News, Views & Reviews on Digital Process Automation, BPM, Performance Management & IT industry trends
Business Process Management is slowly becoming a must have.
Earlier today, I read something that made me snort on my afternoon coffee. Not just because it was funny, but because, to me it had some additional insight that I thought was worth sharing with you, especially when you think about Intelligent Processes and how they can be crafted for a BPM initiative. Here it is: Two men walk into a bar. The first man says I’ll have some H2O. The second man says I’ll have H2O too. The…
One of the pet peeves for the fanatical BPM believers among us has been the gap between what outcomes of BPM initiatives could be if done right, versus what it seems to be on the ground. We (the fanatics, that is) have been looking at that gap and discussing and debating why BPM benefits seem so elusive, why customers find it so challenging to do all the right things in order to ensure great benefits and so on. But…
Last week work beamed me to Chennai in Southern India, a city where I was born and had also spent a large part of my childhood. Work has taken me to Chennai often and I am usually booked at a hotel that is not far from where I lived as a kid. The hotel has a lot of nostalgia value for me, for, among other things, it has a swimming pool where I spent a few hours every evening through my…
When we are at the receiving end of poor customer service, it unfailingly ticks us off. Being champions of process only makes it a little more painful because even while we go through a first-hand experience of poor customer service –- be it over the phone or a counter –- we are also immediately able to see beneath the surface and understand why things are likely going wrong. Now, on a theoretical plane, you might think that this ability…
Last week, while I was in London on work, I had to stand around for over an hour outside a client’s office building, in the cursed cold weather, waiting for my colleague to show up. I could only enter the office with him as he was the one with access to the building and authority to sign me in. This kind of a situation isn’t always a very pleasant experience. Especially if it was a first-thing-in-the-morning meeting, and more…
One of the recurring themes in product demos in the recent past is that all too familiar spiel about being “technology for business”. To be sure, this T for B angle is a really good thing and all that. But it’s a problem when vendors lay that out freely and happily without having a product that genuinely lives up to that spiel. And what’s worse, when they notice that you don’t display any skepticism and that your eyebrows didn’t…
It must have been around a decade ago when I first received a ‘text alert’ from a bank on my mobile phone. My bank had let me register my mobile phone number with them for this and once they activated it, I started receiving text alerts after every credit card transaction I made. Today, I still receive these alerts, but I also have an ‘app’ the bank has additionally given me, from which I can do a lot of…
To me it seems that with the onset of ‘Social Media’, the bigger theme of a ‘Social Paradigm’, and the associated chatter these have generated, has driven all of us into some kind of a ‘me-too’ mode. Almost everyone in the industry – you and me included – has a point of view. Almost every enterprise software worth its salt has released, is releasing, talking or thinking about ‘social’ features. The BPMS market has not been spared either has…
All this Business Process Management talk is getting boring. And clichéd. Blogs. Forums. Communities. White papers. Analyst calls. Product vendor presentations. Webinars. Analyst events. One-on-one meetings. Gardens. Roof tops. That’s an indicative list of all the places where it has been said time and again that BPM is first a (management) concept THEN a technology. Not one, not two, but hundreds of bloggers, analysts and thought leaders, including the self-proclaimed (the tribe is ever increasing) have said that enough….
When you are obsessed with something, you start seeing it in everything you do. If you are someone with a tendency to always be happy, you will find happiness and joy in just about anything you encounter : the creak of the wooden floor, a blade of grass – or many blades of grass for that matter, fragrances, sun-rays, you name it. A recent analyst report claims that 76.34% of non-millennial, male respondents from this psychobablographic category actually enjoyed conversations…
I think there is a need for this thing called Agility in your organization. You agree? You do? OK. I had a feeling you would. It is a burning need, no? Third degree, even. Now let me ask you this. Of all those people in your organization – CXOs, Business users, process owners, compliance managers, IT, you name it – who do you think has the biggest need for that agility? [sound of clock ticking] Ok, let me pose that…
Organizational change in any form, evokes much the same feeling you have when you are on a diving board looking down at the cold water below. Although you know it will all be fine in under 20 seconds after you’ve left the board, for the 20 seconds before that actually happens though, you display emotions that seem to suggest you are about to confront a most dreadful event. The thing is, that hesitation, that sense of apprehension, is not…
It is about to become something of the past. That’s sad because it really is something from the future. Something that could have even shaped it. If you had a Wave account, you might agree with me. Google announced the end of the Wave project months ago, but last weeks mail from the Wave team was sad to read and if you have an account, am sure you felt the same way. The Google Wave project excited the imagination…
During a long weekend last year, a group of friends and I headed to a small sea-side town around 100 miles from Bombay. Enroute, we stopped at a small hotel for refreshments – a franchisee of a reasonably well known restaurant chain in India. However considering it was along a highway, although a busy one, we weren’t sure of the quality of their service or their menu items. Such a situation calls for a safe bet on steamed ‘Idlis’,…
Call it culture, resistance to change, fear, politics or just old fashioned pig-headedness, but BPM initiatives are seldom without change issues and internal friction of some kind. And as we see BPM adoption increasing, there is increasing proof of the existence of such a thing called BPM Inertia. And it compromises the degree of BPM success. It seems to me that almost any firm running a BPM initiative acknowledges the need for change management at the beginning, but not…