I participated in virtual Business Process Management (BPM) conference on Twitter today led by several Forrester analysts. A lot of interesting insights came up (here's the link to the full transcript, and I'm sure the Forrester folks will be publishing something on the topic.) I'll just summarize what I took away and how it relates to running a successful BPM effort.

1. There is no 'standard' BPM message to sell the concept - and that's a good thing. BPM is not same for everyone. It will vary across verticals, across organizations, and even within organizations of sufficient scale. That leads to...

2. The most important determining factor of BPM effort success is stakeholder involvement. And that depends on knowing what will keep the stakeholders involved and committed throughout the initiative. Which means that while there should be a core message set to socialize BPM around the organization, there should also be a subset that is unique to each stakeholder. Without that commitment, and a point person at the executive level to continually refresh that commitment, success is unlikely to be sustained.

3. Another core part of sustainability is availability of BPM analysis resources. Several analysts and practitioners agreed that only 50% of 'classical' business analysts will be successful once trained in BPM practices. Many factors contribute to this, but the result is the same: plan accordingly, as reliance on BPMS vendors to provide this skill can lead to process models 'unique' (read: legacy) to vendor platform. Client/Vendor philosophy compatibility is an obvious key here, but assessing whether that compatibility is real before entering into a partnership is not trivial.

4. BPM by itself is not sufficient. There are other approaches out there (e.g. SOA, MDM et al) and they all have their strengths and weaknesses. Combining approaches tailored to solution is not trivial, but it is the optimal technology investment management strategy. Yet only 8% of organizations surveyed by Forrester link their BPM and MDM investments, and the pitched battle between BPM and SOA camps is well known. Talk about opportunity for improvement!

5. Thought leaders from other specialized process-driven disciplines, such as Records Management (RIM) and Governance Risk and Compliance (GRC), are now realizing that their flows are a special case of BPM. One of the corollaries of moving toward a disciplined selection approach (e.g. "Process First, Tools, Second") is that it gives organizations struggling with multiple platforms the ability to consolidate.

6. Successful BPM implementations take a holistic approach to the reforming process, supporting technologies, and supporting organizations, while breaking delivery groups into discrete chunks. The most effective way of determining what and how large those discrete chunks are? A capability-based approach.

AAB