Bischoff is an international expert on optimizing and automating business processes across silos and the extended enterprise. She also is recognized for her work in Web services, brand strategies, strategic planning, integration, and IT/organization alignment.
According to Bischoff, most organizations are in the “tactical” mode when it comes to BPM. In other words, they are still in the discovery phase when it comes to Business Process Management. Moving from the tactical model to strategic mode is the key to enterprise success and necessary when implementing BPM.
There are many reasons why companies elect to stay with tactical BPM solutions. These include:
• Investments stay under the radar
• Seeing immediate results
• Not having to deal with cultural issues
• Not having to face enterprise vendor decisions
• Implementation can be done by existing staff
The factors that drive BPM investment include government regulation, industry regulation, frustration with manual processes and one-off exceptions, and an over-reliance on individuals to make things work.
The benefits of strategic BPM are many. These include:
• Increased agility, flexibility, and speed
• Economies of scale – reduction of competing solutions and friction across the organization
• True transformation across boundaries
• Competitive advantage
Bischoff says that process culture is the only real differentiator between enterprises. If you aren’t making the move to strategic BPM, one of your competitors is.
There are five steps in moving from tactical to strategic BPM.
• Get the organization ready
• Enhance IT/Business partnerships
• Change measurements and behavior
• Exploit new technology concepts
• Implement adjacent technology solutions
There are some basic steps necessary for organizational readiness. The need is to celebrate incremental change within the organization. This is easier when change is done through partnerships, rather than coming from a dictate. The organization culture should change from one that praises the individual hero to one that emphasizes the team. A culture of change needs to be embraced. To do this, sponsors at the executive level are necessary.
In the IT/Business partnership, the business owns the process while IT owns the technology. It is best if the tools used split the business modeling and the IT integration and coding. The business/IT partnership itself becomes a learning tool for BPM strategy.
They key to change is in the measurements. When the metrics are changed, the behavior changes. The measurements need to be meaningful. The individual metrics need to be meaningful, and should include things like:
• Quality
• Quantity
• Speed
• Accuracy
• Target achievement
• Partnership
• Leadership
• Innovation
• Compliance
• Stability
• Costs
The fluid nature of measurements needs to be understood and communicated. Training needs to be provided for change management and the new metrics. Performance reviews are needed to address the changes, otherwise, the behavior won’t change. IT needs to look at Service Oriented Architecture and Long Tail implementations, according to Bischoff. Long Tail applications are micro-applications designed within an SOA framework that takes advantage of micro rather than broad markets. Bischoff also advocated looking at the bordering technologies beyond BPM such as decision-making, collaboration tools, and business and social networks.
In summary, Bischoff said it is important to promote process thinking across the enterprise and work from both the top down and the bottom up. Perform triage to discover the highest impact processes within your organization. Work the culture instead of having the culture work you. Many consecutive small changes are better than rare big changes. Look to the concepts and partnering/networking technologies.
