A Top Priority for Organizations

Business Process Management (BPM) is widely viewed as a top priority by organizations seeking to increase overall efficiency and competitiveness, customer satisfaction, product quality, and time-to-market performance.  In a recent survey,* 63 percent of respondents considered BPM to be either “significant” or “imperative,” the primary drivers being hard dollar savings from “improving process throughput” and “reducing process steps.”  Nearly half the organizations achieved payback within 18 months, and another 23 percent within two years.

But implementation of ç is very challenging, and many BPM initiatives fail.  In the same survey, the top five managerial issues encountered during implementation of BPM were:

• User resistance to change
• Lack of understanding what BPM is
• Underestimated time to map and agree on processes
• Extending ownership across departmental boundaries
• No single, identifiable process owner

Strategic, Tactical & Operational

Another survey* measuring the effectiveness of BPM implementation identified problems on three levels: strategic, tactical and operational:

Strategic
- Lack of governance or ownership
- Lack of employee buy-in
- Lack of consensus
- Disconnect w/ business strategy

Tactical
- Lack of standards
- Weakness in process specification
- Lack of BPM education
- Lack of methodology

Operational
- Lack of tool support for process visualization
- Perceived process design/execution gaps
- Miscommunication of tool capabilities