In a recent post Connie Moore, VP Research Director at Forrester, shares what she has learned about Business Process Management in a summary format. While I agree with most of the points described by Connie, I must disagree with the point 6 : « BPM projects should be led by business, not IT, to avoid failure ».
I see more and more people associating BPM projects with business analysts as the key factor for a BPM deployment to succeed so I wanted to share with you my vision on that point.
The reason to explain this association is an evidence for me; BPM vendors are providing expensive BPM solutions that only the largest and wealthiest organizations can afford.
There are two direct consequences of this statement:
- Only a reduced scope of projects uses BPM solutions: mission critical or big projects, otherwise the ROI will be negative
- Business analysts and key managers are the people in the organization in charge of the selection of the BPM solution, due to the cost the BPM solution is considered to be a strategic choice.
So why BPM vendors are just targeting business analysts in marketing campaigns and go to market strategies? well, in such a kind of project business analysts and key managers are the only deciders ☺
This is in fact the well-known top-down approach of deploying applications in organizations, first we made the choice of the solution to be used at corporate level and then we push it down…
But what about IT people? What about the use of BPM solutions in any enterprise or standard application? are not IT’s the ones that are going to do the job at the end ? I think they are, who is going to customize the web forms of the application? who will configure or develop connectors to call existing IS services ?
I have a vision of BPM in which project teams are also involved in the selection of the BPM solution. A vision in which the organization think big and start small, doing concrete things, solving concrete problems and then replicate it in others projects… in other words a bottom-up approach.
That’s already the case in other technologies such databases, web frameworks, portal solutions or document management systems, time now for BPM.
This seems a natural approach, especially for organizations, but there are two prerequisites for this approach to succeed: let the users free access to the technology and propose optimal prices to industrialize applications developed with this technology… the solution, to bring to the market a complete open source BPM solution backed by professional support and services to secure BPM applications.
BonitaSoft will bring to the market this approach. Let’s do for the BPM what SpringSource, MySQL, SugarCRM or Talend are doing for applications platforms, databases, customer relationships and data integration markets.
Miguel