Just come across a post by Steve Jones that discusses the folly of equating BPM (or even business processes) as the top level of engagement that any IT provider can have with a customer. The phrase he uses to debunk this is ‘Bollocks’ (a lovely British phrase).
That’s hilarious. I couldn’t agree more. My whole view of the world aligns very definitely with Steve’s in that I see surfacing what an organisation does through the business capabilities that it has (in his parlance the business service architecture) and then deciding how you want to go about realising these. To be honest BPM (and processes in general) are a dangerous distraction at the top level of dialogue since they immediately dive into the detail of ‘how’ to do things before people have even decided whether it’s a good idea by understanding the need for - and the value of - the capability that the process will support. When you’re looking at the detail of ‘how’ something is done it’s all too easy to feel that something is both important and necessary and thereby waste an absolute fortune creating or improving pointless processes. As a result I wholeheartedly agree with Steve.
I’ve discussed my view on this stuff a lot, with perhaps the most relevant post being here
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[...] discussed before why I think that this is a poor model but basically I believe that we need to first separate what gets done before we start to get into [...]