Over the years the search for IT and/or Business ‘Excellence’ has led to a concept that is often misunderstood and can be very amorphous in definition and execution – Business/IT Transformation. The term also commonly used in the same context is that of a Centre of Excellence or ‘CoE’ aka ‘Competency Centre.’ In this post, I will not attempt to redefine either, but rather explain a bit more about how the various constituent parts of a CoE can support Transformation projects and more specifically Business Process Management (BPM) initiatives. (more…)

Foreword: The following post has been adapted from a post I wrote few years ago and for those interested in some of the more theoretical aspects, they can be found here.

I have worked in many diverse organisations in my career but over the past year I have been in some interesting organisational situations that has highlighted the fact that the human species has a very interesting way of adapting (or not) to Change.

I am reminded of a post that I wrote some time ago about how critical it is to consider the affects the introduction of Change (technological solution e.g. BPM or other) will have on the ‘status quo’ (real or perceived) of people in an organisation. In my experience, I have found that companies that are open to Change does not always mean they react well to it when it is imposed on them. Often this is due to type of culture in the organisation, in other cases it is just due to complacency. (more…)

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. (more…)

Context is a critical foundation for BPM success.  It is for everything, right?  But how do we set it.  We assume with the wide range of technology, depth of understanding and innovative solutions, there is no need to set context as it is already there.  Or we assume that we can just paint a quick picture and folks are on board.  Better yet, we just rely on others to get it done and for that matter, folks just get it.  BPM is more than just putting in a technology or point solutions.

BPM is where people, process and technology come together in a new context to orchestrate business execution.   Silos are to be broken down, broader technology integrations are to be implemented and a new set of methodologies and tools are to be deployed to create seamless flow(s) of operations.  I find that when the right context is set and the ‘ah-ha’ moment is reached, BPM adoption accelerates and greater operational efficiencies are achieved. (more…)

Recent research has shown that there is a marked increase in the move to outsourcing application development and maintenance of organisational applications.

Computer Economics have found that based on an annual survey of 200 IT organisations, there has been a marked decrease in ‘in-house’ IT staff ratios for application programmers and system analysts. It has declined from 25% of the IT staff on average in 2007 to 20% in 2009. (more…)

BPM is a hot topic today, for the enterprises who are evaluating BPM as well as for those who have already boarded the train and are implementing BPM. For those who are currently evaluating BPM the challenges are many: business case preparation, technology evaluation, Business-IT alignment and education, architecture and roadmap. Each of these areas not only consumes lengthy cycles of learning curve and evaluation but also introduces failure points. (more…)