A critical but often overlooked step toward BPM success is getting every employee to understand how BPM affects their jobs, and how their jobs contribute to more effective business processes at their organizations. How best to do this depends on who's available, and their skills and comfort levels regarding communicating to and with groups – and with evangelism, which is in fact what is often required to "sell" people on caring about business processes.
If you want your enterprise to succeed with BPM, you have got to start by getting people to buy into the importance of BPM, and of their contributions to it. This is by no means an easy set of tasks, for many reasons. Some of these are discussed most eloquently by Ismael Ghalimi, founder of open source BPM solution provider Intalio, most recently in "What is Wrong with BPM" in his IT Redux blog.
For better or worse, at many enterprises, this evangelism is going to have to start with people focused on IT. This is because they are often those with the most (if not the only) experience applying at least quasi-rigorous processes at least quasi-rigorously to business challenges. Also, this process of connecting people to BPM is going to require a fair amount of communication, and much of that takes place via IT-empowered tools, such as e-mail, portals, and wikis. This is why I started this multi-part screed with IT and not BPM training recommendations.
Ultimately, what I think everyone needs is a brief, enterprise-specific mini-handbook on how to use the top three to five IT tools available to them, and another explaining their roles in the company's top business activities, goals, and processes. These documents need to be supported by processes that ensure that they get regularly revisited and updated, and that they are appropriately distributed and their use and value promoted.
Where they exist, IT people should help to spearhead these efforts, but they cannot and should not shoulder the entire burden alone. Input from business-focused constituents is essential as well. At many enterprises, unfortunately, IT people will need their best and brightest marketing and sales skills to convince their business colleagues to make the effort.
Where there are no IT people available, business people are going to have to take up the slack at both ends. That is to say, those business people must evangelize for business process engagement, and for the IT infrastructure elements supporting the business and its processes.
Whether or not there are dedicated IT people (multiple definitions of "dedicated" absolutely intended here!) at your organization, they're going to need help here. As a start, I would modestly offer some of my previous musings in this space, particularly "BPM: Be Prepared to Market" and "BPM: Beginning Proactive Messaging." I would also recommend a bunch of the stuff in the RFG section of the ebizQ Analyst Corner, as well as the other resources at ebizQ. And if you're already dealing with incumbent or candidate BPM and/or IT infrastructure management vendors, you should see how and if they can help here as well. Let me know what you're doing and how it's working out. I'll try to help you to help us to help others.
Michael Dortch has been an analyst, 'information entrepreneur,' speaker, and writer about IT and 'the real world" for the past 30 years. After almost 10 years at the Robert Frances Group (RFG), Michael begins a new position with Aberdeen Group in September.
Dennis Byron is an analyst with ebizQ, focusing on Open Source Software as well as Business Process Management technologies.
