Opportunities for Business Process Manager

From Saving Money to Realizing New Opportunities
Two years ago, IBM's annual survey suggested that CEO's were primarily focused on saving money. This year the annual IBM/Economist/Nikkei survey of 456 CEO's reported that 80% of the CEOs now think their highest priority is to help their companies achieve growth. 60% reported that their best chance of obtaining growth in the next three years lies with the introduction of new products and services. Most, however, expressed concerns that their organizations are not currently responsive enough to customers or agile enough in responding to new opportunities.

This sounds like good news for everyone engaged in business process change.

Unlike some professions that prosper during an expansion cycle and are pruned during a recession, Business Process Mangers can prosper during both the ups and the downs. When times are tough, companies want to cut costs. They want to figure out the best way to eliminate products, divisions, people, or activities that don't add value. They want to increase productivity and focus on competencies. In more expansive times, senior managers are less concerned with saving money and more excited about expanding, scaling up, and getting into new and more profitable lines of business. Regardless of where the organization is in the business cycle, Business Process Managers can re-design, measure and manage the company's processes in accordance with whatever strategies and goals the organization adopts.

Some organizations approach efficiency drives and expansions with a heavy hand. Policies that cut people from every division without distinguishing between those engaged in profitable processes and those engaged in unprofitable processes usually assure inefficiencies. Efforts to get into new lines of business with insufficient planning often result in inefficient processes that will need to be redesigned within a few months. It's easy to get cynical about the whole cycle.

Increasingly, however, smart BPM groups are working to get ahead of the changing priorities of senior management. One way is to create a knowledge repository that continues to accumulate value through the cycles of ups and downs. Another is the design and development of a business process architecture and a process measurement system that stores data to support better decisions. In essence, during expansion times, one can model and create measurement systems to refine new processes. During lean times, the same models and monitoring systems can be used to identify opportunities to save money. And, maintaining a good process model that can be used for simulations that anticipate the need to scale up or down can be invaluable.

No BPM group wants to spend too much time modeling or measuring. The goal of BPM, after all, is to help create and refine processes that generate value. You don't want to be perceived as an overhead function that spends its time documenting, counting, and generally slowing things down. The key is using the right kinds of tools for modeling and measuring and to focus on the right processes. For example, we have recommended SCOR to supply chain analysts because SCOR is fast and easy to use and will almost always result in creating a better solution in a shorter time frame.

Similarly, choosing a process modeling tool or BPM suite that stores all your models in a repository and facilitates the reuse of your models is very important. It isn't possible to model and simulate every process in a large company. Luckily, it isn't important to do so. It is important to model and simulate those processes that really impact the bottom line. Similarly, if you are creating a new process, it's important to model it at the outset. Then, if the model is saved in a good repository, you can access that model later when it becomes time to think about how that process can be streamlined or merged with another process. Similarly, if your company acquires another company or product, you will want to model the processes to be merged.

What this really suggests is that it's important that your BPM group has a long range plan and a methodology that assures that it systematically accumulates and manages the knowledge it obtains through all phases of the business cycle.

At this point in time most companies are in an expansion mode and most BPM groups are being asked to create new processes and support new initiatives to manage the change. If you don't have a plan to manage your business process change initiatives this is the time to get one in place.