Welcome! My name is John Morris and this website is all about a business revolution enabled by technology, including especially technology around "BPO", "BPM", "data services" and "presentation".
Using journalism as my model, I want to share what I learn about the potential, the successes, the reality and the dysfunctions of this new technology-enabled business world. And luckily, my role as a front-line sales person and evangelist for business technology-based projects gives me a great perspective "at the rock face". In addition to that bottom-up perspective, I'm also able to attend both industry and academic conferences, which along with wide reading and conversation provides the theory that helps make sense of daily practice.Business Case
There are in fact very significant differences between best-in-class and laggard organizations concerning how contingent work is managed. Best-in-class managers get much better results (over 50% higher reporting program objectives achieved), better contingent workforce cost control and most important, significantly better overall organizational efficiency. This last benefit gets to the heart of the whole contingent workforce business case. Why bother with all the effort and management time to organize contingent workforce scaling if your organization does enjoy overall improved efficiency as a result? In a world of intense competition, contingent workforce scaling makes intuitive sense, and it's not surprising the Aberdeen Group has identified characteristics of the organizations that "do contingent" better. But why highlight these insights in this Decision Models forum on business process management technology?
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According to the analysts at
BPM software advocates need look no further than the regular reports from the analysts at Aberdeen Group for terrific examples of BPM in action. The latest example, by Analyst William Jan, is AP Invoice Management in a Networked Economy (you can acquire this report without charge for a limited time via the embedded URL; registration is required). The world of business process is about the processes at the core of any business. And for this reason unless you are an insider in any given function or vertical market, it's difficult to acquire in-depth knowledge about business processes in real life. Organizations tend to be reticent about revealing the secrets about how they do business; and as well, in any given function the processes reflect the complexity of corporate life and one is not likely to master that complexity over night. So, for these reasons, the work by Aberdeen Group is very welcome. Their analysis work focuses especially on identifying best practices in various corporate functions, such as sales, accounts payables, inventory management, and so on. And although Aberdeen Group includes technology in its analyses, their work is refreshingly "business first". The case of Accounts Payable is a nice example of an end-to-end process analysis of an important corporate function. Using A/P practices as a measure, and compared to "laggards", best-in-class organizations manage their A/P to deliver much better cash flow, which can have a huge impact on bottom lines.
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Your host started his IT career at IDC, in the previous millennium. Working for IDC gives one a perspective on analyst relations with vendors and end-users. Analysts are little bit like movie reviewers -- they like technology as much as movie reviewers like movies. And the economics of the technology analysis business is such that it's difficult for analysts not to be cheerleaders for technology, in the same way that movie reviewers find it difficult not to be cheerleaders for movies, or, considering the subject of this website, cheerleading for BPM software.
BPM prospects often ask a question about "simulation". Our standard answer is "simulation is best done by a best-of-breed Why is the BPM business simulation question so frequently asked? The reason is that the question is directly related the two main business cases for BPM. BPM is justified either on efficiency terms or on business model terms. The BPM efficiency business case is the same IT efficiency business case that has driven most IT investments for two generations. Efficiency in the best of situations is about dramatically reducing costs for a given business process; in the worst of situations, it's about "paving the cow path"! |
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business simulation product, outside of BPM". This answer is usually delivered after some qualification to discover what the prospect means by "simulation". Some of the time the prospect is concerned about technical simulations and the regular process of software QA. But the majority of the time the prospect wants to be able to do business what-if simulations to answer questions such as "how many warehouse staff should we have" or "should we add a new warehouse in the Midwest".
