Business Process Owners

Another of my current personal responsibilites is the commercial ownership of our Business Process Management (BPM) solution FlowCentric. The whole concept and practice of BPM is fairly new and evolving within the small to mid-tier enterprise and is frequently referred to as workflow (the big boys have been playing here for years but we have a great, affordable solution for the more cost sensitive organisation) .

One of the regular conceptual challenges is that of a business process owner - being someone who owns and is accountable and responsible (sound familiar) for the complete lifecycle of a process within the company. The reality is that many - if not most - people cannot get their heads around this idea. The general response is that "I own it from here to there, then Fred owns it to there and then Mary owns it and then ..." - in other words edge-to-edge rather than end-to end responsibility - no-one is measured on a lifecycle KPI.

The result of this blinkered view into process execution is that it can be challenging to achieve quantifiable efficiencies and improvements end-to-end unless each edge-to-edge champion gets a bite of the benefit cherry. Without a single, butt-kicking, head-on-the-block, KPI-driven, process-owner things are always going to fall through the cracks and get lost in the grey areas of handover.

The following snip from www.bpminstitute.org gives a nice definition to business process owner.

"The notion of business process owners was introduced by Michael Hammer in the 1990’s as part of the Reengineering discipline, but integration of this notion into business practice has been limited. A process owner, as stated in the iSix Sigma Dictionary, is the one "accountable for sustaining the gain and identifying future improvement opportunities on the process." These folks become your cross-functional link across all facets of the end-to-end process. They are the ones who ensure that improvements in one segment of a process don’t negatively impact downstream process segments. Identifying executives who will own the measures, improvements and success of each business process is critical to the implementation and on-going success of your process management efforts."