You’re a business leader with high hopes for your company’s innovative future, and your budget has finally been approved for an automation overhaul of your business processes. There is excitement in the air, and you’re chomping at the bit to use your business process management (BPM) project to reduce expenses and boost revenue overall. You can almost feel the legacy crown of glory on your head.
Fast-forward nine months. You’ve used up double the implementation hours you allocated, you’re forced to delay other projects on the docket, and you’ve just requested a new budget which is three times your original. You can feel failure closing in around you. Instead of the legacy-defining achievement you expected, your CEO has lost complete faith in you, and you begin to contemplate jumping ship from a BPM project that has no end in sight.
This is your BPM failure, and you’re not alone. In fact, 50 percent of BPM projects end exactly this way. There are many factors that contribute to failed BPM, but the cause of death more often than not comes down to a lack of collaboration between business and IT.
The number one reason why BPM initiatives fail is that business owners don’t take integration seriously enough. The majority treat integration as a separate initiative requiring separate technologies; they don’t realize that BPM and integration are two sides of the same coin.
This misalignment of goals is understandable because business and IT are two groups with vastly different roles and responsibilities. Historically, business has been in charge of operations, while data has been owned by IT. Business has looked to optimize processes, while IT has looked to maintain data integrity and security.
In addition, most BPM software suites encourage the disconnect with a lack of sufficient integration capability. Many BPM vendors flat out cannot support a necessary range of cloud, on-premise, and hybrid integration environments.
The solution to this is to make BPM and integration a single initiative with a single owner. It is crucial to find a vendor with software technology that can bring BPM and integration together into a single solution that promotes alignment between business and IT.
Your BPM project doesn’t have to end in tragedy. Involve IT from the start, and treat integration with the respect it deserves.