Dr. R. Keith Sawyer, a professor of psychology and education at Washington University in St. Louis, MO, specializes in:
"how to be more creative in collaborative group settings, how to change our organizations for the better, and how to tap into our own reserves of creativity."
Interestingly, according to his blog, he also plays jazz and teaches and lectures. Based on a recent lecture, he asks users in a May 15, 2008 blog post to think about what they are doing before choosing business process management (BPM). He suggests you innovate, not just re-invent.
What caught my eye is that he rightly connected the dots between “BPM” today and the 1993 book Reengineering the Corporation by Michael Hammer and James Champy. He then goes on to say:
"Although “conventional wisdom” has it that BPM was a short-lived fad, in fact the core of the message lives on in widely used management techniques..."
The reason that CW thinks BPM faded away is because SAP, Baan and other ERP players of the 1990s absconded with BPR (Hammer's and Champy's term for BPM). As I describe in this recent ebizQ feature article, the ERP players all insisted that you re-engineer your business processes to match their software logic. Not only were many companies happy to do that (prodded by FUD over Y2K) but then they payed Andersen, PwC, E&Y, and whomever else was in the big 7 in those days to customize the ERP software back to the company's business processes. (Oh, those were great days for analysts as long as you could spell ERP.)
BPM takes a different approach as Sawyer recognizes: make the software, including content and collaborative software as well as your line of business software, work the way you do. An upcoming ebizQ article explains how SAP now recognizes BPM is a better way to look at it. I'm also working my way back in history to see what Baan thinks these days...
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.
