Looking in on rehearsal presentations for Inspiring Performance 2011 next week, it's interesting to see how operational excellence is coming to the fore - and how BPM is central to it.
Agreed, operational excellence sounds worthy but boring (though execs at UBS might be wishing that they'd paid it more attention).
Agreed too that, while it's a widely used term, there's only a loose consensus on what operational excellence actually means (even the Wikipedia entry includes an appeal for help).
But, however it's defined, or branded within the organization, it's an unqualified good. Every COO wants it. What's less obvious to many organizations though is how operational excellence is directly linked with Business Process Management.
BPM in its IT incarnation - let's call it 'micro-BPM' - is focussed on automation. But BPM in its wider sense - 'macro-BPM' - is about operational excellence. And, in global organizations across every sector, a macro-BPM platform is emerging the essential foundation for operational excellence.
Talking with clients and colleagues since our first attempt, back in January, to define how you do operational excellence in practice, we've converged on four closely-related capabilities:
To achieve operational excellence, the enterprise needs the capability...
to understand the whole. To maintain a complete, holistic and integrated model of the business - including what's automated and what's not, what's outsourced and what's in-house.
to flawlessly execute strategy as end-to-end operational processes. To maintain two-way line of sight between strategy and operating reality.
to continually re-optimize performance by integrating metrics and analytics with end-to-end operational processes and providing the framework for the entire enterprise to collaborate on continuous improvement.
to manage risks, controls, quality and compliance together, within one enterprise-wide and real-time governance framework.
Cue the enterprise-wide BPM platform: the essential enabler for all of these capabilities, and therefore for operational excellence. More on this, after the conference...
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