Thursday
Aug172006
Agility- Part 2 BPM/BR’s impact
Thursday, August 17, 2006 at 08:07AM
If the biggest cost driver for moving to BPM and business rules is project management and implementation, early benefits from reduced development costs are slight. A lack of portfolio project management is a symptom of bigger issues. Perhaps there is rapid growth or decline without related management structure. As I mentioned earlier, companies approach BPM/BR projects from a need to achieve business maturity.
The long-range benefit of BPM/BR occurs when the organization maintains its applications with an automated model of business processes and business rules. The savings arrive when an organization is smoothly able to adapt to challenges. Organization might even experience huge gains in agility by easing project planning needs and swiftly reconfigure its products and services. Classes of products, such as decision analytics, might even predict and develop automatic responses to certain problem domains. Reconfiguring products and services are a matter of agility theory. I will describe these factors in coming posts.
With BPM/BR, change is simplified, and wide swaths of technology changes are cutout. Sometimes project planning can be expelled. Classes of products, such as decision analytics, might even predict and develop automatic responses to certain problem domains. Yet, as I will suggest, there are still critical barriers to total business engineering agility.
If agility is a capability then perhaps expanded agility is a goal. These factors should be measured. Developing agility metric is daunting even to imagine. Yet goals should be measurable, or at least recognizable.
Agility has many imaginative characteristics. It should be a measure of an improved capacity to move from instantiation of the challenge, recognition by the organization, addition to the technical and operating environment and, finally, business implementation of the response. BPM, Business Rules and Business Intelligence approaches have a role throughout these. Not only do they impact operational changes, they enable detailed research and discovery. They also can help simulation, scenario development and brainstorming. These are the traditionally touted benefits, yet this is an information systems view. For business, BPM/BR should also impact organization agility.
The improvements might be measured against legacy means. Organizations that use and benchmark earned-value-management or function point analysis to describe their activities are positioned to begin to measure their agility. James Taylor described one approach to this in this posting.
The first step is to recognize opportunities, challenges, and new competitive measures. This happens through research, observation, and heroic innovation. Peter Laundry recently posted a article on this with the BPM institute. Knowing is one state, institutionalizing it is yet another. Change drivers have a life, response to these must occur within a favorable economic window. Organizations must ramp up, ramp down, reconfigure their products and align their missions. Again, agility is considered key to mission strategy.
Agility types
The agility of business operations can be assigned to four separate infrastructures: Marketing and Sales, Business Delivery, personnel, and information technology. BPM and Business rules are designed to connect management and operations and improve the agility of almost every area. In my next post I am going to break these areas into 17 different agility factors that can be measured and incorporated into agility metrics.
The long-range benefit of BPM/BR occurs when the organization maintains its applications with an automated model of business processes and business rules. The savings arrive when an organization is smoothly able to adapt to challenges. Organization might even experience huge gains in agility by easing project planning needs and swiftly reconfigure its products and services. Classes of products, such as decision analytics, might even predict and develop automatic responses to certain problem domains. Reconfiguring products and services are a matter of agility theory. I will describe these factors in coming posts.
With BPM/BR, change is simplified, and wide swaths of technology changes are cutout. Sometimes project planning can be expelled. Classes of products, such as decision analytics, might even predict and develop automatic responses to certain problem domains. Yet, as I will suggest, there are still critical barriers to total business engineering agility.
If agility is a capability then perhaps expanded agility is a goal. These factors should be measured. Developing agility metric is daunting even to imagine. Yet goals should be measurable, or at least recognizable.
Agility has many imaginative characteristics. It should be a measure of an improved capacity to move from instantiation of the challenge, recognition by the organization, addition to the technical and operating environment and, finally, business implementation of the response. BPM, Business Rules and Business Intelligence approaches have a role throughout these. Not only do they impact operational changes, they enable detailed research and discovery. They also can help simulation, scenario development and brainstorming. These are the traditionally touted benefits, yet this is an information systems view. For business, BPM/BR should also impact organization agility.
The improvements might be measured against legacy means. Organizations that use and benchmark earned-value-management or function point analysis to describe their activities are positioned to begin to measure their agility. James Taylor described one approach to this in this posting.
The first step is to recognize opportunities, challenges, and new competitive measures. This happens through research, observation, and heroic innovation. Peter Laundry recently posted a article on this with the BPM institute. Knowing is one state, institutionalizing it is yet another. Change drivers have a life, response to these must occur within a favorable economic window. Organizations must ramp up, ramp down, reconfigure their products and align their missions. Again, agility is considered key to mission strategy.
Agility types
The agility of business operations can be assigned to four separate infrastructures: Marketing and Sales, Business Delivery, personnel, and information technology. BPM and Business rules are designed to connect management and operations and improve the agility of almost every area. In my next post I am going to break these areas into 17 different agility factors that can be measured and incorporated into agility metrics.
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