Jim has always been one of the analysts that gets the heartbeat of these things right. We’ve been talking about Social BPM for a while (not sure if it is Facebusiness or Processbook) but when the likes of Jim join the conversation we know that it is more than just a tweet (pun intended).

His blog post addresses the fact that business process management is not about the features anymore. It is not about dynamic processes, rules, content/data, BI or complex event management but how all of these are needed in BPM technologies that tie human and machine interaction together.  Processes of the future need to cater for answers where the questions are not defined yet. It requires new social interaction.

This new paradigm that business finds itself in is not unique. I received a newsletter from our local school today where the principal quoted a book, The ABC of XYZ, by social commentator Mark McCrindle that had this to say in a chapter on ‘Educating and Engaging’:

Age is no longer a factor in learning. We are all students in this information age. While younger generations are now staying in formal education for longer, older generations are continuing their learning experiences well past middle age. Today’s younger generation have been born into a time that has seen the printed word morph into an electronic form where communication is not restricted to the spoken and written word but is multi-modal. The age of reason has given way to the age of participation. It is not the era of experts but the era of user-generated opinion. In these post-modern times statistics don’t influence with the same power as story. It’s not content but process that dominates.

While schools structure learning by subject, Generations Y and Z live life in a hyperlinked world. Teachers deliver formal lessons, yet students are experiential and participative. We test academic knowledge and memory in examinations yet they, with the always-on internet, are living in an open-book world, only ever 20 seconds from any piece of information.

Generation Z is highly intuitive and confident unaided users of digital technology who are too young to remember its arrival. And while the majority of today’s learners are not yet employed, in a decade they will comprise approximately ten per cent of the workforce.

Therefore the future of education depends on understanding and engaging with these 21 century learners. Whilst our schools and structures are very traditional in form, we need to move with steady creative certainty toward many new modes of delivering curricula and co-curricula activities

I don’t think that it is just the education system that is seeing these changes to how people react and interact. I could not help but think of how accurately the quote describes “Gen Me” in the current business context. We may not be there yet and we are all thinking about and working on next generation BPM technologies but our requirements for work management systems are changing.

Process management tools will have to stretch itself in many ways to handle the social and dynamic requirements that “Gen Me” users will have in the months and years to come.

One of the discussions is to try and define BPM in 160 characters or less. I added my few cents and came up with 2 attempts along these lines:

• The purpose of BPM is to actively manage process events, variables and stakeholders to deliver critical, measurable process outcomes; and
• It is “applied common sense” to make sure that you do the right things the right way over and over to stay in business and that you get better at it.

Roger Tregear’s definition, however, is the best BPM for Executive Dummies that I’ve seen in a long time.

• Organisations exist to deliver value to customers and stakeholders. That’s strategy.
  
• They do this via a series of coordinated activities across a number of functional elements of the organisation. That’s a process.
  
• It makes sense to optimise these processes so that they satisfy the requirements of customers and other stakeholders. That’s process improvement.
  
• Taking a coordinated view of the performance of the processes by which an organisation delivers value, optimises performance. That’s process management.
  
• Process management allows organisations to focus on processes that create the market differentiation described by the strategy. That’s execution.
  

It is more than a 160 characters but it describes the essence of what BPM wants to achieve, or for that matter, the essence of what any organisation wants to achieve.

It is actually part of an article that Roger did (see the “achieving process based management” in the box.net section of his LinkedIn profile) and I recommend reading it. He lists some of the reasons for BPM in the same document, which I will comment on in a later post.

Back to the “profound sequence from strategy to execution”. Not all organisations look at their processes strategically. They should, and Roger gives the definitive reason in the five bullet points. We seldom find prospects or customers that want to start the discussion with strategy. Most are looking at bullet 2, the series of coordinated activities across a number of functions in the organisation. Most have a problem with coordinating events across functional areas of their business and want a quick fix. And that’s generally where many organisations stay. They may automate them but they don’t get the benefits associated with managing them.

It also illustrates the difference between process automation/workflow and business process management. You may require process management software tools to achieve effective BPM, but it remains a way of thinking and how you approach processes that will have the long term strategic benefit. There is a process in getting to real BPM. The good news is that it is fairly simple and not hard to do. Just take the five points and apply them to your organisation and go from strategy to execution through your processes.

Executives are not really interested in performance measures, dashboards and processes if it doesn’t assist them achieving their single most important goal. Improve overall business performance. That is really the task assigned by company shareholders to the management team that they employ that manage the business on their behalf. That is really the only overall objective that a CEO, President or Managing Director drive in an organization. Continuous improvement not only in terms of shareholder value, but also in overall financial performance, customer relations and satisfaction and employee productivity to name a few. These principles also apply to non-business environments like charities, public sector and non-profit organizations. BPM, in both flavors, is equally as important in these organizations as their business counterparts even though BPM have business in the names of both acronyms.

In my experience as a business consultant, process practitioner, technology solution provider and businessman, I have not come across a single top executive that want to buy business intelligence tools, process management suites and business rules engines or portal technology. They all just want to manage the performance of their businesses and they try to use these methodologies and tools to achieve that. That is the only thing that they really want.

The objective of this blog is to provide some strategic perspectives on how to use BPM both from a performance and process perspective to provide a holistic management approach that accelerate continuous improvement by combining the two perspectives in Business Performance and Process Management or BPPM. The approach will show that performance management is the foundation of such a methodology and process management is the means to achieve the quickest sustainable results. Business Process Management is the best practical means to deliver on improved business performance requirements.