a chief process officer

I've had more feedback on the "Chief Process Officer" posts than any other I've written. This is a topic that is clearly growing in interest, and the emails I've received have been all over the map in terms of people's thoughts about this issue.

Although he misinterpreted my comments about a Chief Process Officer (or at least my motives and rationale), James McGovern succinctly states the problem as follows:

"The problem ... can be summarized into two different problem spaces. The first is lack of real enterprise architecture and the second the lack of cultural change within the corridors of most enterprises."

Just to state it in a little different way: In my experience, the reasons business process projects succeed is because an enterprise has a clear picture of their business needs and embraces a new way to determine, build, deliver and consume those requirements. That is: effective process governance requires an enterprise business architecture and a culture that embraces end-to-end process excellence.

Enterprise Business Architecture

Enterprise architecture has, in the past, been primarily about technology. Most architects are in the Information Technology group and are focused on systems (more recently, services) provided electronically to the business. In the era of globalization, there's a need for an Enterprise Business Architecture that is independent of IT. It may be (probably should be) that this group includes the EA's, but the business architect is concerned about the process services and related interfaces from a business perspective, not a technology perspective. The decomposition of a business process that includes humans and systems, inside and outside the firewall, is one example of this type of architecture. I am not saying today's EA's are incapable of doing this. I am saying that today's organizational structure places barriers on their abilities to deliver this. A new Enterprise Business Architecture must embrace a broader remit than today's EA, and it should sit outside IT - and not in any particular silo that exists today.

A "Process" Culture

Most companies' culture reflects the functional organization chart. This is where budget (power) and responsibility live. The single biggest reason process-centric projects fail today is bad governance. Processes span functions and when optimizing a given process, political disputes arise, and there's no single owner that has the power to drive the project to completion. Something that is good for the organization is, basically, killed because someone's power would have been diminished. The answer is not another reorg! The answer is to drive a process-based culture, but in the short-term (read: the real world) what this means is that someone will need the power to make this stuff happen. You can't change culture without changing reality. I propose that this means - in practical terms, not in "ivory tower" terms - someone with clout has to be driving the process initiative.

The Change Agent

I agree that these are two separate issues, but because you are changing process (and therefore culture) to enable a newly-defined enterprise business architecture, I think they are related in practice - at least initially. Therefore, my conclusion is that a Chief Process Officer is a good thing (and a very practical thing). But I am also not advocating a new ivory tower, so I'm changing my thinking a bit... in the future I'll call this person a chief process officer, not The Chief Process Officer.

technorati tags: BPM, Enterprise Business Architecture

Comments

[james]

OK, so when in your opinion should an enterprise be process-oriented vs. rules-oriented? Enablement, agility and reuse can occur based on both approaches yet your particular product offering supports only one side of the equation.