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Education Critical to BPM Proliferation


By Lisa L. Morgan
September 15, 2006 — 
Bill Swanton, AMR Research’s vice president of research, sees two barriers to business process management adoption: First, BPM vendors don’t understand their customers. Second, user organizations don’t understand why they need BPM.

While vendors are busy defining and implementing various industry standards, the vendors themselves differ in expertise and the industries they serve. Swanton said all BPM vendors think the technology is important, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that BPM, or their particular implementation of it, is widespread. In fact, some companies don’t even recognize that they need BPM.

For example, companies in the insurance and manufacturing industries need BPM, he said, but people within the organization have no idea how to use the technology.

“Vendors are facing some market adoption issues, like you can’t do everything inside SAP,” said Swanton. “A lot of education is required.”

Vendor education is also required. According to Maureen Fleming, business process automation and application deployment program director at IDC, most vendors don’t understand information design—that is, what users need to look at in order to make decisions. As a result, the business activity monitoring component of BPM suites is pretty weak.

Some vendors have gone as far as to refer to visual monitors as “eye candy.” What these vendors are missing is the business users’ view. Visibility can be much more important to a business user than the automation of a process.

Vendors also need to understand how to integrate the change cycle into the application, she said. To implement a business process, there are countless actions taken within an application. When the change to that process is specified, the tracking of what actually needs to change is pretty poor, which has to improve.

What enterprises really want, according to Colin Teubner, information delivery analyst at Forrester Research, is BPM applied to one or two main processes implemented with the help of the vendor. Over time, enterprises will increasingly rely on vendors for service assistance as BPM is used to improve more business processes.

Systems integrators see this trend as a threat, he said, because half of a systems integrator’s revenue comes from specifying requirements that are later transformed into code. To alleviate revenue leaks, they are spreading fear, uncertainty and doubt, which requires vendors to do more evangelizing.


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