Meet IBM 2010 - Effectiveness and Efficiency

Breakout session: Efficiency and Effectiveness

Jan van der Sypt BPM specialist IBM

Despite the proven benefit and value, BPM projects tend to be very costly and take much too long. The promised ROI evaporates before any result is obtained. Although typically there are many good intentions to collaborate, the failure to transpose business requirements to a technology implementation is driven by the difficult communication between line of business people and the technology people. A BPM project requires the business to be in the driving seat, and any requirements need to be shared without losing any detail with the implementation teams. What is needed is a platform that will simplify the BPM approach to facilitate business people to provide the needed input, that will enhance collaboration between all parties involved, and that will shorten the cycles between new or changing requirements. This is what WebSphere Lombardi edition has to offer: a complete BPM solution that is covering the whole lifecycle, from modelling to optimization and monitoring, with one single product. All the different oles inside an organization will find a way to make their work smarter using this platform.

Product or Business Proces? 

The session is very product focused. I realize that this conference is very customer focused, where a lot of conferences and sessions which I attend from Microsoft are much more partner focused. Well they are people focussed as I mentioned earlier, but that is translated into User eXperience. The presenter tries to adress the business needs, but very poor.

He misses the point in my opinion. The results of a effective & efficient BPM project is NOT depended of the supporting tool. He mentioned the business is crusial, but still presented a tool focused presentation.

The Themes
Themes mentioned are indeed very important to take in consideration and base of a well designed business supporting proces:

• simplicity
• engagement
• repeatability

Well I do not know if simplicity is the right word. Business and Technology should have a common language to discusse requirements, changes to these demands to ensure the result ìs the implementation of the solution both agreed on. That is NOT simple.

Engagement is indeed a crusial element to ensure success and effectiveness of the end results. In perception of the business it becomes their system.

Repeatability should help to become more efficient, but there is more than just an object in a tool. Best practices in how organisations can be helped to analyse the business problem and what sort of solution helped simular organisations before. It is not as suggested repeatability on the level of the tool itself.