Home / Resources
Resources
Discover a Wealth of BPM Knowledge and Expertise at BPMInstitute.org!
Business Architect in a Big Data Era
Cloud, big data, and analytics are disruptive technologies that are affecting almost every enterprise across multiple industries. Companies are trying their best to leverage these new capabilities to gain advantage in a highly competitive market place. Companies that do not evolve to leverage these capabilities may be left behind and could even become unviable in the near future. Ubiquitous data from consumer smartphone usage can provide valuable insights for companies, but ubiquitous data comes with set of challenges viz., storing, managing, and analyzing the large volumes of data. Cloud and big data technologies are positioned as the panacea to leverage and analyze ubiquitous consumer data.
Managing By Process: What Does It Really Mean?
Ask senior BPM professionals what “managing by process” means and you will receive a variety of responses.
“It becomes a strait jacket that inhibits improvement and innovation.”
“Most organizations don’t understand managing by process…they approach it in a vacuum, disconnected from the most important goals of a company and other key practices that support a company’s strategy.”
Yet, those same experts voice common threads of agreement.
Managing by process is about:
Meet the Author: David Hamme, Customer Focused Process Innovation
Author of Customer Focused Process Innovation: Linking Strategic Intent to Everyday Execution
For any organization to prosper, its leadership must drive bottom line results, expand the product offerings, and identify opportunities to better strategically position the organization. But all too often they look to trendy business practices or copy the competition. They don’t know the answers to basic questions: How do things really work and fit together in this organization? What does the customer really want from us? Who really does what and where do I fit in? How can I move the ball forward? Without these answers, the organization’s innovation capabilities are limited.
Customer Focused Process Innovation: Linking Strategic Intent to Everyday Execution
For any organization to prosper, its leadership must drive bottom line results, expand the product offerings, and identify opportunities to better strategically position the organization. But all too often they look to trendy business practices or copy the competition. They don’t know the answers to basic questions: How do things really work and fit together in this organization? What does the customer really want from us? Who really does what and where do I fit in? How can I move the ball forward? Without these answers, the organization’s innovation capabilities are limited.
Enter, business innovation expert David Hamme. In his book, CUSTOMER FOCUSED PROCESS INNOVATION, Hamme provides the framework to transform organizations into Process Focused Enterprises—ones in which organizational silos, command-and-control management, guesswork, and information inadequacies cease to exist.
A (Compressed) Day in the Life of a Business Analyst – Part 1
This is the first of a two-part look at a “Day in the Life” of a Business Analyst (BA). It’s broken into hours as a simple way to illustrate the myriad duties and skills that a BA needs to have, but in real life the process described below would take weeks, months, or possibly years, depending on the size of the effort. And, as every BA knows, there’s no such thing as a typical day – or even a standard job description. We’ll look here at the phases that every effort has, and tools that every BA needs.
Business Process Management Trends & Observations
Business Process Management Research Report:
Check out the future of BPM and see how your organization stacks up.
Research conducted by global market research company, TNS Global, shows that while BPM is delivering key benefits in both the public and private sectors, a large number of organizations still struggle to keep processes documented or up to date.
Download this BPM research whitepaper to see how your organization compares and get valuable insights into future BPM investment benchmarks, the level of BPM resourcing within organizations, common barriers to process improvement and the role BPM plays in helping businesses achieve their organizational goals.
Making the case for OpEx and BPM
The integration of Operational Excellence, which relies on a proven, systematic set of tools in Lean Six Sigma, and Business Process Management (BPM), which relies on a systemic view and a technology enabled approach is likely to create greater value for both customers and the company. The integration and consolidation of these two approaches to process improvement will not only identify and eliminate waste, it will also align and better utilize information systems, promote cross departmental collaboration and keep the customer front and center throughout.
An Introduction to Operational Excellence
Operational Excellence is not easy to define. Some descriptions are too broad. Others are so narrow that the ultimate definition seems too focused in scope. Often, we end up with definitions that seem plausible in an academic sense, such as “Being world class,” “Being the best globally,” or, “Excellence in everything we do,” but these are difficult to translate into specific practices.
To properly define Operational Excellence, there is value in looking at the evolution of the term.
In “The Discipline of Market Leaders – Choose your Customers, Narrow your Focus, Dominate your Market“, Michael Treacy and Fred Wiersema described three distinct value propositions or disciplines an organization could choose to compete in their market or industry – Operational Excellence, Product Leadership, and Customer Intimacy.
When Should Change Management Start?
So often I see organizational change management as a part of the implementation plan for putting the recommendations and new design of a Business Process Improvement project (BPI) into operation in a company. It should be there, but it needs to start sooo much earlier. In fact it needs to start with the first phase of a BPI project- namely in developing the charter and doing Process Discovery and Modeling.
Amplifying BPM with Customer Experience and Design Thinking
In the modern Digital world, Customer Experience is a critical factor for success in BPM. Organizations can apply Design Thinking framework to map the right emotional innovation factors and succeed in the BPM transformation.
Amplifying BPM with Customer Experience and Design Thinking
Managing Enterprise Transformation in Government
“Culture does not change because we desire to change it. Culture changes when the organization is transformed; the culture reflects the realities of people working together every day.” Frances Hesselbein – President of the Frances Hesselbein Leadership Institute
Effective use of a transformation framework, such as the one illustrated in Figure 1, is a hallmark of successful organizations and an essential means to achieving operational and technology environments that maximize institutional mission performance and outcomes. Among other things, this includes realizing cost savings through consolidation and reuse of shared services and elimination of antiquated and redundant mission operations, enhancing information sharing through data standardization and system integration, and optimizing service delivery through streamlining and normalization of business processes and mission operations.
BPM Salary Survey – A comparative analysis
A must read for business analysts, business process analysts, business process managers, business process designers and business architects.
This BPM Salary Survey report outlines a regional comparison across the USA, Canada and EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa). It is based upon the data collected in the BPM 2015 Salary Survey conducted by BPMInstitute.org which represented the first such survey and formed the baseline for our future research in this area.
Simplify Your Processes with Decision Modeling
Download this whitepaper to see how you can reduce the complexity of your process models to increase participant understanding and ensure consistent, optimal execution.
Within business processes lie important decision gateways that direct workflow. These gateways are just as essential to the success of your processes as the process models themselves, and they deserve equal attention. In this whitepaper you will learn how Decision Modeling Notation (DMN) 1.0 gives organizations a standardized way to model decisions, connecting them seamlessly to the processes they drive.
Business Transformation & Process Management
Organizations are undergoing major transformations – to shift to digital business, become more customer-centric, and keep pace with regulatory changes. Any transformation impacts business processes, often requiring dramatic changes to how people work. Yet over 70% of transformation initiatives fail. Process management practitioners can change that and directly contribute to the success of their organization’s initiative by applying the latest process thinking, techniques and technologies to innovate and drive change.
Listen to Marc Kerremans discuss what you’ll learn at Gartner’s London Business Transformation & Process Management Summit.
What’s the Value Proposition of BPM?
What is the value proposition of BPM and how do I communicate to my senior leadership team is one of the most frequently asked questions on BPM.
In answering this question, the first order of priority is to ensure that people in the organization have a common shared understanding of BPM. In our view, BPM is not just modeling processes, it’s not just launching improvement projects, and it’s not just monitoring process performance for continuous improvement.
Instead, it is all three of these – in other words, the modeling, AND the improvement AND the management of the large cross functional processes in the firm.
Once, a shared understanding of the definition of BPM is achieved, it is then possible to outline the approach, benefits and pitfalls to avoid in BPM to demonstrate the value it can provide.
Some of the key principles and the general approach in BPM are outlined in Table 1 below:
Building the BPM Business Case
9 factors for minimizing the cost of a successful BPM investment
One of the first steps to BPM success is to communicate an accurate business case. While the benefits to the business are often clear, what are the most common factors that drive the total cost of your BPM program?
This ‘Building the BPM Business Case’ whitepaper distils the learnings from leading BPM implementations to provide a must-read guide for those of you evaluating BPM solutions.
Download the ‘Building the BPM business case’ whitepaper and discover:
- 9 factors to consider for ROI optimization
- Key questions to ask BPM vendors
- Total Cost of Ownership checklists
Transforming Customer Experience with BPM
In this white paper, we’ll demonstrate how BPM can transform CX and provide the following benefits for your business:
- Streamlined, optimized customer processes
- Consistent experience
- Management visibility
- Tracking and improvement
- Faster, higher quality service
- Compliance with regulations and reduced risk
- Better collaboration between business units
- Ability to react to Business Moments and Changes.
BPM is an essential element of improving your Customer Experience. Find out how:
Factors Affecting the Leadership of Process Improvement Teams
Adèle selected her process improvement team very carefully. She needed to ensure that different types of expertise and knowledge were represented. Each of her team mates had specialised knowledge of a particular division of the company. Every single one also came to the table with a unique career path and background. She got to know her colleagues quite well during the interview process and was very pleased with the team she had assembled. They were extremely competent and motivated to improve the company’s operations.
What Cambodian Tuk Tuk’s Teach us About Process Improvement
This past year, I had the privilege to travel to the Kingdom of Cambodia to visit the great temple complex of Angkor Wat. For those not familiar with Angkor Wat, it was built in the first half of the 12th century and is still today the largest religious structure in the world. However, Angkor Wat is but one of hundreds of temple complexes many crumbling ruins spread about the countryside around the present-day city of Siem Reap. For those fortunate to visit the area, the best means to travel about the temples is via a rather primitive means of transportation – the Tuk Tuk. The best way to describe a Tuk Tuk is to think of a rickshaw pulled by a moped. Most Tuk Tuk’s have a roof spanning two facing seats. Depending on the size, two to four individuals may ride comfortably. But there are variances to Tuk Tuk’s. At the high end of the market are elaborately hand carved and highly lacquered versions – a work of art unto themselves.
Communicating the Value of Business Architecture
Articulating the value of business architecture within our organizations is one of the most important things that we need to do and do well—the results of which can ultimately determine if business architecture is embraced and how it is positioned. However, this can be a real challenge and barrier to growth for many business architecture practices.
The Struggle for Understanding
While the need for and potential value of business architecture can be very obvious to practitioners, it is not always clear to others. This can be extremely frustrating for practitioners, but if we understand the context we can not only interpret peoples’ reactions, but better address the challenge. To effectively communicate the value of business architecture, we need to put ourselves in the minds of our business architecture “customers” and adapt our approach to what they might be thinking.
