The Tao that is told is not the Tao.
-Tao Te Ching

What if, at the conclusion of a meeting between the senior executives of two companies, the new alliance they had just formed could be implemented within days after each side returned to their respective offices? What if the world's most common excuse--"The IT department says it will take 18 months to implement"--was no longer to be heard? Agility has been on the agenda of companies for quite some time, but inflexible technology and the lack of an ability to manage business processes has hampered efforts to achieve it. Now, however, it's time to remember the venerable proverb: "Be careful what you wish for, because you just might get it." Until the third wave of BPM, the business-IT divide was a comfortable excuse for not implementing change. Until the third wave of BPM, companies could not manage their business processes. Because the third wave of BPM places technology and business processes firmly in the control of the organization, the naked organization itself is all that lies between business change and innovation.

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Process, organization and technology combined to form the inseparable triad of business change. Alter the balance, and chaos and waste are sure to follow. For example, companies recently pumped indecent amounts of money into technology, trying to renew and reinvigorate their busi-nesses by technological means alone. Forrester Research calculates the technology overspend in the years 1998 to 2000 at $65 billion in the U.S. alone, as large companies engaged in a historic tech orgy. Forrester's CEO, George Colony describes the result: "Bewildered CEOs and CFOs who felt burned by the dollars lost (and who are now slowing capital spending to a trickle), lost credibility for IT, lost stature for ven-dors, hardware for sale on eBay at 10 cents on the dollar, and pressure on operating margins. Oh, and by the way, you also get one toxic technology recession."

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Business processes have become insidiously more and more complex, yet there was no sharp transition. The earth was not hit by a complexity asteroid that suddenly made business processes three orders of magnitude more complex and cast our reptilian process techniques into extinction. Page-Jones calls the way in which process complexity actually increased the "Frog in the Pan." This is because although a frog will jump out of a pan of hot water, a frog that is placed in a pan of cold water and slowly heated will fail to leap forth and will actually boil to death. The temperature gradient is so gradual that there will never be a point at which the frog declares, "Boy, it's suddenly gotten hot in here! I think I should hop out." Many Innocents are experiencing "Frog in the Pan" and are trying to tackle problems of the 21st-century with approaches of the past without realizing that the problems they're facing are the very ones that the third wave of BPM was created to alleviate.

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Companies can expect many people in the organization to be interested in BPM and to want to take on their own initiatives. That's okay, because the beauty of BPM is that processes can easily be connected, whether designed separately in different divisions, by different people, from different perspectives, top-down or bottom-up. The process description language allows multiple processes to combine and collaborate. One process can exchange data with another. One process can become a subprocess of another. One process can govern the lifecycle of another set of processes. One process can inherit a new capability from another. One process can monitor another. These capabilities are not reliant on technical integration of systems, but inherent attributes of process data.

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CEOs who approach corporate strategy as a portfolio of initiatives, each aimed at achieving favorable outcomes for the entire enterprise, can extend this approach to the high-level management of a portfolio of processes-the challenge being to convert raw processes into new profits. To achieve the desired outcomes, a company must manage its process portfolio with the same rigor that a venture capital firm uses to manage its portfolio of investments. They must organize a disciplined search for the best processes, inside and outside the firm; nurture and enhance promising processes; and consider the option of acquiring process from third parties through collaboration, purchase or alliance. Process portfolio management is a business process like any other and we recommend placing it too under "process management."

Excerpts from Business Process Management: The Third Wave, Howard Smith and Peter Fingar, ISBN 0-929652-33-9 Off-press November 2002, Meghan-Kiffer Press