When "platform" is a four-letter word

I was at a meeting yesterday with a prospect and they asked "where's the value of BPM? isn't this just another platform? for this little first process maybe we're using a sledgehammer to drive a nail? maybe we should wait a year until we're 'ready' for a new platform..."

Well, the notion of a BUSINESS PROCESS MANAGEMENT PLATFORM is downright scary to some folks. Remember the last "platform" purchase you made? And the one before that. And the one before that. You know the old adage, "fool me once shame on you, fool me twice shame on me." Well what about being fooled for the 5th or 6th time? So, OK, it's understandable.

But here's the real scoop. Honest. This is a platform, and there are some up front costs as with any platform... there's some new infrastructure and there's training. There is bringing in a new technology to maintain. You can't escape these realities...those are the negatives.

The plus-side, though, is pretty impressive. The best BPM platforms reflect the learnings of the past decade of failed enterprise deployments of ERP, EAI and most every other eThing (and iThing). The best BPM platforms are much easier to use by IT developers, IT SysAdmins and Business users than alternative approaches. In fact, many of the technologies inside a BPM platform aren't so much "new" as they are "repackaged to be easily consumed."

Further, while it is a platform, it is built to handle and give visibility to processes of all sizes - from human workflows to complex integration and event processing. Choosing to start down the "process excellence" path may very well start with a simple process (I mean, wouldn't it be nice to get n easy win AND learn the new paradigm?) - therefore it's not a "sledgehammer for a nail." It's a "properly sized hammer for the nail" built on a solid foundation that allows many people to be building (hammering) at once. And because of this, it scales very well from an administrative perspective. You can build one process, or you can build twenty. Sequentially, or all at once. Guess what? The maintenance of the platform is identical! You can't say that if you use traditional approaches to solving those twenty business problems. You know the drill: twenty different Access databases; custom tables all over Oracle; and files in directories everywhere. And who knows what's deployed out on your application servers or Windows network.

The traditional or EAI-based approach scales like this: "add a business solution and you add IT pain."

But the best BPM platforms scale like this: "add a business solution."

So while it is a "platform," it is a kinder and gentler sort of platform. It is one built to scale so that business impact can be maximized, while the ongoing IT cost of administration remains fairly flat. This is one of the new ideas of BPM! Different business applications. Same technical footprint. Guess what, IT now scales...

As to "whether to wait" well, as you can imagine, I am against that! Aside from my selfish self-interest, here's why: this isn't some radical new technology that will take months to learn. And it isn't some rules-engine based thing (at least the best BPM platforms aren't) that requires months of time to haggle over ontologies and such. This is a pretty-easy-to-use-and-deploy platform whose value increases each time you use it. Waiting a year doesn't reduce any risk, it simply adds time before you start achieving the platform's unique value. Why? Because the highest value you will get from a BPM platform isn't the automation of a process - it's the data, stupid. The run-time data that is gathered (out-of-the-box) by good BPM platforms is the key to improving the performance of the process and your company. You can automate a process any number of ways... but you can only really understand the process by collecting the data as you then run it. This requires either

(a) building a LOT of custom data collection capabilities, or
(b) automating the process using a BPM platform.

This is another big idea of BPM... process-related data is automatically collected, and this data will lead to more process improvement than the initial automation. Representative examples we've seen show that a given process solution improves performance about 40% of its potential with version 1. These improvements are usually driven by altering how humans interact with the process, streamlining their activities and, therefore, improving performance.

But we find that achieving the rest of the performance potential occurs in subsequent iterations. These improvements are primarily understood based on the data that flows through the process. And, unlike version 1, these improvements are generally less about altering the human workflows, and are more about altering the flows of process instances based on data in the flows. These are non-obvious changes to the process. Every SME can tell you where time is wasted... but it's a much more difficult discussion to come to understand the business data patterns that can be used to automate out process instances from the high-cost path. Without the real-world, run-time data and subsequent analysis, those improvements never come to light, or can never be proved and implemented.

So here's the summary:

The value of BPM lies in multiple places:

The automation of the process the first time (verison 1)

The collection of the data flowing through the process

The understanding of that data, and the subsequent improvement it allows (version 1+n)

The near-zero-incremental maintenance cost of deploying additional processes after process 1

This is a new type of platform that relies less on new technologies, and more on easier-to-use, standards-based ways to present existing technologies

These platforms are built to allow for smaller, "quick wins" for version 1's (especially for the first process you deploy). The focus is on "getting the IT right" the first time, and then the focus moves to getting multiple business users up to scale the delivery quickly, without adding IT headaches.

Don't wait, because the barriers to implementation are not IT-readiness. Many of the biggest benefits of BPM lie in the collection of data as processes built on BPM platforms are run. Until you begin using the platform, you won't achieve significant follow-on value (up to 60% of the total business value you can expect to receive will be from version "1+n" deployments).