computers and internet

Having experienced process improvement in the Manufacturing arena with influences from the Japanese (JIT, TQM, Kaizen), I wanted to expand my horizons by getting an orientation in BPM. The first chapter is worth the price of the book on strategy, fit, focus and position. Excellent summary of M. Porter the hot daddy on strategy. Harmon is a good writer--he writes clearly and succinctly. His insights and observations are biased toward the practical. If you are need a good intro into BP, start here--you will be ahead of the pack.

Businesses are changing shape faster today than ever before. Information technology (IT) is playing an increasingly significant part in this rapid evolution of businesses. That does not just mean the Internet, but a whole range of increasingly powerful influences from data warehousing to developments in Web services.
Unfortunately most books about business process change tend to assume that IT is merely a support player in relation to business. The continued economic downturn only serves to reinforce this mistake. At the same time most books about systems analysis and design, including those on the Unified Modeling Language (UML), are weak in their treatment of business processes. There is a widespread failure to appreciate the collaboration that must achieved between business and IT if business process change is to really work well in today's climate.

While this book will probably be of immediate interest to business managers, the refreshing thing about Paul Harmon's new book is that it speaks clearly to both IT and business camps in plain language. It reflects the need to integrate business and IT thinking. As such it is also a must read for both business facing IT people and for those key individuals who are breaking the conventional barriers between business and IT.

The book contains a wealth of timely advice. While it's range is wide and impressive, it is structured for ease of information access. This means that readers can quickly use the book for reference. Enjoy!

I spent last year creating a "Business Process Management" team for the CIO of HP. We spent much time and effort thinking clearly about how to approach business processes without the pitfalls of "Business Process Re-engineering," and worked to create both a holistic approach and an extremely simple, intuitive methodology. Through concentrated effort, without the luxury of time (in the midst of a complex, highly-visible merger), we arrived at a set of conventions for our work, policies on alignment to the office of the CIO, IT Architecture and Program teams, as well as different approaches we could supply to our business and IT internal clients. The value we've provided has been dramatic in the areas we've worked in, from Supply Chain Integration between pre-merger HP and pre-merger Compaq, to HP direct sales process design, to Global Content Management processes and re-engineering.

In hindsight, I wish I'd been able to read Paul Harmon's Business Process Change a year ago. Creating the team and its functions would have been much simpler, direct, and less time-consuming. Based on our experiences in a process architecture team in a $75B IT company, I see the book having major value to at least three audiences I deal with daily. First, the book is for managers considering major business change. It will provide a blueprint to why they might be changing (Part 1 - Process Management), specific ways they might change (Part IV - Patterns section), and if/when they use external consultants, a way to specify with formidable detail what they're expecting to receive (Part II - Modeling, and Part III - Managing).

Second, it is for IT people who are seeking to regain architectural and analytic skills, which ERP and packaged workflow may have supplanted. This book provides both modern idioms for approaching business with what might be termed 'object-oriented' analysis (Part II - Modeling), as well as a summary of the field of implementation techniques (Part V - Automation and Part VI - E-Business).

Third, for the consulting function to both IT and business, it provides a well-rounded blueprint for marketing (value propositions), tools, techniques, and implementation approaches. I cannot imagine a consultative team which doesn't have virtually all the elements of Paul's book as part of their basic operations. Certainly, no state-of-the-art team would want to be without them.

For the futurists (which I don't deal with daily), the book provides an implicit narrative of how the nature of business is changing (I myself feel we're on the edge of a dramatic change in business structure.) It begins with the disappearance of organizational models - which in the book are artifacts of a process model - and the focus on quantifiable outcomes for transactions (I'm thrown back to hierarchy-disrupting transactional analysis from the '70s). It continues by looking at virtual business structures - the 'extended supply chain' example which Paul walks through -- a linking together of transactions. And it ends by building IT - automation -- around process elements instead of traditional 'systems' architecture. Traditional labels, capsules, and hierarchies change and shift, and I see the book in a more 'future perfect' tense.