'BPM Should Enable Enterprise Performance Mgmt'

The world of Business Process Management is changing quite rapidly, and many a times, enterprises get stuck at the wrong end when dealing with such initiatives. Dr Ketabchi, founder, president and CEO, Savvion India, talks about some of the common issues encountered by CIOs during BPM initiatives, also detailing upon some of the more spoken about concepts like Enterprise Performance Management in an exclusive interview with Biztech 2.0.

What are some of the biggest challenges when it comes to BPM initiatives within enterprises?

Within enterprises today, a CIO’s main objective is to narrow down upon the additional skills required for effective BPM deployment.

Apart from the IT infrastructure skills that CIOs have at their disposal, a commonly asked question is ‘What else do I need?’ These companies have the necessary skills but in effect, they are present in silos. The object is to bring the business and technology aspects and assets of the enterprise to work together. Typically, you have a set of business people, who understand the business needs, and you have a bunch of technology people who take care of that aspect of the enterprise. However, the problem is that there is a clear lack of communication between people belonging to the two disciplines. Once, you adopt BPM, it provides the right language and concept for appropriate communication between the two disciplines.

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Could you give us your views on Enterprise Performance Management (EPM), and how it differs from BPM?

Historically, BI companies have used EPM. So the old approach to EPM is based purely on information, this means that the process aspect of the equation is ignored. Enterprises end up believing that by simply analysing pure data one can realise areas/ sources of bottlenecks. However, EPM cannot be achieved purely by analysing data. The processes related to the data being analysed are also extremely important, considering they provide a frame of reference for the same. One must also define business processes and the information surrounding them. This kind of strategy allows enterprises to analyse bottlenecks almost in real time. At Savvion, we believe that BPM is an enabler to achieve EPM.

How do you integrate BPM solutions with pre-existent analytics solutions?

BPM does not rely on a ‘rip and replace’ strategy. It sits on top of existing enterprise assets. All these assets are necessary to enable process execution. Processes that are functions of these existent systems execute by leveraging allocated resources. So here, one is not worried about infrastructure-based data inconsistencies.

On the other hand, if a company does not have existing systems, it can build its processes using BPM and create databases and other components quite easily.

Finally, what is your advice to CIOs who are entering BPM initiatives?

When companies adopt BPM, they try to do too much too soon. We feel that enterprises need to look at their process portfolio first. They need to identify the processes, which if streamlined can give the quickest improvements when one applies BPM to them. One must gain insight from this single experience, show the stakeholders what is possible, which can then translate into an enterprise wide process automation initiative. It is better that CIOs focus on achieving steady results, rather than doing too much at the same time. They should learn by gaining experience so as to finally move forward with their initiatives in a positive manner.