Serious doubts have been raised in recent analyst blogs about the future of BPM. The central point of the argument seems to be: Do social media and the blurring lines between Adaptive Case Management, Enterprise Content Management (‘ECM’) and BPM signal a paradigm shift in the way we consider business process? Terms like ‘Social BPM’ (was there ever an ‘Anti-social BPM’?) or ‘Adaptive Process’ are being introduced into the discussion. The latter appears to imply that the process itself changes due to unique customer requirements or changes in circumstances. We knew this to be the case all along, but it opens up an area that wasn’t traditionally the domain of process professionals: Case Management.

 

Don’t get me wrong - these assertions certainly open up new ways of looking at business processes and the applications that support them. I believe, however, that there is significant pressure out there in the BPM community to somehow transform or re-invent BPM to make it fit future requirements, mainly in response to popular use of social media and maturing technology offerings such as Cloud Computing and SaaS, .

 

My contention is that BPM as a discipline (or method if you like) is not changing that much. The way BPM is perceived and applied, however, requires more background knowledge, flexibility and creativity from process professionals.

 

Let me give you some examples:

 

1. 1.Whereas requests for BPM projects were common in the past, a process-based approach or the deployment of BPM techniques is now more mainstream than was the case five-six years ago. Most organisations across the Business/IT divide now recognise the importance of process excellence or maturity in their sector, as an important ingredient of a successful change strategy. Formal programme and project management methods, such as PRINCE2 and MSP, have incorporated the need to discover, design and deploy business processes and consider these activities as a cornerstone of the delivery of successful change.
   

2. 2.The choice and variety of business process analysis (‘BPA’) and BPM tools and their capabilities to support collaboration between process practitioners both inside and outside the organisation has expanded significantly. There are well over a hundred service providers in this field of automation - this does not even include traditional ERP/CRM /EAI vendors that have jumped on the bandwagon and repackaged their products as BPM systems. This means that ever more powerful process modelling and execution applications become available to a wide spectre of businesses and IT users, including the BPM-sceptics of the early noughties.
   

3. 3.The BPM approach itself has evolved to the extent that you no longer need to be a master in scientific management or a black belt to engage in process discovery, design and improvement. It does help if you develop some excellence in the organisation to maintain standards and protect IPR, especially where core processes are at stake. However, the fog that used to hang around BPM seems to have lifted. This means that the threshold for applying BPM techniques has been lowered for business users and analysts alike. Irrespective of whether you think this is a good or bad thing, this is the reality that we have to factor into our projects and initiatives.
   
   

So do we face a paradigm shift in BPM?

 

The first decade of BPM in this century seemed to have been mainly about bigger, better, faster (e.g. BPMS, Lean Sigma and Agile); companies responded to unprecedented growth in the economy by looking to ‘build better companies, better processes and a better response to customer needs. Throw in an increasing appetite for outsourcing and offshoring, and we see the potential for fragmentation, lack of governance and control over process performance.

 

It is clear that the next decade will be dominated by the deployment of more complex process interactions both inside and outside the organisation, using collaboration tools, cloud computing and social media. This will lead, in my view, to a more diverse and interesting playground for the process professional. It does not shake the BPM world at its core, as some analysts tend to think – instead it will make the field richer and more exciting.

 

What does it take to declare a paradigm shift in BPM? - or as some will put it: Do we see the death of BPM as we know it? To be honest with you, I don’t know.

 

We will learn from the innovative companies that apply the new process tools and techniques and perform better. The current list of flagship companies that have been paraded as BPM success stories is getting stale. We will take note once we find out which companies have managed to extricate themselves from the recession into stellar performers and credit BPM, ACM or ECM for their success. I am afraid, however, that quoting organisations trading at significant multiples on the stock market, or who are on the M&A warpath and have some sort of Process Centre of Excellence, does not signal a new dawn.