Watson says the most important thing in running a BPM pilot is to find and develop measurable results and benefits you can use. The pilot needs to directly address cycle times, unit costs, or some other meaningful information that justifies running the pilot program.

There are a number of elements to the application strategy for BPM projects. The most critical element is the current state assessment. This should not include staff functions, which have little customer impact. Large impact opportunities should be targeted, along with opportunities that are easy to prove.

Brett Champlin is the President of the Association for Business Process Management Professionals (ABPMP.org) and a Senior Process Consultant with a large insurance company. He has led business process transformation projects for the last 15 years. Champlin is also on the adjunct faculty at Roosevelt University and the University of Chicago.

Champlin is a pioneer and advocate of the new field of “services engineering”. In the last two hundred years, we shifted from a primarily agricultural-based economy to a manufacturing-based economy because of the industrial revolution.

There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things.