BPTrends advisory: Research confirms gaps in BPM maturity
By Manufacturing Business Technology Staff -- Manufacturing Business Technology, 5/7/2008 4:20:00 PM
According to a recent survey of nearly 300 executives, major gaps in maturity remain despite growing interest in business process management (BPM) as an enterprise discipline.
In terms of the Capability Maturity Model Integrated (CMMI) scale, most enterprises in the research are described as Level 2 organizations that have begun to formally document their processes. However, these organizations have yet to fully implement an enterprise-process architecture, systematically measure performance, or continually improve process efficiency and effectiveness at the enterprise level—behavior associated with Level 3, 4, and 5 organizations respectively.
The survey, The State of Business Process Management 2008, was conducted by BPTrends, a leading source of business intelligence for business process change with 20,000 members worldwide. Software AG, a business infrastructure software specialist, sponsored the research.
“The BPM market continued to develop and expand in 2007 as most enterprises now recognize its strategic potential," says Paul Harmon, executive editor of BPTrends, and coauthor of the study. More growth is expected in the current year. The growing interest in business process management suites as a richer alternative to simply modeling processes also is noteworthy. Our research indicates that these organizations are typically more sophisticated in their overall approach to process management.”
According to the survey, one-half of these enterprises are pursuing BPM as a strategic discipline. More specifically, 26 percent of respondents described BPM as a “major strategic commitment by executive management,” while another 24 percent noted that their organizations had made “significant commitment to multiple high-level process projects.”
In comparison with similar research conducted in 2006, the number of respondents identifying BPM as exclusively a set of software technologies declined from 16 percent to 9 percent. Rather, most described it more broadly as either “a top-down methodology designed to organize, manage and measure the organization based on the organization's core processes” (40 percent); or as “a systematic approach to analyzing, redesigning, improving, and managing a specific process” (29 percent).
Greater consensus also emerged in 2007 in terms of adoption drivers. More than half of all respondents now identify “need to save money by reducing costs and/or improving productivity” and “need to improve management coordination or organizational responsiveness” as their top two reasons for pursuing BPM.
Reflecting the relative immaturity of their adoption, the majority of respondents (55 percent) only “occasionally” documented and maintained their processes in an up-to-date manner. Not surprisingly, this lack of enterprise process architecture limited many of their subsequent activities. For example, respondents only “occasionally” standardized process models, reused components across subsequent implementations or defined consistent measurement strategies.
“Bringing modeling and execution together in a single platform is critical to delivering on BPM’s promise of rapid process redesign and continuous process improvement. This is the unique role that BPMS plays,” says Kiran Garimella, VP of BPM Solutions for Software AG. “BPMS is also important for facilitating effective collaboration across the diverse stakeholders supporting BPM initiatives. All of this positions BPMS as a major driver of BPM’s growth and success at the enterprise level.”
The survey attracted 274 qualified responses, which were drawn from BPTrends’ global membership base, and was conducted in November and December of 2007. A majority of the respondents described themselves as Process Practitioner/Business Analyst (55%) followed by Business or Line of Business Manager (17%), IT Manager/IT Developer (15%) and Executive (12%). Geographically, respondents were split between North America (42%), Europe (30%), Asia/Australia (16%), Africa/Middle East (7%) and South America (5%), with responses drawn from more than fifteen industry sectors.
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