Organizational-thought-of-choosing-a-BPM-product-blog-feature

Organizational thought of choosing a BPM product

When we analyze the BPM space, we see many BPM products built with industry standards and a few of them like IBM BPM, Pegasystems and Appian leading the pack with a robust product with large adoption. While choosing a BPM product you may face many challenges. With multiple options on the plate, customers always ask a question, which one should I pick? What is right for my organization? Should I pick the ones that are highly rated by the market analysts like Gartner and Forrester? Or may be the ones that are being used by my competitors? Here are a few thoughts on this.

Choosing a BPM Product: Understanding the Requirement

Let us understand what are my requirements? When I say “requirements”, I don’t mean the requirements for one project or business unit rather we need to look at the bigger picture of different Lines of Business. The perception is based on the question, Are you from “business” or “technology”?

Let’s talk about an example of each. If you are from business, Irrespective of business domain like banking, insurance or healthcare, you are trying to solve a business problem. More specifically fixing a business process. This fix could be eliminating the manual steps by automating the process or consolidation of data from multiple systems. End of the day, business users wants to share a quick response to the client than gathering data from multiple systems, analyze and share an email. If I am from technology, then I need to understand enterprise architecture along with Data, Application and technology architectures. BPM is more process oriented and it is the critical component of the architecture. With many BPM features, the existing legacy applications can be decommissioned. This will impact many existing applications. So when business is looking for optimized BPM solution, technology can save money on infrastructure, integration and elimination of existing systems.

Now both business and technology have agreed to fix the process issue, let’s go back and ask the same question, which one to pick? the ones suggested by market analysts or used by competitors? Les answer few questions.

Nature of the organization

For every organization, data security is the most critical aspect and every industry has to follow the security regulations. For Banking, data Security will be one of highest priority while for pharmaceutical organization, compliance and governance are most important. So depends on the nature of the organization, BPM service offerings will be different.

What is the organization goal for choosing a BPM product?

Today most of the organizations are going towards mobile, social & cloud based solutions. Just because other competitors are going towards BPM products, are we ready yet? what are the short term goals and long term goals?

Maturity of the organization

This is one of the key component as not every organization is matured enough to adopt the new process/technology. Lets understand few of this questions

  • Is it a fully process-driven organization?
  • Can your systems adopt new technology changes?
  • How many people willing to change towards improving process/technology?

How complex are the business process?

Sometimes the business processes are simple but complexities might arise in bringing the data from multiple systems or manual processes. So does the new BPM product can support most of these? or can organization modify the processes along with technology?

End of the day, choosing a BPM product can be a complex process as this requires to map your organization’s need to a BPM products offerings. This requires both business and technology thought leaders to understand the organizational goal and demand for future requirements.

BPM is not just about the process but also providing solutions to complex problems. Before choosing a BPM product, as a thought leader, you should ask “Are we ready to change?”

As a thought leader in BPM, Princeton Blue has a very scientific methodology and tool driven BPM Consulting offering and we have helped several customers select the right BPM product for them.

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