As I find books about BPM, I'll add them to the book list below. Please let me know if you'd like to suggest a title.
Less is More by Jason Jennings
Jason Jennings in his new book "Less is More" is about how companies can use PRODUCTIVITY as a competitive tool.
A fundamental concept of WTGBRDT (What's the good business reason for doing this?) is described and developed with business cases. An entire chapter is devoted to DESTROYING bureaucracy The last chapter includes twelve rules for doing more with less
for reviews and descriptions
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The Agenda, by Michael Hammer
Michael Hammer, of re-engineering fame has come out with a new book, The Agenda . In Chapter 4, "Put Process First" he describes how to make high performance possible in an enterprise. He implores managers to become 'process fanatics'
Quick outline: 1. Make yourself easy to do business with 2. Add more value for your customers 3. Obsess about your process 4. Turn creative work into process work 5. Use measurement for improving not accounting 6. Loosen your organizational structure 7. Sell through, not to, your distribution channels 8. Push past your boundaries in the pursuit of efficiency 9. Lose your identity in an extended enterprise
for more information about 'The Agenda'
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Business Process Improvement Workbook by James Harrington
I found this cruising the shelves @ Borders. James Harrington is the international quality advisor to Ernst & Young & worked for 40 years at IBM. This is a very detailed book that runs the gamut from selecting process candidates to documentation and implementation. It's a good place to start if you want less theory and more concrete examples of all of the components associated with business process improvement.
Just a caveat - This is a TEXT book - not light reading. Please check the reviews on Amazon before you decide to buy - its expensive and may not suit your needs
for reviews and descriptions
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Making Technology Investments Profitable by Jack Keen & Bonnie Digrius
Over 50 percent of all Information Technology projects fail, not only costing companies considerable monetary investment but also thwarting key strategic initiatives for which the new technology was critical. This book helps executives and managers increase IT project success by using a process for identifying the true ROI value for proposed IT investments-"Real ROI"-then tracking project results against that standard
This guide provides an abundance of pragmatic tips, tools, and techniques to make the process easy to understand, focusing on implementing an ROI plan as well as on tracking IT investments and measuring results post implementation. A small criticism... the book refers to tools that the author sells as part of his consulting practice. It's kind of a commercial but there is EXCELLENT advice for proving your next IT investment.
To read more about this book...
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Business Process Mapping by Jacka Keller
A holistic approach to harnessing a company's processes to achieve true customer satisfaction. Every move that a corporation makes is a mixture of input, action, and output, in short, a process. To keep customers, employees, and shareholders happy, corporate management must juggle conflicting priorities. These competing priorities result in conflicting processes. To help achieve true customer satisfaction, management needs tools that allow for a holistic approach to analyzing these processes. This book provides that tool. It shows corporations how to analyze and enhance their critical processes in order to deliver the highest level of service to their internal and external customers. Providing a clear understanding of what process mapping can do for a company as well as practical applications for each step in process mapping, this useful guide outlines a proven method for assuring better processes and building a more customer-focused company.
This book is a pretty basic primer for mapping business processes. Probably good to pass on to a new person on your team. See Amazon reviews- wide range of opinion on this book.
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Business Process Management - Profiting from Process by Roger Burlton
Roger Burlton, founder of the Process Renewal Group, provides the strategic guidance and tactical steps to build a process-managed enterprise.
Roger describes a process management framework consisting of eight phases. For each phase, the book provides detailed descriptions of the steps, their inputs, outputs, guides, and enablers, as well as the tricks, traps and best practices learned by experienced practitioners. For those of you about to embark (or are in the middle) on a process automation journey, this book provides a compelling call to action, a guide for management and an invaluable reference.
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Process Redesign - The Implementation Guide for Managers
This book, by Arthur Tenner & Irving DeToro is one of a series of books from the engineering Process Improvement Series by Prentice Hall. While it is a text book, it is very readable and easy to understand.
The book is broken up into 3 major sections: Process Management and Improvement, Improving Functional Processes and Special Process Topics and Tools. It also includes a special section on Six Sigma Implementations. Solid book, very practical backgrounder.
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Re-imagine! by Tom Peters
Tom Peters, of "In Search of Excellence" fame, has done it again. He swears this will be his last book (tome). And he's RANTING.
Subtitled, Business Excellence in a Disruptive Age, Tom says he's "mad as hell". The premise of his book-"People in enterprise, in government, are by and large well intentioned. They'd like to get things done. To be of service to others. But they're thwarted... at every step of the way... by absurd organizational barriers...and by the egos of petty tyrants". He offers his thoughts on how to fix these problems.
His chapters on new business value, business design, and making work matter are the most closely related to improving business processes. While he doesn't have specific methods for improving processes, his ideas are intended to inspire you and give you cause to change the way you're doing business.
This is an entertaining, a little whiny, thought-provoking book. Its pages (a la Wired magazine) are bold and strewn with images and crazy colors (mostly red) are somewhat hard to read. If you've enjoyed his previous books, you'll surely love this one. Good gift idea too.
Start a "WOW" BPM project to find out more....
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Workflow Modeling, Tools for Process Improvement and Application Development
While the title is a little misleading, Alex Sharp and Patrick McDermott have created a well written "practical exposition of what works, by practitioners for practitioners" This is a book that can hold your hand through the entire process of workflow process modeling, business process improvement and application development. Each chapter is designed to be put to use as soon as you read it.
Their approach in a nutshell (Chapter 3) is organized into four phases:
Frame the process
Understand the current (as-is) process
Design the new (to-be) process
Develop use case scenarios
The intended readers of this book are for people working on or responsible for a process improvement process including:
Business analysts, consultants and project leaders
Systems analysts defining IT requirements
Business managers with a mandate to fix their process
This book has lots of practical advice from consultants that do this for a living. HIGHLY recommended
To read Amazon reviews of this book..... »
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Business Process Management, The Third Wave by Howard Smith & Peter Fingar
Arthur Hedge, president of Castle Ventures provided this review in the July/August 2003 edition of AIMM edoc.
Get a Grip on BPM
A review of Business Process Management: The Third Wave
George Bernard Shaw once said, "You see things; and you say, 'Why?' But I dream things that never were; and I say, 'Why not?'" Howard Smith and Peter Fingar have taken Shaw's quote to heart in Business Process Management: The Third Wave. The authors first deal with things they see by explaining why systems and businesses run the way they do today. The book then moves on to an exploration of the new software category, business process management. The authors are offering a better way to operate organizations and throwing down the gauntlet to senior executives and demanding, "Why not?"
This book is geared to business people and the struggles that they face running organizations using traditional software applications. There are strong explanations for the current problems that businesses deal with in trying to serve ever more demanding customers in a hyper-competitive environment. Smith and Fingar spend the first portion of the book explaining how businesses have responded to these issues, including a discussion of business process re-engineering. Re-engineering was developed by Michael Hammer (and others) in the early 90s to address these concerns, with moderate success. Smith and Fingar find and present every failure that has beset the re-engineering movement. They spend the bulk of the discussion centered around Michael Hammer and James Champy's 1993 book Re-engineering the Corporation and the holes in that approach. Unfortunately, the authors disregard the advances in theory that Champy and Hammer have made and make few references to their latter works The Agenda, Beyond Re-engineering, and X-Engineering the Corporation. On the positive side, Smith and Fingar do contrast all of the shortcomings in re-engineering and describe how the business process management approach would overcome them. Smith and Fingar are on the right track; and this provides a great theoretical starting point for business process management.
There is a lot of confusion in the software market as to what exactly business process management is. Smith and Fingar remove that confusion. They state, and I agree, that it is a "systems' perspective where one can design, deploy, execute, and manage business processes in an integrated environment." Why does the confusion exist? This is partly because there are new vendors that are building true BPM environments from the ground up such as Fuego and Intalio, there are middleware vendors who are adding middleware capability such as Tibco, and the traditional workflow vendors such as FileNet and Staffware are expanding into this category. For example, in January FileNet renamed its workflow tool suite as the Business Process Manager.
One of the issues that Smith and Fingar face is that business process management is a new software category and it is not clearly understood. This could have been addressed with a description of what the current software tools offer, but it isn't until page 235 that they tell us that "We have, therefore chosen to describe an enterprise-class, 'plain vanilla' BPMS." They present a high-level architecture and a laundry list of features that should be in a BPM system. It is an in-depth description of a system that will give you the basic information you need to get started. The authors, unfortunately, do not use any concrete examples to illustrate their points. An introduction to the Business Process Modeling Language (BPML) that has been developed by the non-profit Business Process Management Initiative is presented. The standardization of the languages and models used to describe business activity is underway and this section will help the reader to understand the importance of BPML. It you are looking for a practical guide to business process management systems, this book is not it. Smith and Fingar criticize Michael Hammer for including only two cases studies in his original article on business process re-engineering, but that was two more than Smith and Fingar included in this work. They have a fictitious interview with a CEO and CIO of a company that does not exist. It is really a pointless exercise. In an appendix, they review "Lessons Learned from Early Adopters," but the descriptions are so vague and no specific companies or products are named that the reader is left wondering if these are of any value.
Should you read this book? In the end, the background information on BPM is too important to miss and, in spite of the weak examples, this will be looked back upon as a seminal work.
Arthur Hedge is the President of Castle Ventures LLC, a consulting firm focused on delivering business process management solutions to its clients. He can be reached at ahedge@castleventures.com or 973-538-8004
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