour of people that use ERP, CRM and BPM systems and will change the face (no pun intended) of business systems forever. I’ve always held the view that future ERP systems will be based on a type of “BPMish” tool and I think that SOA, BPM, ERP, BI etc. are all converging to new ways of using technology to get better at getting work done. This is in the end the main objective. It will not look the same as what we know right now. It will be better adapted.
I think it is too early to say that BPM won’t take off like ERP and CRM systems. That is, if you see BPM as the technology component and not the management science. I think it can and will take off, maybe just not in the form that we see it in now. It is all based on how well it is suited to the “conditions of life”
Double entry system source: http://www.canhamrogers.com/HDEB.htm
