BPM is touted as the technology that will finally bring business and IT together. Not that we haven’t tried to do this before. For instance, many people thought object orientation would do the trick since it tried to model the real world as closely as possible. Did it deliver? To a certain extent, but not quite. Primarily, it ended up as a productivity tool and paradigm for IT (with sometimes questionable success), not the ‘be all’ and ‘end all’ for modeling and executing business requirements.
BPM is touted as the technology that will finally bring business and IT together. Not that we haven’t tried to do this before. For instance, many people thought object orientation would do the trick since it tried to model the real world as closely as possible. Did it deliver? To a certain extent, but not quite. Primarily, it ended up as a productivity tool and paradigm for IT (with sometimes questionable success), not the ‘be all’ and ‘end all’ for modeling and executing business requirements. With reasonable skepticism, people are now asking: can BPM deliver Business and IT alignment?
To sustain the alignment of the Business-IT bridge, there are four critical hinges:
- Measurable Strategies: Most enterprises agree that providing the plans and approaches for achieving corporate objectives are important. Yet, in many situations these measurable strategies fail to be implemented or executed. Dashboards are not enough. You also need to drill down from top level management Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to specific processes, partners, organizations or even individual workers. The quantitative monitoring and correction of the KPIs need to be pro-active and in real-time, otherwise, performance results lag without a clear link to the executing processes. The better you can drill down from management performance to specific executing processes, the better chance you have of aligned business and IT.
- Unified Policies and Processes: In some cases, Business Rules and Business Process Management have not been unified into one core BPM platform and used by both business users and IT. In these approaches, rules and processes are still kept separate. Trying to solve the alignment of business and IT by creating artificial boundaries and roles to fit multiple products is not a great recipe for success. Logically, however, rules and processes should be modeled and executed within the same system. It makes sense to think about, analyze, abstract and model the declarative rules in conjunction with the information model, the organization model, the flows, and the user interaction. While the appropriate use of business rules changes the topology of a process flow, it will also simplify the flow and facilitate the management of applications. The policies can also be used to define when one should use a particular flow, or a particular business rule, or a trading partner or back-end applications. The policies are applied in many situations – within processes and across applications. Business and IT need the “process” and “business rule” to speak as a unified language of communication. This can happen only if the two are unified.
- Extensible Solution Frameworks: BPM is often viewed as an infrastructure – or technology void of business content. BPM alone will not bring IT and business users together. Business and IT must take the first step and align themselves around solution frameworks that have inherent business object models and the associated processes, business rules, usage models, and integration necessary to achieve concrete solutions. It helps when they can use pre-packaged solution frameworks that embed industry standard content (e.g. HIPAA objects, SWIFT messages, COSO/COBIT repositories). It helps when these come with best practice workflows and be deployed in weeks rather than months to build the process improvement momentum.
- Accessible Platform: The Web “platform” has become second nature for both business and IT. This common comfort can be leveraged when bringing IT and business together to build a new BPM solution. Browser-based development is in fact highly conducive to continuous improvement and dynamic lifecycles. Change needs to involve the people who know and care most about the solution; a flexible browser-based development and deployment platform can only help.
If these four core requirements are met, aligning Business with IT within BPM is possible. Bottlenecks arise when analysts and developers are forced to map between multiple layers. Gaps occur when we force IT and business to use separate tools, models, and platforms. The preferable approach is a unified Business Process Management System that combines granular metrics to truly optimize performance, a single engine for processes and rules, pre-packaged industry expertise for fast ROI and a shared accessible platform. This combination will help us take a leap in agility and flexibility, and help deliver on the true promise of BPM. Today’s CIOs are interested not just in maintaining secure and reliable infrastructures, but also in being involved in innovation. This next generation of BPM stands a much better chance of giving them both. With the bridge secured for the first time, the traffic of business change can flow unimpeded, with business and IT sharing the same HOV lane.
