Business

Where IT meets business

There is a new entrant in the alphabet soup of acronyms that describe Web-enabled practices and tools. The author provides a dummies guide to Business Process Management and looks at emerging players in India.

REMEMBER THE first wave of computerisation in the work place? There was the electronic data processing (EDP) manager who was lord of all he (or she) surveyed in the computer department — which usually meant an IBM 360 or similar juggernaut. And — like the character in Gilbert and Sullivan's comic opera "The Mikado'' — there was a Lord High Everything Else who ruled over the rest of the company's business operations from procurement to manufacturing to sales and support. The twain never met — if that was possible.

Then came the second wave, circa 1975. MIS or management information systems was the new mantra — the golden buckle which bound the computer cowboys and the business boffins by providing top management with made-for-dummies tools to give them instant executive information on such transactions like turnover, sales, payroll, receivables and the like.

Finally, with the coming of Internet in the fading years of the last century, there was an explosion of buzzwords to describe fashionable Web-driven business processes: enterprise resource planning (ERP); customer relations management (CRM); product lifecycle management (PLM), supply chain management (SCM), business process re-engineering (BPR)... Like the blind men feeling the elephant, each of these was part of the answer, but none could claim to have captured the totality of the automated business process.

Around this time corporates were learning facts of life the hard way: the biggest digital divide was not the obvious one between the haves and the have-nots but the more insidious gap between the business and the IT operations of the company. They were separated at birth but they could never stray too far apart.

The new breed of chief information officers (CIOs) had to work closely with the CEOs and COOs — those charged with executing and operating the business — or see the business itself shrink in the face of competition.

How to bridge the divide between the IT and business operations of an enterprise? Business process management or BPM is the answer. At any rate, it is the answer this week.

In their book — one of the first to demystify BMP — "Business Process Management: The Third Wave'' (Meghan-Kiffer Press 2003; $39.95) authors Howard Smith and Peter Finger suggest that to business people, technology is always intimidating; and for technical people, business processes are always complex. But on rare occasions, business and technical interests converged in a beautiful creation... like the spreadsheet. Here was a software product so convenient and cheap, that it fuelled the Personal Computer revolution in business.

"To the business, the PC loaded with a spread-sheet meant a radical simplification of routine calculations, transferring to the everyday business person a function that had once required special programming skills... A similar simplification and transfer of functions is needed by those pursuing business process development and optimisation.''

"BPM software promises things like process monitoring, analytics, corrective notifications, providing so called business `dashboards' and the like... in other words it's software that tells you how things are doing and screams out when something is going south,'' writes Doug Bartholomew in "e-Commerce Times'' earlier this month. The dashboard is a currently `in' word that BPM providers like to use to describe what their product does for the hot shot executive in the `driver's seat.' Possibly more meaningful, is to describe BMP as the steering wheel, with its spokes linking what were till recently, unconnected islands of technology — documents, finance reporting, programme monitoring, resource skills (see diagram). The `dashboard' or executive information system would then be just one element of this integrated business tool.

Since August 2000, the Business Process Management Initiative (www.bpmi.org), a non-profit organisation has tried to promote the standardisation of BPM tools and the emergence of a common language (BMPL).

Infosys, Satyam and Wipro are three Indian players who are members — and increasingly active BPM providers. SETLabs, the applied R&D division of Infosys, has helped the company create and showcase a BPM implementation and develop a BM engine, "Choreo.''

Staffware has specialised in providing business process solutions for over 15 years — and BPM is a natural progression for this U.K.-based company. Today, it counts HDFC and ICICI as two important Indian clients in the banking arena, having provided both with workflow solutions tailored to their needs.

The U.S.-based Sapient is another name to reckon with in the BPM space — and most recently it has moved very fast to offer a suite of solutions based on the new BizTalk Server 2004 software specifically crafted for BPM applications, that Microsoft is to globally launch exactly a week from today. Many of Sapient's tools are crafted at its Delhi development centre — the only one outside North America, And these days, Indian engineers are putting together applications centred around what might turn out to be the `agni asthra' of managing business process particularly in the whole sale and retail shipping of consumer products — RFID or Radio Frequency Identification Tag. Already they are talking of RFIDs `hyper optimising' the supply chain.

A recent report by management consulting A.T. Kearney entitled "RFID/EPC: Managing the Transition,'' sees 2004-07 as critical years when industry will rush to adopt RFID as big global buyers like Wal-Mart, Tesco and Metro in the U.S., the U.K. and Germany respectively, mandate their use with consignments shipped to them. Ben Gaucherin, Sapient's Chief Technology Officer, in India last week, told this author that radio tags in large quantities were already available at less than 5 cents (Rs. 2) a piece and hence it made sense to use them as warehousing aids. But companies such as Gillette were also trying out the technology on high priced individual consumer items essentially to prevent store and godown theft.

"It is too early to begin worrying about individual privacy issues,'' he feels, in answer to simmering apprehension that an RFID Raj fuelled by increasingly aggressive BPM practices might infringe individual shopper's right to privacy.

But that's the way the technology cookie crumbles. Show me a compelling new business tool — and I'll come up with the appropriate Conspiracy Theory to debunk it.

Will BPM survive — to deliver on the promise of those who dreamed up this latest three letter acronym? Like TV soaps that end with a cliffhanger — we have to wait and see what tomorrow brings.

Anand Parthasarathy

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