Breaking BPM news: Business intelligence (BI) solution provider Business Objects SA and BPM solution provider Savvion, Inc. announced a strategic alliance intended to integrate their respective technologies and to help enterprises integrate their BI and BPM efforts. This is yet another example of the continuing consolidation reshaping the BPM marketplace I've mentioned in earlier postings here. Stay tuned; more to come…meanwhile, back to our regularly scheduled rantings…
One of my all-time favorite advertisements comes from the venerable and renowned language instruction providers, Berlitz. Perhaps you've seen it. If not, you can watch it on Google Video here, or on YouTube here. In the ad, an eager young German Coast Guard member receives an English radio message from a ship in trouble. "We are sinking, we are sinking," the radio crackles. "Vat are you sinking about?" asks the well-meaning but apparently entirely clueless young man from the German Coast Guard. "Improve your English," the ad says at its end.
Previously, I have alluded to the criticality of getting all of the right BPM stakeholders around the same table. However, it is at least as important (and tricky) to get everyone talking about the right things as it is to get the right people all talking in the first place. In other words, to answer your enterprise's own version of the question, "what are we thinking about where BPM is concerned?"
RFG research and client experiences have led us to believe that the term "BPM" itself provides a great "mini-agenda" for such discussions. The first major subject should be the business, and how and why you and your colleagues are trying to improve it. The second major subject should be about appropriate processes for achieving those goals, while the third should be how to manage your way toward them.
Like a lot of stuff related to BPM and enterprise IT generally, this sounds deceptively simple, and can instead be a big, complicated challenge – but does not necessarily have to be. So how best to navigate this thicket successfully?
Well, a good first step – or best practice, if you insist– is to make sure to tailor your messages about BPM efforts and goals to align closely with the things your audiences care about most. (The "seven Ps" I've written about previously – people, planning, platforms, portfolio, process, products (and services), and projects – can help significantly here. Others include deciding whether a message is informational or intended to engender actions, and to tailor accordingly, and keeping your messages focused and simple.
It is also important to support messages with credible, meaningful metrics. Again the seven Ps can help you to determine what metrics will best meet these criteria, by aligning what is to be measured with what constituents care about most. The framework can also help organize BPM effort elements into projects and portfolios that are similarly aligned. All good things regarding your BPM marketing and sales efforts.
The point is that whether you use the RFG P7 framework, guidelines such the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL), industry-specific guidelines and recommendations, or those developed internally, use something to guide your messages and message-crafting, about BPM and your other strategic initiatives. Then, use the same frameworks and guidelines to help you craft and prioritize projects, and project portfolios, as well as meaningful metrics to evaluate your efforts – and to promote your successes credibly to your constituents. This interlocking set of processes can help you with every stage of every BPM effort, including what is sometimes the most important, the most enabling, and the most potentially limiting stage: getting and maintaining stakeholder support.
If you'd like to read more about these issues, check out "RFG's Recommendations for SOA Initiatives" and "Best Practices for IT Infrastructure Management and Business Alignment" in RFG's segment of the ebizQ Analyst Corner. Want more? Just e-mail me with your name, title, company, and a few words about what you're doing and how it's going. I'll send you some additional relevant RFG research in return, at no charge, of course. If you've got stories to tell or questions to ask, please send those along, too. Meanwhile, onward and upwards…
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