Business Process Management: A New Glue or the Old Soft Shoe?
There are more than 100 BPM software vendors, all selling something different. Here's how to figure out whether you need it and how to make it work for you.
The Star Alliance, a partnership of 15 major airlines, including United and Lufthansa, is using BPM to help integrate its members' legacy systems. While the partnership is committed to unifying the processes that its members use, it is equally committed to doing so in a way that respects each company's previous investments.
That's no small challenge, says Brian Cook, Star Alliance director of IT and acting CIO, with dozens of legacy systems to integrate. For example, a new service for frequent fliers on member airlines required the IT team to consolidate 90 separate business processes across nine airlines and 27 legacy systems.
This kind of integration effort could quickly spiral out of control, says Cook, but the BPM software helped provide a blueprint for how to share data among the various systems. The Star Alliance IT and airline project teams used the BPM software to record how each airline checked in customers and processed their frequent flier information. Then, airline managers took that information and developed a new business process that they mapped in the BPM application. This map was used to identify the points of integration for each legacy system.
How to Tell if BPM Is Right for You The vendors will tell you that everyone can benefit from BPM, and, like all hype, there's a grain of truth behind it. Almost everyone has a business process that needs improvement. The questions you need to ask yourself are: What's the problem you are trying to solve? What's the size of the investment you are willing to make? And how committed are your business units to making their processes more efficient?Forrester's Vollmer says that an EAI/BPM suite is a way to get more from your existing systems, since this type of solution can enable the building of integrated applications without necessarily requiring you to make any other technology investments. This gives companies a tremendous amount of flexibility when determining what type of project to pursue and which BPM vendor to work with. But Vollmer also says that common sense plays a large role in making that choice. For example, if you are considering an enterprise application integration project, he says, it is also wise to consider whether you are a good candidate for BPM in the near future. Since most EAI vendors provide both, CIOs should make sure that combined EAI/BPM solutions are evaluated as well as stand-alone products in each category.
On the other hand, most BPM users prefer to start small. One reason, warns ANICO's Kirkham, is because process change - particularly, the type of radical process change his company's call centre employees experienced - is hard. Trying to change too much at once could be counterproductive. People need time to learn the new process and how to use the BPM software. Just as business process re-engineering failed, BPM will fail if there isn't institutional support for change. Kirkham says that even when ANICO's employees got training, the company didn't really gain efficiency until they hired a large number of new workers who never knew the old process.
