This year I finally had the opportunity to attend the BPM Lisbon Conference 2011. The conference brought very different topics of discussion: governance, dynamic processes, old school lean.
One of conclusions that came out is not only in Portugal that BPM still lacks implementation maturity.
The speakers that came from abroad clearly told that there is a lot of work to do around BPM, and today’s ubiquitous social engagement among BPM practitioners, where new concepts born and die at the speed of light, fighting around definitions and methods go obtain competitive advantage (like a enterprise) does not help the poor people in the companies that try to figure it out how to transform it’s business processes. This thought makes me remember this excellent post: Platos Cave. Read it and you know what I talking about.
Regarding the conference, I attended the first day only. here are some insights:
Samuel Ho – Green 5S: The route to Excellence
I started working in the factory floor and I never forgot the classic improvement methods used on assembly lines.
Today some BPM professionals consider this outdated, useless methods.
I continue to find very useful, particularly because it’s possible to apply it in the digital automated world, rather than hype concepts.
Cherie Wilkins – What is a Process? Definitions Matter to Everyone
On the start I thought that this discussion was about helping companies to understand the basics of BPM: what is a process all about, but fortunately Cherie embraced around the wiki build to create an open source BPM body of knowledge that aims to clarify the BPM concepts and stop deceit. You thought flame wars only happened in professional forums? Think again. Cherie choose the process definition. It presented the contributions of respected people in the BPM community, resulted that:
If the experts cannot agree what a process is all about, how it’s possible to progress on the other BPM concepts?
As a BPM professional how do you deal with this situation? Do you keep with the “no definition“, our with your own? Maybe worth to read this old post – Why you don’t need a BPM body of knowledge.
Pascal Ravesteijn – Dynamic Process Capabilities
Pascal brought the discussion around dynamic, ad-hoc, unstructured process world. I personally think that attendants where not prepared to this, but he pointed quite clear that if you look deeply most of the times:
People achieve the outcomes not following the flow. Thus why loosing time making detailed process definitions?
José Libano Monteiro – The challenges of process management in a financial institution – Millennium BCP
Very good track, for me the best. José talked about it’s experience about structuring the bank processes, defining the architecture, raising a process culture, but two important conclusions where shared:
The bank manage its processes, but does not do in a holistic way, or if you prefer on a end-to-end basis.
The bank still deploy it’s strategy on a functional basis (marketing, operations, HR) rather thank linking the strategic iniciatives to the process improvement programs.
This raises another question looking to this evidences: how mature do you think in your company BPM is?
Till next year.