Are you sure you understand where Business Process Management (BPM) fits in the information management landscape? To get a clearer pricture IDM spoke with Pegasystems Vice-President , APAC, Luke McCormack

IDM: How would you explain BPM to a business executive who is not familiar with the concept?

LM: Typically, when demystifying BPM, I talk about the fact that business processes are the DNA of their businesses, so the way in which their businesses operate.  It may be some process that operates deep in the back office of an organisation or it could be the way in which a customer engages to open an account.  

At the end of the day business processes are what makes an organisation tick when we think about technologies that support business process, analysts coined the term “business process management.”  For us it is a term that is a little bit restrictive because we think that what we do is far more than just business process management. It’s really about the complex processes and the hand off, the interchanges of information, the interaction of engagement of customers and the engagement with their core systems and their underlying foundational technology. 

IDM: What are the reasons that an organisation should be considering BPM software solutions such as those from Pegasystems?  What are the circumstances where that’s something that they need to reach out and look for assistance?

LM: Organisations, regardless of their maturity, will have what we call execution gaps where the existing technologies have been filled by post-it notes on monitors or spreadsheets or Access databases.  Basically a sort of a disintermediation of the way in which processes are executed, so there are gaps in the way in which the business is executed and those gaps typically fill with whatever is available at the time.  And what that leads to is inconsistency of service and the way in which people execute their roles.  It leads to pockets of capability, so an instance where Keith over in the corner may be the only person who knows how something is done.  It leads to errors because you don’t have a consistent approach.  And probably the biggest thing that would confront organisations that fall into this category is they just lack agility.  Their ability to change their business at the pace in which the market might demand is restricted because they have a whole set of what we call these execution gaps where things are stored, as I say, on post-it notes or in pockets of IP around the organisation.  Their ability to change those, they need to go and change every small knob and dial within the organisation and they don’t have control of their business and therefore they’re not agile and can’t move at the pace in which some of their customers in the market would demand. 

IDM: How sophisticated does an organisation’s information management maturity need to be to consider BPM?  A recent AIM survey found 82 percent of firms lack and enterprise-wide ECM solution.  Do they need to have ECM in place to undertake BPM or can that sort of help move them towards a higher level of information management maturity?

LM: I see ECM as a fellow traveller of BPM.  The organisations that choose to digitise their content and store it using ECM technologies that is something that has certainly yielded great returns and helped those organisations become more effective.  But ECM is certainly not mandatory when it comes to BPM and we see content as an enabler, as a fellow traveller.  It’s just another piece of information and maybe by way of example there is content generated in many customer-focused transactions.  A good example would be a loan origination, a mortgage application.  So there are going to be documents that are going to need to be captured but for us BPM is more than just those documents.  It’s not a document-centric view.  They are an important part and they are an artefact that’s required for completion of a loan but BPM is around automation of the end-to-end process and really trying to make sure that at the centre of the process is the customer.  So whether it be the capture of the information at the interview stage or whether it be the dissemination of information requests for additional pieces of information, all of that is orchestrated through a BPM layer and some of that is captured within an ECM style technology.  We do work with many very, very large and complex organisations but we also work with some very small government agencies, for instance, that don’t have vast back offices or vast IT departments but they have very particular business problems that they need to solve and their ability to adopt our technology is eased by our ease of adoption, if you like, but also it’s really around the business problem that they’re trying to solve. There is no classic identifier that says BPM is mandatory.  It’s more a case of understanding the business problem and for us BPM is not a technology discussion.  It is a business discussion and we’re lucky enough to have market leading technology to support the outcomes of those business discussions. 

IDM: Gartner recently reported that Australian BPM spending will be up 10 percent this year (see opposite page)  Why do you think that’s such a strong prediction for Australian uptake?

LM: vWell, I think partly because there has been a recognition in the market that packaged solutions are not living up the promise of ease of use, ease of change and matching the agility required in most organisations.  That also I think is a case for traditional CRM in that it’s heavily data-centric and somewhat monolithic.  And so I think there’s been a recognition that BPM does delivery agility to organisations and as a result of that BPM technologies have become far more interesting and certainly have got a lot more traction in the thinking of organisations as they set strategy, technology or business strategy.  So I think that it’s a lot to do with the failed promises of other styles of technology and certainly in our experience BPM is delivering the returns that organisations expect from their technology dollar.