What I have been upto...

I sometime wonder myself about what I am up to. Seems to the world that I am busy but I am not sure about it. The fact is I should be busy but I am not. I have been up with some assignments. Let me try to put down the assignments that I have been up with. One of the courses that I opted for in the first term was called as BPM (Business Process Management and I took up evaluation of Intalio, an open source BPMS as part of my readings in Business Process Management System. The assignment was pretty unique as I was evaluating the Intalio against the industry norms like BPMN and BPEL.

The second course that I credited was called as "Advances in Marketing Management". I had more than one assignment and all of them were pretty academically rigorous.

Another compulsory course that I has to take is called "Philosophies and Methodologies for Creating Knowledge" and this had two assignment. One of them (fortunately for me) has been submitted. The other assignment that I am working on and is keeping me busy is titled by me as "A Paradigmatic and Methodological Examination of CRM in IS: 1995 to 2007"

Now this is pretty hectic and hence time consuming. Second term is on it's way and I already have 2 very rigor assignments to start.

~May God bless me !

Technorati Tags: BPM, Marketing, AMM, Intaio, MDI, Research at MDI

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Process Management

And the question why "Process Management" will haunt a few people and would be just another word to impress the vocab of business communication/language. I was doing this session on Process Measurement with Prof Saxena; KBC as he is popularly known as. And when I am in the class trying to relate it to something from my past corporate experience I start realizing how such big companies like the one I was working for sometime back can talk about management philosophies and water tight execution. They never define it around the process but around the team and in true sense it's quite ironical.

We are so ignorant to get into the system and forget to apply the things we have learned in our academics. True that management is to be practiced but do they really practice it. Why do I not see a manager or the head of a department, coming to the company and giving his/her process an improvement that's strategic in nature.

Let me critic a process very common in most of the organization. We talk about process improvement. Let's take HR hiring process. How many companies after a desired period of hiring a person evaluate whether their hiring of the above candidate was in fact justified. All these traditional hiring process suffer from the myopia of evaluating their team and process internally as to how many were the potential hire and how many got hired? What were the targets and what were the actuals? I am still curious to find that one organization which has an HR function that measures the outcome of whom they have hired. Let's say six months, does the HR evaluate whether the candidate which was hired for six months now is on expectations. Do they identify the strategic factors which might re-evolve their hiring process?

I am listening if there's someone who does these basic "Performance Measures" to complete the cycle of "Business Process Management".

The World of Business Process Management

An introduction to a not so unknown world of "Business Process Management" what is also an acronym for BPM. A brief wiki article can be had at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_process_management. Let me dissect the term Business Process Management for you. First let me take management out of it and thankfully I don't have to go into the details of discussing what Management is. Let's now briefly talk about the term "Process". The word process has it's origin from Manufacturing as far as the field of business management goes.

"Process is a naturally occurring or designed sequence of changes of properties or attributes of an object or system."

Source: Wiki

Of late there has been an urgency or should I say evolved need to see Business Process as a resource just like human resource and other resources applicable in an organization. And because of this evolution to see Business Process as a resource there is a continuous need to manage it just like any other resource.

With changing influence of technology into business there were concepts like ERP which started gaining popularity. However, initially these efforts did not enjoy the success because they focused on department or functional areas of business. The myopia they struggled with was that they failed to understand that such efforts will provide multitude of success if the pattern to implement them was process oriented. However, on a larger perspective it also gave an insight that business should be looked from the criticality of process driven rather than function driven. The problem with a function driven approach is that it looks at the business from an in-house perspective. But as we all know that the success of any business today is driven by customers and hence the approach that the business should take today should be process driven. The process that focuses on customer satisfaction.

As a result of this advancement in the way the Business is starting to take advantages of process driven approach we see many companies (esp service-oriented) to boast about being 100% process oriented. Airtel, makes such a claim. I carefully used es service oriented. This is not to take anything away from manufacturing intensive firms' claim of being process intensive. However, there can be an eternal debate about how many of manufacturing firms have functions which are product oriented rather than service oriented.

We are now starting to see that companies are becoming more and more process oriented, but not many of them have reached a stage where they can brag about being process centric.

Let me briefly give theoretical elements involved in Business Process.

I think this should be it before I completely talk about my learnings of 4 hours today.