How does BPM change IT performance?

Before the advent of BPM, IT had two missions: providing tools to support unstructured collaborations and implementing and configuring the architecture of organizational applications. Both were aimed at empowering users. Collaborative tools facilitated communication, enabled cooperation, and supported sharing documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. Organizational applications recorded transactions, analyzed organizational status, and participated in well-defined structured business processes in which applications were executed.

BPM offers a new kind of empowerment and shifts the role of IT to some extent. BPM allows business users—those who specialize in spreadsheets and presentations and make the most practical use of the technologies at their disposal—to play a major role in discovering, defining, and automating business processes.

While we should see more details in the sections related to BPM technology, one of the key ways BPM transforms a company is by empowering business users. If BPM technology is placed behind IT and application infrastructure to support SOA, this increasingly enables business users to design their own processes and take a more active and valuable role in creating new solutions to support them. It should also be noted that IT staff using BPM technology will be able to increase their productivity when developing solutions. Regardless of who uses the technology, business process models are not only descriptions of how a company does its work but also a source for creating solutions. In other words, business process models are semantic models of a business. As Professor Erik von Hipel's research on user-driven innovation shows, when people are given tools to solve their problems, a flood of innovation often follows.

Regarding BPM, what usually happens is something like this:

• Business users realize they can define processes and take a more active role in creating solutions for automating them with BPM technology.
• They start identifying processes that are performed informally and begin automating them using BPM.
• During automation, retrieved information is stored in organizational applications via web services.
• In cases where required web services are not available, IT creates the necessary information and capabilities to support processes.
• Over time, increasing support for BPM infrastructure occurs, business users gain more skills in process design, and some begin building solutions for themselves, while IT ensures everyone has the tools they need.

In a company with a high level of BPM maturity, the relationship between business and IT changes. Assuming the correct BPM technology and web services are available, businesses can do more work on their own, with IT involved only in exceptional circumstances. Instead of directly asking IT, users solve problems by involving IT only when something is missing.

This transformation does not happen rapidly in most companies because BPM technology adoption and the emergence of a full-service toolkit develop gradually. In the short term, BPM means much better alignment between business and IT. In the long run, it is important to remember that one of the outcomes of BPM is empowering a wide range of users to innovate and solve their own problems.