BPM is great - but the on-premise model is broken
BPM is a great tool for making repetitive work more efficient. It is about providing guidance to people how to deal with recurring business situations. BPM software allows to specify which TODO items / tasks have to be done to progress in a process. It lets you define who needs to do which part of the process and it gives you tracking of the current status.
BPM is a great thing because it takes a business issue (the process) and translates it to IT (the process implementation) with very little friction. Business and IT can both use BPMN 2.0, or some even simpler way, to talk about the process.
How many repetitive things do you have going on in your organization? If you spend 5min thinking about it, you will easily come up with a decent list of small and large processes that could benefit better IT support. Even if you have ERP or CRM systems in place. How much does this really help to track your processes? Or is it just a place to store the data?
Today, IT needs to get involved to provide the infrastructure and technical administration capacities to roll out the BPM platform. The time from deciding to deploy a BPM solution until having the process up and running, often takes several months. Given these large implementation cycles and investments required today, business managers have to have a detailed business case in place with an appropriate ROI, before being able to select a vendor.
The current BPM prices have a simple reason: From the BPM vendor’s perspective, winning a new customer is quite expensive. A lot of presales effort is required to get the prospect to a yes. The vendor needs to understand the customer’s use case and provide a proof of concept. Once the vendor has won the project, the right professional services people have to be provided in order to deliver the system.
The current BPM model is broken. This is a shame, because far more scenarios could benefit from a BPM approach.
Now think cloud - and reap BPM’s full potential
The cloud has transformed the enterprise software world in recent years. Finally, business users can choose their own tools and start using them right away - without the need to start an IT project for that.
Now imagine cloud for BPM: The business users can focus on their business processes - and do not need to worry how to run the system.
Imagine that you only have to sign up with your email address and build your own small process within 5min. Imagine, you can get your colleagues involved for certain tasks just by typing in their email addresses. Imagine you could even get people from other organizations involved - while having full control over which information leaves your organization’s boundaries and which stay internal.
Imagine you do not need to worry about huge investments, but rather have a pricing model that scales seamlessly with the usage of the system.
In such a world, the barrier to using BPM technology is lowered drastically. You can just get started and start improving your processes with it. No need to calculate ROIs up front - you can smoothly extend the usage of the system as you go.
This is what we aim for: a world where BPM technology becomes attractive to every business user and is applicable even for the smallest processes, without worrying about IT or making large investments.
This is the Effektif way of BPM!