BP Maturity Models

Sandy Kemsley in her piece today about BPMM (BPMM tutorial) clearly hasnt seen too many of these things.

Our old friend at Babson (Tom Davenport) has one, Gartner have a collection of slides for $795 (I am sure it is more than that), Bearing Point have one (The
Business Process Maturity Model: A Practical Approach for Identifying Opportunities for Optimization (overview free from BP Trends) … even a casual search on Google brings up a great number when you put in Business Process Maturity Model. But BPMG dont seem to make it to the first few pages. Every vendor worth its salts in the SOA space has one …

But none that I have seen have anything like the depth and breadth of that which is being discussed at the OMG next week (i.e. BPMM). Personally, I had a real “A Ha” moment (I know I have had a couple in the last 6 months …) during John Alden’s original presentation on the concept in June in Boston … I was writing (thrashing around) my paper on Corporate Agility and Process Innovation (available
free on the BPM Focus web site under White Papers). It was very much about at what point endless standardization of process needs to give way to innovation and personal freedom (the sort of thing that Jon Pyke alludes to in Why Workflow Sucks).

Legacy Thinking or BPM

Expecting Different Results When You Do The Same Things …

I am sure there are more of them - but here are a few that might resonate. I find that so many people are climbing on the band wagon of BPM that they dont even realize it when they are applying exactly the same thinking that caused their existing mess in the first place.

• “We are going to outsource implementation” … as in we are going to abrogate responsibility and find someone to litigate against once it all goes wrong.
• “Must get all our processes into a repository” … as in , lets spend 10 man years pouring stuff in the front end only to discover that 80% of it is out of date and we still haven’t got anything implemented.
• “Functional Requirement Specification” … as in, have you ever seen one that actually stood up to the test of time. Whatever the user signed off on was not what was really wanted.

But it goes deeper than that. We see so-called “experts” exhorting people to adopt one process modeling technique and ditch all others (see
here As Craig points out in his comment “In a way it is like learning a language (spoken or programming) you never really have a true appreciation for communication until you learn a second one.” (corrected typo).

We see many of the same old approaches trotted out with subtly different spin (I am thinking IDEF based decomposition here and all the raft of “methods” that went with it). Sure IDEF has its place, but not at the sharp end of helping people really get to grips with how things get done around here (or step outside their cosy little box). Exactly what ICAM Definition Language (and ICAM stands for Integrated Computer Aided Manufacturing) has to do with white collar office work and services is quite beyond me.

I am sure there must be other good examples of Legacy Thinking out there … a free copy of the book to anyone who can get past my BS filter (you knew there had to be a book aroudn the corner). Expect it end of Q1 2007 (which probably means Q2).