Psst… Business Process Management (BPM) has a “dirty little secret”….
BPM and practitioners of BPM like to craft beautiful and elegant Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) based process solutions with all the “bells and whistles” associated with the “who, what, and when” that those processes should take. However, they almost never look at how those processes actually perform. Oh, sure… practitioners of BPM assume that their processes always perform as expected and/or they perform as intended…
But they rarely look back to make sure the process actually delivers the correct results.
A perfect example of this might be the “analyst community” of Wall Street. While they don’t put their processes in BPEL, Wall Street analysts have their own defined processes that generate results. However, rarely do they look back to see if their “prediction” results actually match reality. Recently, I ran across an article by Philip Elmer-DeWitt that does an excellent job of grading the “process results” of Wall Street analysts looking at Apple. As you can see, not many analysts did a good job of predicting Apple’s recent revenues report.
Unfortunately, there aren’t as many internal “reporters” who give such good graphical representations of the performance of various BPM processes.
In telecommunications, this concept becomes more and more important as telecom service providers rely more on automated processes to provide event processing and product/service order management solutions. The BPM practitioners are doing a great job of looking at how to design processes, but rarely do they look at the results of their process. More often than not they leave that someone else….
Do you agree that telecom BPM practitioners rely too heavily on their design and not enough on their results?
Post your comments below or email (John.Myers@BlueBuffaloGroup.com) / twitter (@JohnLMyers44) me directly.
Posted February 9, 2010 8:39 AM
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I am not a favorite of organizations that spend a disproportionate amount of their time and corporate resources in litigation. My best example is/was the the open source patent company that found it was easier to make money by suing those who infringed on their patents rather than actually implementing them.
Another Tuesday… Another comment on the guys from Philly…





