Earlier, I wrote about common questions organizations have when beginning with BPM. Challenges, however, do not end once a project is begun. Gartner predicts that more than 50% of BPM programs will fail by 2011. This is not an exaggeration. Our experience validates that as you move into the implementation phase, the biggest challenges will be around stakeholder alignment, requirements prioritization and scope definition. Sometimes this phase can take 3-6 months leading to a loss of confidence in BPM as a transformation tool. Knowledge and experience around leveraging a chosen BPM technology for its out-of-box capabilities can be crucial in reducing the time to market as well as meeting business expectations.
One of the key methods to reduce failure points and accelerate the project is to eliminate abstract and lose requirements through prototyping and workshops. Another critical success factor is to prioritize scope for a production delivery in 90 days. Iterative development and keeping business teams on board with the development cycle and testing can also yield dramatic improvements in success rate. The non-traditional nature of BPM technologies and the capabilities they offer can sometimes lead to gaps between business expectations and IT delivery.
As we move into an enterprise BPM roll out phase, the most common challenges we see are the following:
(1) Reuse of assets
(2) Reduce cost of ownership
(3) Repeatable standards and methodology
(4) Knowledge management
(5) Skilled resource assurance
(6) Infrastructure optimization – hardware and software.
The biggest accelerator and enabler, during a large scale adoption phase, is a “Business Process Competency Center (BPCC)” or a BPM Center of Excellence, which institutionalizes the key aspects of governance and reuse. Most companies have yet to launch a formal BPCC owing to their being in varying stages of BPM maturity cycle. A BPCC offers a strong platform for ensuring success of enterprise-wide BPM implementations, and it is only a matter of time before a BPCC becomes a crucial component of every company’s BPM adoption strategy.
