Hats off to Janelle Hill, whose opening keynote at Gartner's BPM Summit in London today laid out a new understanding that re-frames BPM and opens the door to new levels of productivity and value.
She swept away confusion, challenged sacred cows, and positioned BPM to make a difference. It was Gartner at its very best.
You might think that a lady who has captained her local tennis club to the US National Finals for the past three years an unlikely revolutionary.
But when Janelle set out Gartner's vision for a BPM 'Revolution 2.0' she set the hall buzzing. She built on some recent Gartner themes but went further in setting out a new vision for BPM.
BPM, Gartner-style, is no longer focussed on the 20% of the enterprise that is structured work and automating the routine. It's just as much about 80% that is the unstructured, dynamic, social operational reality.
It's a management discipline that treats processes as enterprise assets contributing directly to performance improvement and agility. It's about a future of 'intelligent business operations'.
It recognises the value of holistic and multiple perspectives if change is to succeed and be sustainable. And that many process improvement projects don't need to go near IT: 'Oftentimes, process improvement will be simply to stop doing stupid things'.
It sees visibility of the end-to-end processes as the start point: 'Process is the key construct for how organizations work'.
It sees BI metrics and analytics as vital but secondary: 'See the process first - and then, with that understanding, measure and identify improvements'.
It's rapidly becoming a C-Level concern, underscored by Gartner's dramatic prediction that 10 major companies will topple in the next three years due to process breakdowns.
Most interestingly perhaps, it's about an empowerment mindset: 'Take a chance on your workforce, trust the creativity of your people to deliver'. But all of course within an appropriate governance framework.
Viva la revolución! Count me in. This broader conception of BPM is exactly what we need to bring together the disparate camps and enable effective collaboration across the functional and organizational silos. It's inclusive in every way. It's the key to unlocking value and relevance far beyond anything we've seen in the last decade.
Game, set and match to the lady from Connecticut.
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