Establishing a BPM Center of Excellence [partner info]

Business Process Management (BPM) is defined as a holistic management approach that promotes business effectiveness and efficiency while striving for innovation, flexibility, and integration with technology. BPM helps companies to cope with frequent market changes and increasing competitive pressure by increasing productivity and facilitating better cost control and risk management. Simply put, BPM helps companies to constantly monitor and continuously boost their operational efficiency.

However, BPM adoption is not an ad-hoc activity.

[download_file]

Many BPM projects are disbanded after implementation because they cannot deliver the promised results. The main reason is that organizations are adopting BPM technologies without applying proper supporting BPM disciplines via the competency center.

According to some research almost half of the enterprises that reported clear and measurable benefits from their BPM efforts had a BPM  Center of Excellence (COE) in place; only 10 percent of the group reporting mixed results had a BPM COE in place.

What this shows is that a BPM Center of Excellence (COE) is a vital link in the chain of successful BPM adoption. A Center of Excellence or Competency Center is a cross-functional team with a formal organizational structure, defined tasks, roles, responsibilities and processes for supporting and promoting methodical BPM adoption and effective use of BPM and continuous improvement across the organization. It develops and maintains a library of reusable standards, methodologies, and techniques to ensure continues success with BPM projects and to minimize the time and effort needed to achieve those successes. The COE focuses on following critical activities:
• Creating and maintaining BPM vision and plans
• Taking inventory and capturing processes
• Continuously improving existing processes
• Creating new capabilities

In addition, a COE helps in addressing issues such as:
• How to create awareness and gain buy-in and acceptance
• What processes to consider and which one to automate next
• How to demonstrate the potential ROI of BPM initiatives
• How to develop competencies for successful BPM deployments
• How to engage and involve people from different organizational units
• What are the data collection needs across processes
• How to define key performance indicators (KPIs)
• How to identify key improvement areas
• How to successfully deploy projects and measure results
• How to develop and manage user training programs