The BPM Bottleneck

One of the things you learn in BPM projects is that bottlenecks are never solved – they just move down the process.

If the bottleneck is at step #3. You release it. It will now cause a bottleneck at step #9. You release it. Bottleneck moves to step #14…

One of the mistakes that process managers make, is spending too much effort trying to over-tweak a step with little added value.

So you’ve tweaked step #3 up by 90%. Excellent. Now leave it alone, and go and tweak step #9 . You won’t get much more than 90% efficiency on that step.

What am I aiming at here?
The BPM industry has spent time and effort on tweaking the old BPM bottleneck (process design and execution).
Great. Now leave it alone and spend your effort on the next bottleneck: BI.

Our BPM reporting, monitoring and analysis capabilities are lacking.
We have got process design and process execution pretty well tweaked.
BPA tools, BPM suites, BPM methodologies…
We can continue to tweak them and add features until we are blue in the face, but will they give us much added value?

Now look at BI
Organisations need visibility, transparency, to pinpoint problems, to visualize…
Yes, we all have some out-of-the-box reporting, and we all have some pretty gauges. Nice tick in the box.

Can we do better? Think “Minority Report” kind of functionality. Think 3 dimensional drilldown. Think Artificial Intelligence…
We’re in the 21st century. We have the technology. We have the smarts.
We just need to find the way to implement them correctly in BPM.

The BPM bottleneck has moved on.
BPM process design and process execution – Been there, did that, next…