As organizations adopt Business Process Management (BPM) as a transformation initiative, they are faced with the challenge of choosing the right BPM technology/product. This decision can be made at the Line of Business (LOB) level or at the enterprise level depending on the urgency and the intended level of adoption. After a major consolidation in the BPM products market over the last 3-4 years, the market today has about 20 major players. Some of them are pure-play vendors and others are enterprise stack vendors. Organizations typically face a few key challenges in navigating the BPM technology selection process:
- Ownership of the selection process – Business or IT? Business often wants to take the lead as they intend to leverage the tool as a transformation enabler and hence want to see how the tool can facilitate continuous optimization of business processes, provide abstraction and reuse of business logic, and enable change in near real time. On the other hand, IT wants to ensure that the tool fits into the larger enterprise architecture, integrates well with the enterprise systems and meets performance and scalability expectations. Having the right level of participation from both sides is the best approach and ensures the tool is well accepted and adopted over a period of time.
- Need based selection or Top-down approach: When the selection is being made for a specific business problem, the focus is on ensuring that the critical use cases are handled well. In such cases, pure-play vendors usually stand out as they are able to demonstrate how well the product can be configured to meet the business expectations. Some of the pure-play BPM products also have pre-built process frameworks that provide distinct time to market and best practice related advantages. A top down approach usually suits best when picking a tool for enterprise adoption. Such selections not only consider the BPM capabilities but also ensure adaptability to the enterprise systems and standards. An ideal approach will be to select a product for critical business needs but also scan the larger enterprise needs and ensure there is buy-in from multiple lines of business. Else the selected product will be discarded after few applications are rolled out as it doesn’t meet the larger enterprise requirements.
- Features critical for the selection process: BPM products must have basic features such as process modeling and simulation, workflow and case management, BAM, integration and Rules engines. Most of the leading BPM tools handle these features well. But as we start looking at specializations such as managing content based workflows, Case management, straight through processing, heavy transaction processing, services orchestration and complex integrations, reuse of processes and rules etc, there is a very clear differentiation that emerges between the tools. It is very essential to take a look at business requirements beyond the immediate need on hand and ensure that we account for common requirements across lines of business while selecting the BPM tool. Tools selected in urgency might solve an immediate problem but can become a liability over a period of time, eventually leading to failure of BPM as concept itself.
Based on our experiences with clients across industries and scale, we have seen these challenges appear time and again. Organizations planning to select and implement BPM solutions will have to consider the above challenges and plan their product selection exercise in advance.
If your organization is starting afresh and planning to implement BPM for the first time, you might be interested in a BPM Test Drive Approach, which can help create a roadmap for long-term BPM use and mitigate some of the risks inherent in implementation. Education about BPM concepts, implementation and technology aspects will be key elements of BPM Test Drive.
