When you have been around as long as I have this debate breaks out periodically. Sure enough that early version of BPM, espoused by Hammer and Champy is dead and buried. Who wants to examine everything they do and build

a process architecture? Ok, wait a minute some of the vendors still want you to do that but that’s about selling software product. Let’s come back to reality…. BPM is dead…Yes I would have to say Inside-Out BPM is terminal, however let’s not be too harsh on those who are still banging that drum with process analysis toolkits and the like. I would even include the fabled 8 Omega, and as one of the co-creators of that we do have to ‘put it away’. Why? Inside-Out that is why. The reality of the globalized, consumerized, ever changing world is that we need a new BPM.

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Business Process Management (BPM) and Customer Expectation Management (CEM) remain ever growing focal points of individual skill development. The “inside word” from large corporations is that BPM and CEM are considered by many to be the cornerstones for 2008 in the continual quest to build and sustain business success.

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In my recent article on BPM Systems, I drove a stake in the ground regarding how these systems are far easier to use in supporting the changes that come from the powerful (yet simple) techniques that are the “bread and butter” tools of the Certified Process Professional – and how current use of these systems misses the mark almost completely.

In this article I hope to shed a bit more light on that subject by delving into a bit of the details… but before I do, please be advised…

THIS ARTICLE IS RATED X for X-tremely challenging to current technology thinking and practices.

(If you love what you are currently doing with tech stuff I strongly suggest you stop reading this right now because you will not like what I have to say.)

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CEMM™

The Business Process Management Methodology for creating Enterprise-Wide Transformational Change

The Challenge

There are more pressures on business today than ever before. Cost-based competition presses margins down, which in-turn increases the size of the customer base required in sustaining profit levels.

Businesses are generally bigger than ever before, have become more complicated, have more demands placed upon them (by customers, partners, regulatory agencies, and themselves) and are being pressed to incorporate change at what seems to be an ever-accelerating rate.

Existing strategies, tools and techniques have proven woefully inadequate in addressing these challenges with key issues identified as…

Agility - the ability to rapidly adapt the organization - its methods, work, goods, channels, value proposition, skills and focus - to changes of unknown character, cause or condition…

and…

Efficiency - the ability to accomplish goals with a minimum expenditure of time and effort where goals include; the products and services offered, the master set of interactions with the customer, the indirect work of the organization, the interactions with partners, and the meeting of regulatory and compliance requirements.

The areas of investment that are the current focus of most organizations in respect to this challenge are BPM and SOA however, closer scrutiny of these approaches finds that they hold little long-term benefit in the areas of Agility and Efficiency – that they are, in reality, another tactical move that perpetuates the problem rather than a long-term solution to the challenge of market change.

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I’ve had a pestering, festering feeling that we’re somehow missing the real prize. That we were heading for the stadium but somehow we got stuck in the parking lot with the gate closed…

and we just can’t figure out how to get it open.

But what are we missing?

It’s Like an Iceberg

It’s like the iceberg thing. We work like devils on the stuff we can see but the other part (and that’s where it starts getting interesting) we can’t touch. So what if our understanding of optimization opportunities is like the iceberg? What if we can only “see” the smallest part of the real optimization opportunity?

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