Opher BanarieBPM?
May 29th 2008 18:42
What does BPM sound like to you? A successor to the BLT at your local diner? A new disease being tracked as a possible epidemic? Maybe a new top secret defense project that has been leaked to the press?
No, none of the above. BPM is "Business Performance Management" and the business journals are full of stories about it. (Google has over 1.3 million entries.)
You may wonder "What is new about BPM that management hasn't been doing for the last, oh, three hundred years?" In reality, nothing. Nothing new, at least, in terms of the intended results. The results are supposed to be "better management" which may take the form of better decisions, more timely action, more efficient operations, etc.
It's not the "what" that is new in BPM, it's the "how". BPM has taken the old concepts and wrapped technology around them, making some of the old "what" more realistic.
Rather than the old 500-page monthly summary report, BPM proposes an electronic presentation which can be explored by trends in product, market, channel, region, etc. This is known as On-Line Analytic Processing, or OLAP. OLAP isn't especially new, having been introduced in the early 1990's. What is new is that the majority of the OLAP vendors have been acquired by BIG players (Microsoft, Oracle, SAP and IBM) and the technology is being integrated into their product offerings.
BPM take the "what" from Six Sigma, Balanced Scorecard and other recent developments and delivers that electronically as well. So you get Dashboards and Agents and Trigger-based reporting.
The question to ponder: Is this "better" than the way things have been done? For some organizations, it certainly might be. But before deciding to move on a technology solution, determine if the existing problems are technology problems. If you have management, personnel, or other "resource" issues, BPM probably won't solve them - it will just make them more obvious.
UPDATE: Tyronne asked in his comment if this is complicated. BPM can be, but it doesn't have to be. In a future post I'll refer to some useful information for those interested in reading more about BPM and what it makes possible. Of course, the Google link above will take you to all there is to know.
No, none of the above. BPM is "Business Performance Management" and the business journals are full of stories about it. (Google has over 1.3 million entries.)
You may wonder "What is new about BPM that management hasn't been doing for the last, oh, three hundred years?" In reality, nothing. Nothing new, at least, in terms of the intended results. The results are supposed to be "better management" which may take the form of better decisions, more timely action, more efficient operations, etc.
It's not the "what" that is new in BPM, it's the "how". BPM has taken the old concepts and wrapped technology around them, making some of the old "what" more realistic.
Rather than the old 500-page monthly summary report, BPM proposes an electronic presentation which can be explored by trends in product, market, channel, region, etc. This is known as On-Line Analytic Processing, or OLAP. OLAP isn't especially new, having been introduced in the early 1990's. What is new is that the majority of the OLAP vendors have been acquired by BIG players (Microsoft, Oracle, SAP and IBM) and the technology is being integrated into their product offerings.
BPM take the "what" from Six Sigma, Balanced Scorecard and other recent developments and delivers that electronically as well. So you get Dashboards and Agents and Trigger-based reporting.
The question to ponder: Is this "better" than the way things have been done? For some organizations, it certainly might be. But before deciding to move on a technology solution, determine if the existing problems are technology problems. If you have management, personnel, or other "resource" issues, BPM probably won't solve them - it will just make them more obvious.
UPDATE: Tyronne asked in his comment if this is complicated. BPM can be, but it doesn't have to be. In a future post I'll refer to some useful information for those interested in reading more about BPM and what it makes possible. Of course, the Google link above will take you to all there is to know.
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