BPM is BPM

I spent 2 days of last week at a conference, the major focus of which was Corporate Performance Management (CPM) - quite worthwhile, mildly enlightening, excellent hospitality. One of the presenters voiced a commonly held view - Enterprise Performance Management, Corporate Performance Management and Business Performance Management are one and the same thing. I concur.

And on the basis that the driver is "performance" then the classifications of Enterprise and Corporate add little more than a sense of scale rather than difference in purpose. Therefore the performance management equation is EPM = CPM = BPM.

But what of the other BPM? Business PROCESS Management. My BPM.

Well I believe that is one and the same thing as well.

So BPM = BPM. Hmmm, that's a tricky equation to prove.

Process Management is all about the inputs - Performance Management is all about the outputs. It is the same spectrum just viewed from different ends.

Another presenter made a very valid point - if you are not interested in, and driven by, change, then Performance Management is pointless. Performance Management when broken down into its component parts - as done elaborately by one presenter - focusses greatly on the identification, measurement, reporting and analysis of business information from disparate and frequently unconnected sources.

That information is also predicated by its very nature on what has gone before - you can't measure what hasn't happened. Performance Management gives excellent opportunity to identify trends and patterns and do that holy grail "what if" analysis. However there is little point investing the time, effort and cost in the Performance end of the spectrum if you have no intention of embracing change at the Process end.

It is afterall the Process end that incubates all that lovely measurement information in the first place. So making process improvements guided by historical performance starts to make a lot of sense. Therefore BPM = BPM.