Theo Priestley once again has me thinking with this post asking “Is This the End of BPM Centre of Excellence?“:

There are two trains of thought at play. In recent interviews on Redux, Vinay Mummigati of Virtusa said “A BPM center of excellence (COE) is an absolute must for organizations planning to adopt BPM across the enterprise. As companies adopt BPM in more than a single department they often start seeing challenges in terms of standardization, scalability, performance and governance.”

And yet there was a completely different perspective taken by Max J Pucher of ISIS Papyrus who stated “…if there is one thing that Social BPM could knock down, it is the Process Center of Excellence and the related bureaucracy overhead!“

Ever a pragmatist, I would suggest that inside any firm that can adopt “social” media techniques, the Center of Excellence has to adapt its traditional role.  Instead of being primarily a governance and gatekeeping organizations, the mission should be re-defined as:

• Providing expert resources for BPM initiatives to draw on – no matter how much participation and spread of BPM skills, there will always be process improvement specialists who have more knowledge and context than the average participant.
• Providing social infrastructure for collaboration – wikis, BPM collaboration platforms, Sharepoint sites, email lists-  whatever is most appropriate for the organization. Lower the barrier to entry for collaboration among your BPM practitioners, users, and participants.
• Encouraging and Curating the content generated from “Social” BPM and collaborative activities.  Knowledge workers need positive reinforcement for their participation in social BPM, and with the greater volume of content the CoE’s role will shift to be more editorial rather than primary authorship.
• Breaking down barriers to communication and collaboration, rather than creating new chains of command and approval.

It isn’t that there isn’t a need for experts-  there is!  But the role of those experts changes from manager-governor to coach-collaborator.  Of course, being an outside consultant, this isn’t a stretch for us to see the writing on the wall -because this is the role we already play for our customers.

David McCoy of Gartner recently commented on Elise Olding’s prediction that 50% of BPM Programs will fail.  This is initially a fairly stunning prediction when you are as aware as I am of all the BPM project successes out there, but the interpretive notes matter in this case.  As David points out:

1. The failure potential is at the program level and not at the project level.
2. The main cause of death will be failing to create a credible Business Process Competency Center (BPCC).
3. We published this research in our annual Gartner Predicts piece on BPM.

My thoughts:  item 1 is spot-on.  Project success is not enough to assure Program success.  In fact, I’m surprised the 50% number that Gartner predicts for program failure isn’t higher based on this notion alone.  In some circles the prediction of success for any one project isn’t higher than 50% (My experience with BPM projects is that the success rate is much higher).

But getting out of the “project” box and into the broader spectrum of a Program is harder.  It takes real, effective, leadership.  That leadership must be accompanied by effective tools and methods.  And these in turn have to be adequately funded for the program to succeed.  As an example in another space informs me:  I’ve seen SOA programs fail after having project success because the SOA team is underfunded, understaffed, and as a result, is perceived by the business and the rest of IT as under-responsive and ineffective (friction to project success rather than grease).

Item 2 – that the main cause of death will be a failing to create a Business Process Competency Center – I have to disagree with that assessment.  A BPCC is an outgrowth of a successful program, rather than a cause.  The causes of success are leadership, tools, method, funding, staffing.  The organizational side-effects are secondary effects.

For example, any center of competency (BPCC in this case) without adequate leadership will get pulled apart by competing demands and inability to prioritize.

A BPCC without adequate funding can’t satisfy enough of the demand – so either projects will happen without the blessing and expertise of the BPCC, or projects will be delayed for lack of support from the BPCC, or projects will go a “non-BPM” direction due to lack of BPCC support.  We can look to SOA competency center experience for guidance.  When the enterprise integration or SOA competency center couldn’t provide resources, projects would resort to ad-hoc point-to-point integrations.  When those P2P integrations weren’t allowed, projects were delayed or canceled while waiting for Competency Center support – often forgoing large Return on Investment opportunities.

A BPCC without the tools and methods will fail to deliver consistent, measureable success. Of course, one could argue that the very definition of a Center for Competency would be that it includes good method and tools!

Having said all that, Sandy Kemsley provides a very good summary of Elise Olding’s webinar on the first 100 days as BP director – and in that summary, Elise gives very sound advice on the topics of staffing, strategy, governance, and getting results.  Its a lot to chew on in 100 days, but if your title is BP Director, I think you had better figure 100 days is the time frame in which you can start reporting measurable progress as well as a plan for the remainder of the year.