Two recent books on BPM, from entirely different perspectives, illustrate the need for a middle way that combines the best of both.

But first - let me make a bid to reclaim the term Process Intelligence, which is such a great description but has become confined to a very KPI-driven view of process.

It’s rapidly becoming conventional wisdom that process is the key to successful transformation and continuous improvement. Organizations are scrambling to move beyond their historic capabilities – to be able to manage by functional silo, by region and by product – to build a new capability to manage in a fourth dimension: end-to-end process.  For me, this emerging capability, in its broadest sense, is really the development of Process Intelligence. KPIs are part of it, for sure, but it deserves to be a much richer concept…

The most recent book Process Intelligence For Dummies, published last month and available as a free download from Software AG, starts promisingly with lots of very sensible stuff.

I like the comments that an organization can’t buy process intelligence, you have to build it – and the emphasis on the need for collaboration between IT and the business. There’s more good sense scattered throughout the book - some of the Best Practice Tips and Pitfalls To Avoid for instance - but basically it falls a long way short because it has a very narrow KPI and IT-oriented perspective.

It promotes Automated Process Discovery (APD) tools as though they were a standard approach – whereas, in reality, APD tools only have value in the initial excavation where processes are buried in complex transactional systems. It deals at length with the information architecture of BPM.  It prescribes the use of SOA architecture. It promotes measurement first in all circumstances – whereas many would see mapping of the As-Is process as the logical first step, followed by measurement.

To be fair, the book is admirably frank that IT often doesn’t understand business process. One of its tips is on this theme:

“Try to get the IT community up to speed with the business community on process. IT folks need to know and practice the process improvement methods that are now so broadly used in the business communities. IT people need to see processes in a business context.”

And it urges its audience -  IT professionals – to recognise that this needs to be enterprise-wide:

“Process Intelligence is for everyone, at all levels across the enterprise, and with it they will create visibility and transparency about processes that aren’t working well. Don’t hide from this.

This belief that process is for everyone is shared with a book that comes from absolutely the other end of the spectrum: The Power of Business Improvement by Susan Page, published earlier this year to some acclaim [her website is near top in the Google ranking].

Susan Page starts from a completely different startpoint.  She sets out to de-mystify process improvement, to:

“explode the myth that business process improvement must be time-consuming and complex. Nothing is further from the truth.”

She warns that consultants often ‘do not want you to know the full story’.  This is a book about empowerment.  She sets out a very practical approach – proven in her work at Walt Disney and elsewhere - which she urges everyone to adopt.

It’s almost homely: the analogies she uses are things like joining a gym, building a deck or planning a road trip. She blends and simplifies Lean and Six Sigma thinking into a sensibly structured approach.

But Susan Page’s perspective too has serious limitations. She cautions readers about getting involved in ‘large scale system implementations that you have no control over’ – whereas in truth virtually every business transformation program requires business and IT collaboration to succeed. And she effectively creates a new symbolic language for process description.

I know I would say this, but we surely need a middle way? A process management framework that:

- can underpin process improvement initiatives from the grass-roots, leveraging and extending Susan Pages’s pragmatic approach

- uses a language that combines the necessary rigor with the need to be easily understood by the process consumer, right across the enterprise

- recognises the vital role of systems, and can synchronize the business operational view with the EA/IT view.

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