Customer Secrets to BPM Success

Whew, I survived the general session without tripping going up the stairs!

It was hard to hear everything from back stage, but CEO Godfrey Sullivan’s talk was pleasant and personable. In an era of corporate scandals, it’s refreshing to hear someone both talk about being a good corporate citizen and also demonstrate it. New CSO Howard Dresner rallied a call for a BPM Revolution, and CTO John Kopcke gave a sneak peak of enhancements to System 9 (must make it a point to stop by R&D central to learn more….)

I had a chance to share the customer challenges, and secrets to BPM Success:

• Business and IT must be partners: Too often, there is an “us versus them” mentality and IT acts as a gatekeeper to the data and technologies. IT really needs to do more to learn the business language. Not sure how? Invite yourself to a business unit meeting! Know what drives performance in your company: is it revenue growth? Least cost? Customer service? Don’t expect the business to understand the techno babble of SOA, XML/A, OLAP, ETL, any more than your car repair man expects you to identify components under the hood (okay, maybe you’re good at this, but I’m not). Here is the great thing about the conference: I referenced a quote from author Jeremy Hope’s book Re-inventing the CFO (should be required reading for any BI/BPM professionals) and later bumped into his business partner.

• Recognize that BPM is an Evolution: When discussing BI and BPM with one of my customers, the CIO of a Biotech said, “I’ll worry about BPM later, right now our users can’t even get to the data.” BPM is sometimes a starting point, but most often, it’s an evolution. Some companies may start with a planning application, others with some scorecards, and most, with rudimentary reports as a way of providing business users access to data. The problem is if you stop there; if it’s just data, and not the right data. IT often provides users too much detail and data because we don’t know what drives the business. We don’t adequately help them prioritize. Instead, we should ensure that the data within any data mart or data warehouse helps improve business performance at all levels. One of my customers thought they were doing reasonably well here. They had a goal of growing revenues. For this indicator, they were on a roll, growing revenues more than 10% a year. But then Hurricane Katrina struck, supplies tightened, margins shrunk and the company lost money. Initially, they failed to adapt their goals to the changing business environment. They were looking at the wrong data--data that ultimately was only one small piece of their total business performance.

• BI is the Foundation for BPM: BPM across the enterprise requires an enterprise BI platform that must be treated as a strategic asset. Departmental solutions are silos and do little to align individual business units and functions. According to a TDWI survey I co-authored, 42% of companies said that the reason they have so many individual tools is because departments can buy their own solution. This gets back to the first point: if IT and the business have not partnered together, business units will do whatever it takes to accomplish their goals. The majority of companies are trying to standardize on a BI platform across the enterprise. The two biggest reasons cited are to lower the cost of ownership and provide one version of the truth. To be sure, if you do BPM right, the number of users will increase dramatically. Having one set of tools, a common server environment, and one point of user provisioning is a smart way to lower your cost of ownership while still increasing the number of users.
  
  Interviewing customers Jan Tonnessen, CIO of Norway Post and Jeff Brobst, VP of Financial Planning and Analysis for Symantec was enlightening. The results of their BPM culture are astounding. Of course, Jeff had to give me a hard time about not updating my virus definitions often enough so I had to give him some grief about Norway Post not being a Symantec customer.

Now, it's off to some track sessions ...