Business Process: Brett Champlin

Business process management “is certainly a way to deal with the perceived amounts of waste” in government, says Brett Champlin, president of the Association of Business Management Professionals, a year-old, vendor-neutral nonprofit group. “That’s part of process re-engineering.”With about 120 members, the association has three active chapters—in the Chicago, Philadelphia and San Francisco metro areas—and others in emerging phases in at least seven other cities in the United States and Canada.Just back from an international BPM conference in London, he answered questions in a GCN Forum June 7. Thank you for your interest. Our forum will begin in a moment.response_line/response_line response_line /response_line Service oriented architectures and standards are growing in this field apparently. How long will it be before there is a universial standard, if ever?response_line SOA has been developing for some time. SOA is one of the key technical concepts that has contributed to the BPM Systems. There are several technical standards that have to be coordinated to implement SOA. I guess I see the standards kind of like the components - you should be able to swap out one piece for something 'new' without affecting the whole stack. Look how long it took for TCP/IP to become the universal standard for networking. I suspect it will take as long for a universal standard to emerge here as well./response_line business process reengineering initiatives have been around the block many times. what's the big deal with business process management, what is new and different here?response_line /response_line How does BPM compare to Sigma Six or others like TQM?response_line /response_line Personally, I never thought it left, just some of the people who tried to make it work and got kicked around because it didn't work fast enough or lowered IT costs significantly. So, what makes it different to previous business process management efforts this time around?response_line Brett: We've received several questions along this line. Fairfax raises several points, including the speed with which results should be expected and savings. Are there guidelines or rules of thumb, or does it vary by project size and scope? /response_line It appears major BPM Vendors are hitching their hopes on systems to help comply with Sarbanes-Oxley. How can/do/will these solutions help?response_line They can help by visualizing the source of the data and how it flows through the process. BPM solutions are about informating the process, i.e., capturing the data that let you measure the performance and compare to your KPIs (key performance indicators). They can be applied to a compliance process just as well as any core business process./response_line Is there expected to be standardization of "dashboards"response_line Microsoft would love that :-) I do think that after a lot of experience with these types of solutions that a stadard approcah or best practices kind of model will evolve. Similar to the data marts that many people have rolled out, eventually you get to the point where each one is 80+ percent the same, the same dimensions, similar facts, etc./response_line What are the most critical considerations in buying a business process solutions package?response_line First and formost, of course, is does it have all of the functions that you need for your business. After that, one of the more critical considerations is that the packages fit into your technology infrastructure and overall architecture direction./response_line Since we are in the 5th generation software development technologies. Is there an effort being done on knowledge base technology for process improvementimplementations(information/process modeling).response_line One of the key components of most BPM systems implementations is how to capture, manage, and execute business rules. Many of the modeling and workflow vendors provide features to integrate with one or more of the most prominent rules management systems. I think we will see more efforts in that arena and also in developing standards to make that integration more seamless./response_line We are being pressed to justify spending and costs, documenting return-on-investment? Does one vendors’ solution offer a better way to cost-justify than another?response_line Since your group is neutral, let's ask this in a different way: What are some questions buyers should be asking vendors about their products to compare and contrast what's available and how it works> /response_line When and IF – a big IF – the Oracle Corp. merger with People Soft Inc. occurs, how will this change the business process products market?response_line I really don't have an opinion on this. From my perspective it won't have much impact on the BPM space./response_line Brett, a non-technical question. You spoke two months ago at a BPM conference in Miami, Fla. At the conference, there was much discussion about the need to manage cultural change that can come as a result of re-engineering. How much effort should managers put in dealing with this aspect of business process change? And how important is "buy-in" from the top manager or CIO?response_line There are two questions there. First, how much effort should managers put into managing cultural change? I would say that the more you are changing the process, the more effort you need to put into managing change overall and culture is a huge piece of that. The second question goes hand-in-hand with that. For any change effort to be successful and lasting it must have visible support or even better "championing" from someone with enough visibility and authority to get people to recognize it as a serious change. Absolutely critical, probably one of the most important critical success factors./response_line We are nearing the end of our session. Thanks, Brett, for your time and insight. Before we leave, one more question. What's on the agenda for your association for the balance of this year?response_line /response_line Is XML being deployed widely in business-process products or are companies using properietary software?response_line XML seems to have become the lingua franca of the integration standards. BPML, BPEL, BPMN, XPDL, all of those are XML based standards. As far as I can tell most vendors are supporting some kind of XML import/export/communications already. Many are waiting to see which of the various BPM standards will dominate before commiting to one. Some are able to integrate with any of the main ones now./response_line The hour has moved quickly. We appreciate your questions and interest. I'm in the process of lining up more online sessions on business process management for later this summer. Please stay tuned and watch GCN.com for regular updates. Thanks again to Brett Champlin. Have a good week.response_line/response_line/row