The Benefits of BPM when Going Green

I have posted on this subject before and thought it would be good to revisit the subject as it is very topical and important.

“Going Green” in the context of IT seems to be very focussed on how businesses can reduce their operational costs WRT their physical infrastructure e.g. datacentres, server consolidation/reduction, virtualisation, cooling and power consumption improvements etc. 

 An aspect that is recognised as being able to contribute to cutting costs (in support of Going Green) is the optimisation of the business working practices.

This however is not always clearly understood and as readily quantifiable as the more accepted case for physical infrastructure changes.

 In a recent article published on eWeek a case study from Tetra (a global Aquarium and fish food manufacturer) is used to explore how after adopting BPM, the streamlined process allowed its engineers, scientists and other knowledge workers across the globe to collaborate about changes to their product line online. This reduced the travel, paper consumption and also allowed them to realize their enviornmental benefits. 

BPM Adoption and Delivered Value/ROI – Market Research and Analysis

Understanding of how Business Process Management (BPM) can deliver value to business is becoming increasingly well understood by businesses and IT even though the following points seem to indicate why there may be slow adoption across some organisations:

• Pockets of user resistance across organisations and departments
   
• Lack of understanding leading to poor adoption due to immaturity
   
• Lack of executive sponsorship
   
• No strategic plan to adopt BPM i.e. adoption tends to be tactical (departmental)

Business users, practitioners and technologists all differ in their opinion of what BPM is and what is hype, theory and practically achievable but there does seem to be consensus that it has the capability for sizeable, realizable benefits when implemented correctly.

Quick Recap for the BPM uninitiated

Automation of business process must be balanced with human exception management, which is managed by workflow. These business processes are enhanced by the ability to interconnect a range of different applications systems and data across the organisation. These may include general ledger, order entry, inventory, process control, and human resources to mention a few.

The IT perspective is that BPM aims to achieve greater value from existing software assets. IT investment allows business processes to be used to capture information electronically and automate services delivery. As part of this automation, BPM ensures that an automated process is used to dynamically manage business logic with integrated application services and therefore forms a corollary to Service Oriented Architecture (SOA).

What the ‘Usual Suspects’ think….

This post explores some of the BPM market trends and looks into where current BPM demand is as well as its perceived adoption potential. To get a sense of the size of the BPM market, I turned to some of the usual and not so usual suspects. My Google search returned the following results: