Business process management

And it's fun to join you.

Tell me a little bit about business process management has been around for decades, right? But it's suddenly back in every executive conversation because of AI.

What exactly is BPM? What problems was it originally designed to solve? And why do you think it's becoming even more important in the age of AI rather than this?

Good question.

Business process has not evolved.

Then comes fast forward in a few years, they do the credit card checks and your credit history check.

And then, you know, you do a bunch of other checks before the account is open.

So end of the day, The AI process, which is being added to BPM, is just another decision-making process that is a value add to a business process management.

Our discussion will focus on what, in my view, is an archaic practice that delivers limited value while costing industry tens of billions of dollars a year, with individual organizations shelling out millions annually with little to show for it.

The practice is business process modeling, or more broadly, sometimes referred to as business process management, which is a broader discipline.

For discussion purposes today, I'll just refer to these practices collectively as BPM.

Most organizations have multiple individuals and teams engaged in BPM work, investing heavily as a result.

And I talked to enough organizations where it's hard to find somebody that doesn't have BPM work going on.

So the question I'm raising in today's podcast is to what end? What measurable value has business process work delivered? And how does leadership justify the investment, if they bother to do so at all? So listeners to this podcast and readers of my strategy execution book should be clear-eyed as to the decades-long challenges organizations face when it comes to successful strategy execution and initiative delivery.

BPM has done little, if anything, to improve upon these statistics because they're kind of running along the same line.

So the value has to lie elsewhere.

I have always involved myself with various professional associations like the Gesellschaft für Prozessmanagement, the Society of Process Management in Vienna.

In Berlin here, we had also an initiative at some time that was called Berliner BPM Offensive, Berlin BPM Initiative.

Not offensive.

It sounds too offensive.

Process management is too expensive and it's too much effort in the classical way.

So I think this is a problem to many organizations.

If you look at the way how you can organize conceptually process management along the BPM lifecycle, And you see some companies that take this ambition to practice and you see how long it takes to go one time around the clock.

We are speaking about a few, maybe a dozen of months, plus minus.

Ja.

-warum machen sie dann jetzt fast alle noch immer dieselbe Fehler? Wenn es, wenn da dazu kommt, da du, dazu kommt, äh, Implementation des BPMs.

Das ist die große Frage.

[lacht]

And I think there's some people that are challenging whether, you know, I guess it's a brave move in a sense that some people would say, you know, is the advisory space the part that you want to move to? I mean, what convinced you and the leadership team that actually advisory was the right move for the business? And was there anyone pushing against that or was, you know, did everyone sort of see the value on that?

Actually, I don't think so because of the BPM background, right? So we identified, like most organizations, we have our operational executive team meetings, but every quarter we'll sit together, we'll think more long-term and we'll think tank around what's happening in the market, what's our hypothesis, what do we need to change? And I think that we saw the potential in a number of clients that we were working with where actually pure advisory firms can understand gaps in operating models.

They can build value frameworks.

They can build prioritized deployment roadmaps.

And, you know, it's also a great story, right? Being able to give back, being able to bring the next wave of talent into technology.

You know, we've shifted that syllabus as we've grown as an organization.

So we started largely with RPA and BPM.

Now we do lots of AI fundamentals, lots of design thinking, you know, agentic design practices and And actually, we're working with a couple of universities right now that are customers on adjusting our syllabus so that we continue to maintain relevance.

I think I've always divided between transactional HR and strategic HR.

Transactional can be outsourced between technology and BPOs and BPMs and should be, to be honest with you.

I've always gotten, even for the providers, they feel overwhelmed.

So realize most of our clients are providers of HR service.