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The point is that when it comes to IT, many people bring much baggage to the subject, for IT means many things to many people and is an emotiaonally charged subject for those with a particular stake in IT. Many read a book like this and filter it through their individual bias to the point where they distort what the book actually says.
As a business manager using the book to foster discussion in our company, I suggest readers go through it twice: once quickly with their defensive mechanizms in place, and then again with a keen eye on what the IT issues portend for their company going forward. We are doing precisely that in our company and find the book to be the focal point of our deliberations, for it covers all the key issues of the past and those setting the stage for the future. Correct thining about IT, not preconcieved notions or turf bias, is essential for companies to move forward, for as the book says, IT is not about the past fity years of business automation and its inherent limitations, IT is about a "change in kind" in business automation where the focus is not on data and record keeping, but on the way business is conducted. And yes, the authors totally agree that usibility is key to that, for it's business people who must manage their own business processes.
The authors explain the past, present and future of this topic, and, for the first time in print (to my knowledge - correct me if wrong) a thorough examination of why reengineering failed to deliver and why BPM is now unifying business practice AND IT practice to support a simpler method for aligning business and IT. But this is not the only reason, or even the most important reason, I love the book. It's the colourful way the story is told and the little quotes at the front of each chapter, mostly Zen inspired, which tell their own story (if you know the work of the authors of those quotes, and me being a Systems Thinking Bigot .... well ... I do).
I KNOW we'll heard this BPM thing before, but this is the 3rd reason I love the book. It's not theory. It's real. I checked.
(been doing BPM ... that's "Business", "Process", "Management" btw ... for years, like many of us I suspect)
Final point, I know reviews should help people decide who should read this. Difficult to say in this case. Its a business book, and its about technology. Its about technology (BPM) that business people need to know about, because its technology that supports what they do, but some in business may say, I'm sick of technology, and that's fine .... except when something like this book happens. For me it was an epiphany.
One criticism. Hurray up and get the second "third wave" book done. There is mention of this in the covers but I've seen nothing about it around the Web.
Aimed at university students, those in business and industry, as well as consulting firms, •Ŕ?Business Process Management•Ŕ? (BPM) provides answers to achieving operations excellence based upon the best from engineering, computer science and executive management/consulting/practice.
The entertaining and confidently written, content-rich, adequately illustrated, balanced (business: IT) chapters span:
>The next 50 years- forecasting and inevitable uptake of business process management;
>A walk over the hill- taking a helicopter view of functional IT stovepipes shackling business;
>Enterprise business processes- current status, many processes, collaboration, excellence, user-led demand;
>Business process management- lessons learned, from modeling to management;
>Reegineering reengineering- critique of the past (including Davenport, Hammer/Champy);
>Business process outsourcing- new ways to outsource;
>Management theory, ROI and beyond- six sigma, change as a process;
>Tomorrows interview in BPM3.0 magazine- converting the jargon into digestible meaningful chunks; and
>An appendix containing- the language of process; BPM systems; theoretical foundations of BPM; lessons learned from early adopters; and a new MBA curriculum.
Book Strengths:
>condensed review/viewpoint of literally 100s of major transformation approaches over last 2 decades
>endorsed by credible organizations including BPML.org and WfMC
>harsh yet (often) justified criticism of IT industry, and the usefulness of their products in enabling competitive advantage
>BPM based upon main open standards approaches (BPML, UML, SCOR, XML, webservices etc.);
>synergetic (overall enterprise) optimization rather than functional silos
>vision of massively scaleable, fault tolerant, data transaction processing platform linking •Ŕ?fuzzy-boundary•Ŕ? enterprise with suppliers and customer
Book Weaknesses :
>little supporting evidence to base (any) project upon beyond 29 outline paragraphs of •Ŕ?lessons from early adopters•Ŕ? in appendices
>reads somewhat like a literature-research thesis based upon analysts and general business press (or with a different perspective) a sales brochure for new consulting services
Overall: a very worthwhile addition as a strategic corporate workshop discussion starter; or supplemental materials for graduate students.
Third wave BPM has two goals: hyper-efficiency and unprecedented agility. It aims to meet the needs of companies, including a means not only to conceive of new processes but to implement them, the alignment of processes with strategy, turning organizational change into an engineering discipline, and a "pervasive, resilient, and predictable means for the processing of processes. Unlike previous approaches, BPM can create a single definition of a business process from which alternative views of that process can be crystallized - for managers, business analysts, employees, and programmers. The authors make one of many excellent points when they note that "information processing" should, up to now, have been called "data processing". BPM claims to finally move us from data processing to "process processing".
BPM is not just another revolutionary three-letter practice intended to displace all that came before it. On the contrary, one of its multiple strengths is that it synthesizes and extends previous process representation and collaboration technologies and techniques - such as reengineering, EAI, workflow management, service-oriented architecture, XML and Web services, TQM, Six Sigma, and systems thinking - into a unified approach. The entire approach is founded on process calculus, in particular one form of this called Pi-calculus. This author does not pretend to possess sufficient mathematical background to assess this as a foundation in the sense that electrical engineers rely on differential calculus as a foundation. However, the claim could be given added plausibility by noting that the recent field of social network analysis makes use of the mathematics originally developed for quantum physics.
Unlike the previous data-centric approaches, BPM's process-centricity equips its adopters to proactively rather than reactively manage change. Included in this is an ability to simulate change and its effects, making the authors' choice of the term "top-down" perhaps misleading. As Smith and Fingar explicitly say, by "top-down" they actually mean "the ability to model processes simultaneously at all levels in line with business strategy". The ability to simulate is tucked away in the last of eight broad capabilities of BPM: discovery, deployment, execution, interaction, control, optimization, and analysis of processes. The authors' understanding of "analysis" is generous enough to firmly include the synthesis resulting from business simulations. For those executives stung by business process reengineering (BPR) a good place to dip in would be the chart beginning on p.108 that looks at the BPR advocates' reasons given for failure and the third wave perspective as well as the p.118 chart relating BPM to Davenport's Process Improvement and Innovation.
While Michael Hammer comes in for repeated hammering, the authors look far more favorably on Thomas Davenport's angle on reengineering. To their credit, they do not present BPM as springing fully formed from their brains but as essentially an inevitable evolutionary development driven more by economic than technological forces. Further helping the reader to place BPM in context, the book explains how this approach relates to and subsumes John Hagel and John Seely Brown's recent work on loosely-coupled business processes. Chapter 7 is devoted to showing how BPM, far from being a usurper, is actually a supporter, accelerator, and amplifier of existing management approaches such as Six Sigma and Change Management.
A book this rich in big ideas defies adequate reviewing. In addition to the aspects mentioned here, the authors also explain how to measure the return on process investment, ten capabilities embodied in a business process management system, the three competencies required to build BPM competence, and how to apply Page-Jones' 7-stage model of expertise to BPM implementation, along with four informative appendices. No doubt BPM enterprises will experience difficulties not well anticipated in this book. Yet the skeptical eye of this reviewer cannot help count off the large number of nuggets of wisdom, and the seeming inevitability of this vision.
This book converges an amazing number of buzz words into an overly long sales brochure that lacks substance, rationale or proof regarding the benefits of BPM. Dangerously (for you) it ignores the threats of BPM.
Similar to BPM's three predecessors COBOL, CIM, and BPR, this "third wave" claims that a higher order of computerized logic is the key to continual adaptation for maximizing customer value. Unfortunately (for you) it does not clarify how value is to be created also for investors, suppliers and employees. Further, in declaring "business is process" it potentially diverts your employees from leveraging your only strategic asset --- employee learning and collaboration. Thirdly, while extolling the benefits of highly malleable processes, it ignores the problem of managing multiple changes while ensuring enterprise integrity --- a critical problem addressed by the industrial process control industry more than three decades ago.
The technology of BPM has potential benefit if prudently applied with foreknowledge of its limitations and risks (not everything that can be programmed needs to be). This book does not address prudent application, BPM limitations nor risks of highly malleable processes.
BPM may or may not be beneficial for your business. This book is not.
The book is certainly NOT buzzword heavy, in fact the authors go to extreme lengths to make sure they dont talk down to non-technical readers. As they say, managing the processes of a company is about business AND technology (period). Smith and Fingar have made it UNDERSTANDABLE to BUSINESS PEOPLE for the first time (imho) WHY their IT systems often let them down and what they can do about it. Appendices are provided for people who want to geek out. But how Celia can say the book is abrasive beats me. It is so friendly, but at the same time focussed and inspirational. (Peter and Howard - I love the Zen stuff). Yes, they talk about "technology gods" and "cast in concrete" data stovepipes, but that's REALITY guys, that's WHY there is a business-IT divide today and why the third wave BPM could move us all forward, whether we are on the business side of the house or the IT side. I'm an obsessive process architect. These guys have hit the nail on the head.
Its true that Smith and Fingar lament the disruptive and "painful reengineering second wave advocated by their former colleague, James Champy." (Champy was CSC, Smith is CSC, for those who dont know). Well, as I said in my comments at Darwin, it looks like the industry is finally moving on and I am simply AMAZED at the clarity of the analysis in the Reengineering Chapter as to how modern BPM systems can now DO what the reengineering guys said they wanted to but gave no solution, other than to employ expensive consultants. Its just plain SILLY for Celia to say that what Smith and Fingar hope to achieve is to "cut IT entirely out of the business change loop". That's not what they say at all. They show how IT can provide BPM capabilities so that business people are EMPOWERED to manage their own affairs. The only thing that Celia says that IS correct is that "it behooves anyone who might be in a position to benefit from BPM -- or to get trampled by the BPM steamroller -- to familiarize themselves with the subject."
As I said at Darwin, its refreshing to see processes coming back center stage, but this time with TEETH. The books controversial elements may be missed by some readers, but will be understood by those that have REALLY worked at the intersection of business and IT. Clue, read the Epilog.
--- Yours truly, a frustrated (with data) business process analyst just starting to get some understanding of the potential of the third wave.
Bottom line: this book is a great resource to understand the BPM space.
Don't be afraid of some of the supporting concepts that are there simply to logically prove their hypothesis. (Six Sigma, Process calculi, BPML, Pi-Calculus, etc. - each of these subjects could be a book in it's own right!) While critical, they are not the core point of the book -- the coming transformation of where business value is going to be generated is.
After all, knowing the chemical composition of tire rubber and exactly why it doesn't turn brittle and break when it freezes never stopped me from driving my car in the winter.
Just so you all know, technology people end up loving BPM once understood and implemented -- and are more empowered than ever to impact the organizations where they work because they can focus on VALUE ADDED tasks. (Meeting time saved alone justifies a BPMS.)
A true BPMS can get everyone involved in a business process focused on adding value, and that is the best job security you can ask for. (Internal or external.)
Smith and Fingar do not demonize the role of the IT professional in this book...they simply redefine it in a way that makes perfect sense. In fact, it is obvious in our experience that if you understand and implement a BPM strategy that everyone's role is enhanced from the business side to the IT side.
"Obliterating the IT/Business Divide" is not overstating it at all...
Why should a business analyst (or any process owner) be forced to educate an application programmer on the multiple facets of a given business process, which then gets translated to a programming team, that then gets built into a technology stack, (new or extended) - put into production...only to find out that all of that investment was wasted because a key business condition changed, or worse? (And we wonder where all the money went...)
If you are an IT professional, it is critical you read and understand what is being said in this book so you can proactively manage your career to be that value-added player with job security in the future.
If you are coming at this from the business side...dramatic and sustainable competitive advantage is available to you as a result of BPM if you can grasp it and learn to drive it...
The overall tone of the book is abrasive. Smith and Fingar rail against "technology gods" and "cast in concrete" data stovepipes. They lament the disruptive and "painful reengineering" second wave advocated by their former colleague, James Champy. They see the main differentiator of BPM as being its ability to connect outwards to partner businesses.
What Smith and Fingar hope to achieve with business process engineering is to cut IT entirely out of the business change loop. They envisage being able to completely describe all business processes in BPML diagrams - down to the "Coke" machine's inputs (coins) and outputs (cans of soda). This way, business managers need never deal with IT folk again, and they can outsource entire processes by exposing the relevant sections of BPML to subcontractors.
It's truly hard to tell from the book how much of this is blue sky and how much is part of the trend already underway. Either way it behooves anyone who might be in a position to benefit from BPM -- or to get trampled by the BPM steamroller -- to familiarize themselves with the subject.
Relating to the business managers and practitioners this book demonstrates that BPM design and deployment go hand in hand. There is not the great gulf in bridging the 'IT divide' which caused so many failures as reengineered processes fell into the chasm. Put simply the divide itself disappears by moving the process development to the process owners.
This simple and glaringly obvious evolutionary step is now achievable as the technology is finally mature and accessible enough to integrate it as part of the process. The technology is now no longer something you do to the process after it has been designed.
Should you buy? Absolutely. Steve Towers - ...
Everything is possible. Pass the word.
-- Rita Mae Brown, "Six of One"
The Commandments of the EE:
(1) Beware of lightning that lurketh in an uncharged condenser
lest it cause thee to bounce upon thy buttocks in a most
embarrassing manner.
(2) Cause thou the switch that supplieth large quantities of juice to
be opened and thusly tagged, that thy days may be long in this
earthly vale of tears.
(3) Prove to thyself that all circuits that radiateth, and upon
which the worketh, are grounded and thusly tagged lest they lift
thee to a radio frequency potential and causeth thee to make like
a radiator too.
(4) Tarry thou not amongst these fools that engage in intentional
shocks for they are not long for this world and are surely
unbelievers.
