Bridging the Divide Between Business Process and Business Performance Management

by Curt Hall, Senior Consultant, Cutter Consortium

In February, I discussed the convergence of the "two BPMs": business PROCESS management (BPM) and business PERFORMANCE management (see "Merging the Two BPMs: Opportunities Abound," 21 February 2006).

Basically, I said that for the past three years or so, companies have been striving to optimize their business processes and business operations through the use of BPM and business performance management techniques. For the most part, practitioners from both camps tend to view the techniques as complementary but somehow separate. The former focus on analyzing and optimizing process performance (e.g., how long it takes processes to execute), but run into trouble due to difficulties encountered with integrating data from disparate systems to provide content (and context) for business processes they are automating.

The latter focuses on monitoring and measuring different key views of the organization to determine how well the company is performing in regard to meeting various strategic and tactical goals (e.g., revenue, marketing, learning, growth), but find it difficult to live up to expectations because their business performance management offerings tend to be weak in the area of process support.

The ERP vendors initially thought they were ideally situated to capitalize on both business process and business performance management because their enterprise applications support a range of processes and because they now offer add-ons for analyzing data generated by the various business modules (e.g., accounting, HR) of their packaged applications. However, once they moved beyond the processes actually supported by the ERP modules, the ERP vendors quickly ran into all kinds of data integration and transformation issues, meaning that it is difficult to monitor and analyze other key enterprise processes (and data) residing outside of the ERP application framework.

What these findings have made increasingly clear is that if organizations are truly going to be successful in their BPM efforts, they are going to have to somehow tie together all their diverse processes in a manner that can make sense of all the data those processes generate and/or must have access to in order to support their business operations. For this to become a reality, it is going to require analytic functionality that is integrated into a core framework that connects both process management and business operations. That is, a framework that ties business process and business performance measurement capabilities together to support both of the following:

1. The ability to analyze processes in real-time as well as historically in order to predict (and interdict) processes that deviate outside the bounds of the normal operating spectrum; and

2. Analytics for planning (and meeting) organizational goals, monitoring key performance indicators (KPIs), and enabling the appropriate responses to business events -- all of which are driven by one or more business management methodologies (e.g., Balanced Scorecard, TQM).

So far, this has been a difficult -- if not impossible -- task for organizations because a divide still exists between the "two BPMs." Basically, you can get "1" or "2," but not a system that actually integrates the capabilities of "1" and "2." True, practitioners and vendors from both camps are striving to develop new techniques and methods and to incorporate capabilities for measuring and managing processes and business operations in their offerings, but a comprehensive solution is not here yet.

The bottom line is that this is where the consulting groups and vendors are going to make their money: helping companies tie together and orchestrate all their data and processes in such a way so that they function in a cohesive manner -- one that is both measurable and manageable.

-- Curt Hall, Senior Consultant, Cutter Consortium