What Is BPM?

Could have a little more depth but over all its a good book to keep on your desk.

Business Process Reengineering (BPR) is dead; Business Process Management (BPM) is its living descendant, and this book is intended to explain what it is. The key idea, as in BPR, seems to be that companies should be aligned by business processes rather than structured by functions. The author seems to think that the only reason companies have functional organizations is that management does not know any better. This is a bit short, considering that some high-performance organizations, like Toyota, have a functional organization.The author spends quite a few pages explaining what a process is, but gives along the way many inconsistent definitions. First, it's a "sequence of steps," and then a "collection of activities." Finally, on p.22, he settles on a "collection of repeatable, value adding activities" aiming to generate a "product or service that the customer is willing and able to pay for." He does not explain what he means by "value adding," which is used in many different ways. If he uses it like Womack & Jones in  Lean Thinking , it means "that the customer is willing to pay for," and is therefore redundant.It should be noted that many functional departments fit this definition, and I don't believe that it is what the author had in mind. On the other hand, two pages earlier, he describes support and management processes that do not produce anything the customer is willing to pay for, and are therefore not covered by his definition.In this book, BPM is supposed to be the high-level, umbrella concept under which Lean, Six Sigma, or TQM are subsumed. Further in the book, the author provides summaries of these approaches that are intended to make this point.The statements in the text do not add up to a coherent explanation. It feels constructed like a PowerPoint presentation, with the audience expected to respond to keywords rather than understand the rationale for a course of action. The illustrations actually look like PowerPoint slides, and so do the numerous bullet lists.

A good framework for development of a BPM transformation programme I am using it at the moment to develop the process change workstream for a large government based change programme.