Davenport, Champy and Frappaolo on the State of BPM
Davenport, Champy and Frappaolo on the State of Business Process Management
Original article at EMC’s ON Magazine, Number 4, 2008
BPM Study Finds That Most Organizations Are Stuck in Reactive Mode
By Carl Frappaolo
The automation and real-time monitoring of business processes are not new concepts to the business community. Circa 1993, workflow became an integral part of the enterprise content management solution set and lexicon. Despite this, data collected from more than 354 business users and released in the AIIM report, “Market IQ on Business Process Management,” shows 48% of respondents indicating that their organizations lacked consistent practices and that management of processes lacks any formal strategy. As shown in Figure 2 (forthcoming at EMC’s site), only 3% felt their organizations had achieved process excellence. (See Figure 1, forthcoming at EMC’s site, for a definition of the five levels of business process management maturity.)
For most organizations, adoption of BPM is not strategic or positioned across the organization. Despite decades of market attention, its infiltration from manufacturing into knowledge work and across all industries has been a slow journey. The problem lies in the fact that processes are the core of any functioning organization. Nonetheless, our research found most organizations do not have a process governance document or a chief process officer (see Figure 3, forthcoming at EMC’s site). It is not surprising, therefore, that organizations continue to cite lack of understanding and executive sponsorship as primary obstacles to BPM implementation (see Figure 4, forthcoming at EMC’s site).
Until BPM is addressed strategically, it is likely to remain underappreciated, breeding continued lack of executive sponsorship. This is despite the fact that those in our survey who implemented BPM strategically experienced a positive ROI in less than three years.
Carl Frappaolo is president of Information Architected and former VP of AIIM market intelligence. He blogs at www.takingaiim.com.
