Value-Driven Business Process Management: Which Values Matter?

To fulfill its potential, business process management must be linked to the delivery of corporate value. Accenture and the Business Process Management Group at Queensland University of Technology look at how to establish this link and position BPM to drive high performance.

Business process management (BPM) has emerged as an accepted business discipline that delivers real value for companies in pursuit of high performance. However, it can be easy to lose sight of the requirement to deliver corporate value.

Accenture conducted research in conjunction with the Business Process Management Group at Queensland University of Technology in order to explore a wider understanding of BPM. The research explored:

• The types of value organizations currently derive from BPM.
• How BPM methodologies need to be designed to achieve value.
• The root causes of organizations failing to derive value.

Key findings of our research include:

• BPM initiatives without firm support from senior executives and a strong sense of urgency are often focused on methodological and technical issues, and become activity-based programs.

• BPM initiatives tend to be executed based on a general methodology, and in many cases are not tailored to the specific values that matter.

• Transparency into processes and operations is a common core value of BPM initiatives.

• BPM initiatives can help to overcome, or at least reduce, business conflicts that managers are facing (such as the “mitigating power of BPM”).

• BPM initiatives can provide additional value to both of the core strategies identified by Michael Porter: They allow organizations to streamline operations (efficiency) and can contribute to increased quality of products, services and processes.

• BPM initiatives support improved internal integration (for example, by driving the creation of employee-entered processes) and external networking via tighter supply chains and an increased focus on the environmental implications of corporate operations.

• BPM initiatives are essential in ensuring predictability and consistency (compliance) as much as facilitating increased organizational agility.

Accenture has considerable experience in helping organizations use BPM to realize strategic goals and drive high performance.

Our research shows that organizations aim toward different values when starting a BPM initiative. These values can be summarized as one core value and three value pairs: 

• Core value: Transparency. It is fundamental to achieving any of the other six values.
   
• Value pairs. BPM plays a role in helping organizations balance the trade-offs between the three value pairs: Efficiency versus quality; agility versus compliance, and integration versus networking. 

Our research shows that most organizations follow an activity-driven BPM approach. While such organizations may have mature tools, techniques and methodologies, they often lack alignment between BPM and their strategic agendas. As a consequence, although they have a compelling narrative on how they conduct BPM and what artifacts (such as process architectures and models) they have developed, they may have only limited evidence regarding the actual achievements and net benefits of the approach.
 
In comparison, value-based business process management puts the desired outcomes of the BPM initiative first. As described above, this approach is based on a framework that consists of transparency as a core value, and that includes six individual values. We recommend organizations first clearly define the values that matter, and then tailor the process of process management accordingly.
 
This first report of our joint research project has presented the set of values that drive BPM. In subsequent papers, we will show how the process of process management must be customized for each of these values. Finally, we will present the results of our research in terms of the main roadblocks to value-based BPM.

Peter H. Franz is the managing director for Business Process Management at Accenture and is responsible for the global team that helps clients deliver sustainable shareholder and customer value through scalable, efficient and agile business processes. In this role he is responsible for developing our offerings and assets to add pace and certainty to these change programs. This links well with his responsibility for Industry Program Enablement, where he coordinates the development of the industries across all five operating groups, sharing best practices and providing shared services to support them. Mr. Franz has a Bachelor of Science degree in computer science and a Masters degree in commerce from the University of Witwatersrand in South Africa. He holds a Certificate of Productions and Inventory Management from the American Production and Inventory Control Society (APICS).

Dr. Mathias Kirchmer executive director for Business Process Management (BPM) at Accenture. He leads the global BPM-Lifecycle group, as well as the program for the development of Accenture’s Business Process Reference Models across industries and functional areas. His special field of expertise is to establish BPM capabilities that deliver both immediate benefits as well as sustainable competitive advantages. Before joining Accenture, Dr. Kirchmer spent 18 years at IDS Scheer, a leading provider of business process excellence solutions, known for its BPM Software, the ARIS Platform. Dr. Kirchmer is an affiliated faculty member of the Program for Organizational Dynamics of the University of Pennsylvania, faculty member of the Business School of Widener University, Philadelphia and guest professor at the Universidad de Chile, Santiago. He is the author of numerous publications, including five books. Dr. Kirchmer holds a PhD in information systems from Saarbruecken University (Germany), a Master in Business Administration and Computer Science (“Wirtschaftsingenieur”) from Karlsruhe Technical University (Germany) and a Master in Economics from Paris-IXDauphine University (France).

Professor Michael Rosemann is the head of the Information Systems Discipline at Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia. This discipline includes the Business Process Management Research Group, one of the largest applied BPM Research Groups in the world. Dr. Rosemann is the author/editor of seven books and more than 170 refereed papers in international journals and conferences. He is on the editorial board of 10 journals and is named co-inventor on two US patents related to process modeling. He provides regular advice to senior executives in all matters related to value-driven BPM and has been an invited keynote speaker for organizations such as Oracle, SAP and Gartner.