What is business process management? Antony Adshead reports on a
roundtable discussion which brought together those in the
know
Imagine a future where there is no divide between IT and the
business, where changes to the processes of the business are
simultaneously mirrored in the enterprise software. The business
process management movement (BPM) wants to realise this vision by
developing a structure for application development that is as agile
as the data that applications handle.
This roundtable consisted of representatives from three suppliers
with an interest in BPM and a user, Andrew Snodgrass, IT manager at
US construction firm Washington.
Snodgrass pointed out that Washington's interest in BPM is largely
due to its need to share information on an international scale.
"We are a global engineering and construction firm. Our supply
chain is on the intellectual property side - drawings and data
needing to be shared. We need to find ways of having everyone
working on the same thing at the same time," he said.
The discussion began with a look at definitions. Moderator Howard
Smith, of CSC, referred to some of the intersections of BPM and
other technologies, such as workflow, collaboration and middleware,
and raised the question of the relationship between BPM and Web
services.
Richard Wall, of BsoftB, said, "There is a simplistic background to
all this. All IT is there to support the business and that's what
BPM is all about. But should you buy a package or bespoke software
or a mixture of the two.
"I see BPM as getting exactly what the user needs to support the
business. Web services will enable users to tie together different
applications into an orchestrated whole," Wall added.
SSA's Russell Storey defined BPM as a way of creating a level
playing field for business processes and technology. "Whereas the
organisation of the applications and the business processes was
formerly separate, BPM can allow the business and the technology
management to work together to achieve maximum return on investment
from an equal-position footing with a common set of business
priorities," he said.
The promised benefits of BPM are flexibility, speed, measurability,
improved time to market, a better understanding of where the
no-value-add is and the possibility of applications modelled to the
business in a state of continuous improvement, added Storey.
Giving the user view, Snodgrass stated what he looked for in BPM.
The company only takes on construction projects with a minimum $50m
(£34.6m) value which may last from six months to 10 years.
"Flexibility is key to our business. We need to respond to
potential clients with solutions to projects. We have to
collaborate between ourselves and clients on proposals, estimates,
processes and delivery of materials. We need to track these types
of things from beginning to end," he said.
Snodgrass explained that the business' workflows need to cross
boundaries, such as engineering, procurement and certification, and
that this vast amount of information needs an end-to-end approach.
The ability of a software platform to be easily modelled to such
processes would reveal a convergence of what were purely technical
considerations in the past being taken to the users, he said. The
problem of not having good BPM in place meant that at present the
business was losing too many changes to information as it passed
through the process.
Smith summarised the points raised in defining BPM. "Business is
end-to-end, and as BPM is trying to combine the business and the
technology it follows that no one supplier can supply what is
needed. BPM is trying to bring about a situation of constant
re-engineering of business processes. The advanced forms of
workflow that would result could allow users to be brought online
and involved in changing processes.
"One of the biggest points, though, is that business processes are
unique to a company so it follows that they can't be supplied by
standard applications. Applications have to become more flexible
but the big step is what will take us out of applications and into
business processes," Smith added.
"We want to see software providing capabilities defined by the
business - calculating, linking databases and defining processes -
and XML will play a huge part in this. The big battle will be
between an applications view of the world and a BPM view of the
world."
Current perceptions
The discussion then moved on to
current perceptions of BPM. Wall said he believed there was
interest now that was not there a year ago.
Smith said he saw companies re-engineering to get more value from
their systems. He described how the development cycle could work in
parallel rather than in series as it does now. Instead of going
through an in-series process of discovery, design, deployment,
execution, optimisation and analysis, we will see a trend towards
carrying these tasks out in parallel, he said.
Questions of leadership were highlighted by Snodgrass, who wondered
whether the BPM movement would see the rise of board-level business
process officers. Storey pointed out that whatever they were called
there would need to be people to champion driving forward
re-engineering of the business in this way.
Snodgrass remarked that IT is usually seen as a money pit and that
this could be the chance for IT to begin to explain itself to the
business more clearly. "Too often IT is asked to justify itself in
purely money terms when the contribution is much more of a
qualitative one. IT in the construction sector is seen as the 'step
child' in relation to the business and the financial people do not
understand IT's demands for money. If the technology side and the
business side were closer this problem would disappear," he said.
The future
Smith considered the technical challenges
of moving to BPM. "How do we get to the process managed enterprise
- an agile one with visible processes? Probably organically, where
something is broken and needs fixing, reworking and
connecting."
Storey emphasised getting harmonisation and collaboration
established through the supply chain. "It's a case of getting as
many partners on board as possible," he said.
Wall said the likely early beneficiaries of BPM technology would
include heavily regulated businesses with lots of
frequently-changed rules, and highly competitive organisations like
telecoms firms and pharmaceutical companies which want to do things
slightly differently.
Smith concluded the discussion with a restatement of the
fundamentals of BPM. "Analysts have described BPM as the
reinvention of the application. Instead of encoding processes in
the software, put them outside so they are visible and can be
changed easily."
Wall has more than 10 years front-line sales and management
experience gained exclusively in the computer software industry. In
that time, he has built up a wealth of expertise working for
software companies such as Admiral, Gupta and Computer Associates.
He has a successful track record in developing profitable business
in both direct and indirect sales channels, start-up organisations
and multinational software companies.
Roundtable who's who
Russell Storey, director of solutions management, SSA Global
Technologies
Storey is responsible for the definition and
establishment of products and partnerships across the Europe,
Middle East and Africa region and for the subsequent pre-sales
roll-out of any products which are brought to market. He has been
with SSA for nearly four years and has held positions in account
and consulting management at both regional and global levels. He
was a prime mover in the establishment of vertical market global
guide groups.
Andrew Snodgrass, IT senior manager, Washington Group
International
Washington Group is a $4.2bn company with
39,000 staff. Snodgrass is IT senior manager of the firm's European
operations. With more than 18 years in the IT industry, Snodgrass'
background includes developing enterprise applications and
supporting operations over large geographically-dispersed areas. He
has focused on the integration of data systems within Washington
and between its clients to support large-scale projects.
Howard Smith, chief technology officer, Computer Sciences
Corporation, Europe
Howard Smith's previous role in CSC
was as director of e-business strategy.
During this period he co-founded Ontology.org and became an invited
expert to CommerceNet's ECo framework project. These two
organisations influenced the development of many of today's XML
standards and Smith continues to help the industry and CSC to
innovate through his role as co-chairman of the Business Process
Management Initiative. He was the chairman for this
roundtable
Further information
The Business Process Management
Initiative is working to promote open standards for the management
of e-business processes spanning multiple applications, departments
and business partners on both sides of the firewall.
Business Process Management Initiative:
www.bpmi.org