A Reflection on BPM

In a typical enterprise IT project, we spend a lot of time justifying the hardware procurement. The justification process can be time consuming and political. Often we need to establish some kind of key performance indicators (KPIs) to monitor the success of a project, be it useful or not useful. We need to identify measurable data in order to compute the KPIs.

It is very common that the establishment of KPIs is not possible due to the nature of the business processes. A business process that makes a company successful in the market is not always probeable. The process is not always generating sufficient data for it to be probed.

Therefore, we need to model the entire business process in order to identify the probe points. This is the process of Business Process Modeling (BPM). By identifying the sub processes that are not compatible to the IT framework, we are able to reengineer the business process into a form that is not only manageable by software but also continue to drive the business success. This process is called Business Process Reengineering (BPR).

Everything seems to be logical as far as answering the question as to why we are doing BPM/BPR. However, the actual reasons behind these activities are complex. The establishment of KPIs gives a picture of how the business is doing in real-time to the managers. The modeling and documentation of business process make the company less vulnerable to changing staff. The core business knowledge is always kept with the company instead of leaving with a previous staff. The management of the company is able to portray the value proposition easily in the case of acquisition. The accountants can record the book values of business process just like any other tangible form of assets.

All these add up to the popularity of BPM among the corporate. However, not all BPM is successful. The reason is very simple. Some businesses simply do not know exactly why they are profiting. A BPM done to this kind of company will reveal the wrong value proposition and hence monitoring the wrong KPIs. It is often lethal for these companies to embrace BPM.