Thursday, August 30, 2007
Industry Analysts and the lack of Case Studies on BPM
I have been asking myself, why aren't industry analysts doing case studies in the BPM market. Is it because there is no compelling story to tell?
Have you read the blogs of Phil Gilbert, Bruce Silver, Ismael Ghalimi, Sandy Kemsley, Richard Brown, Phil Ayres or Jesper Joergensen? You will notice that they talk about the problem space that BPM solves, interesting BPM product features and how many customers they have but absolutely never any mention of how deeply deployed it is within any one customer?
Imagine for a minute, that I am CTO of a Widget manufacturer and I find the BPM story compelling and want to use it for all of my processes and would like to understand how BPM scales across the enterprise and I attempt to find other customers that have done the same, but can't.
I have been successful in identifying another widget manufacturer who has successfully deployed BPM not for a really important business process such as order entry, and not even for a significant business process such as handling order returns but has only used it for a tiny, little, bitty business process where the order returns from the state of Texas on a Tuesday go through the BPM process. Should I think of BPM as credible?
Some will say that larger deployments of technology are only a matter of time. The question I would have is why are the enterprise architects in widget manufacturers, financial services firms or anywhere savage in their adoption of BPM? Have they discovered something that others should noodle? Did they figure out that the story is great sounding from a business perspective but in practicality doesn't scale?
Does anyone in the blogosphere no of any BPM deployment within a Fortune 200 enterprise that concurrently supports say 5,000 users along with say hundreds of distinct business processes?
| | View blog reactionsHave you read the blogs of Phil Gilbert, Bruce Silver, Ismael Ghalimi, Sandy Kemsley, Richard Brown, Phil Ayres or Jesper Joergensen? You will notice that they talk about the problem space that BPM solves, interesting BPM product features and how many customers they have but absolutely never any mention of how deeply deployed it is within any one customer?
Imagine for a minute, that I am CTO of a Widget manufacturer and I find the BPM story compelling and want to use it for all of my processes and would like to understand how BPM scales across the enterprise and I attempt to find other customers that have done the same, but can't.
I have been successful in identifying another widget manufacturer who has successfully deployed BPM not for a really important business process such as order entry, and not even for a significant business process such as handling order returns but has only used it for a tiny, little, bitty business process where the order returns from the state of Texas on a Tuesday go through the BPM process. Should I think of BPM as credible?
Some will say that larger deployments of technology are only a matter of time. The question I would have is why are the enterprise architects in widget manufacturers, financial services firms or anywhere savage in their adoption of BPM? Have they discovered something that others should noodle? Did they figure out that the story is great sounding from a business perspective but in practicality doesn't scale?
Does anyone in the blogosphere no of any BPM deployment within a Fortune 200 enterprise that concurrently supports say 5,000 users along with say hundreds of distinct business processes?
