Ready, Aim, Fire!

Just finished the second day of the UK Oracle User Group conference in Birmingham.  Todays evening keynote was delivered by Tom Kyte followed by a great presentation from dual Olympic gold medallist James Cracknell.  James delivered a tremendous talk that transported everyone on an emotional journey through the Barcelona, Atlanta, Sydney & Athens olympic rowing events.

Discussing this afterwards with some of the staff from Griffiths Waite (an Oracle partner) I noticed some common themes.  We were talking about Business Process Management and how to sell its benefits to business.  the things we were talking about resonated with some of James talk.

James spoke about the need to know what your overriding goal was, winning Olympic gold.  We were speaking about the benefits BPM can bring to business.

James spoke about an intense training schedule that was monitored and focussed to work on specific targets, implicit in this was tests of strength, endurance and rowing technique.  We spoke about the importance of understanding where business is today with its processes before trying to improve them.  We discussed the benefits of implementing Business Activity Monitoring as  a pre-cursor to a BPM revolution, rather than as a follow through activity.  BAM allows us to understand how things happen in real time.  Like James focussing his training from where he was, we need to understand how processes are working today before changing them.

Just understanding where we are today and having a clear vision of where we want to go allows us to plot the course to get there.  Providing senior management with real time business activity monitoring as a pilot project allows the business to see the value that this information can bring and paves the way for wider deployment of BAM and the introduction of BPEL to automate and optimize business processes.

Creating a BPM revolution in a customer needs to start from a solid understanding of where we are and where we are going - before grand architectures, before new processes and definately before changing the way a business works we have to understand how it really works today - not how we think it works.

Creating the BPM revolution in a customer can be rewarding, but I have to say it didn't compare to the buzz I got when I handled James Cracknell's Sydney Olympic gold medal and felt a thrill go through me as I held it in my hands and considered the sweat toil, tears and dedication with which it had been purchased - creating the BPM revolution seems a cushy option to me!