Friday 18 February 2011

Quality Criteria for BPMS Programs

Recently, I have been initiating a Business Process Management System (BPMS) implementation for a major client in the financial sector. This made me wonder: how can I come up with a set of BPMS-specific, practical quality criteria for successfully implementing a flexible, repetitive, and fast BPMS platform? However, some people are not aware of the important distinction between BPM (Business Process Management) as a management philosophy discipline and BPMS as an enterprise IT program:
  • BPM is defined as the overall management philosophy, which frames the enterprise as consisting of a set of end-to-end business processes. These processes, in combination, deliver value to the organisation's clients. Improving the enterprise means architecting, improving, and managing these processes for better outcomes. 
  • BPMS is a collection of software tools and systems engineering practices based on process management thinking. BPMS realises the modelling, automation, execution, and monitoring of business processes on a common, single-instance runtime platform, often through the use of open, well-defined service contracts (such as web services). 
Some vendors equate workflow tools to BPMS, which is not necessarily the case. An enterprise BPMS often involves implementing a workflow. However, the key notion is that modelling and executing business transactions as processes yields predictability and transparency. 

My work has inspired me to pursue writing a pracademic paper on common quality criteria and heuristics for enterprise BPMS implementations, particularly concerning roles, values, expected outcomes, actual outcomes, pitfalls, and general performance improvements. What worked and why? What didn't work out as expected? What business criteria should the CIO and solution architect focus on when planning or building the business case for BPMS? How did can one ensure a higher quality BPMS? 
Granted, several IT governance frameworks already provide generic measures and KPI's. What I am interested in is the process- and IS-specific criteria and measures relating directly to BPMS programs.

1 comment:

  1. There is a third BPM (http://improving-bpm-systems.blogspot.com/2009/11/book-improving-enterprise-business.html) - as a portfolio of the business processes of an enterprise, and the practices and tools for governing the design, execution and evolution of this portfolio (enterprise BPM system or enterprise BPM-centric solution). It seems that your "BPMS implementation" is a step from a BPM suite to the third BPM. So, any evaluation of "BPMS implementation" should be based on the quality of that third BPM.For the latter, I think, the best characteristic is
    the ability to enable business innovations.

    Thanks,
    AS

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