The following review appeared at www.manyworlds.com, the Knowledge Network for Business Leaders ... [link to image]

Over two decades ago in his blockbuster book The Third Wave, Alvin Toffler wrote that we stood on the edge of a new age of synthesis. We would see a return to large-scale thinking, general theory, and the putting of pieces back together. With fortuitous resonance Howard Smith and Peter Fingar position their thinking as the third wave of business process management (BPM), in doing so helping to realize Toffler’s still emerging vision. From both a business and information technology perspective, it is almost as if Toffler was the prophet and third wave BPM the fulfillment of the prophecy. For if the contents of this book are to be believed, third wave BPM is the answer to many desperate pleas from the technical and managerial camps who have suffered through the first two waves associated with Taylorism and reengineering. The authors have done a commendable job of writing for both these camps at once. The result may frustrate some in each group hungry for more detail but the book succeeds in conveying the grand scale and promise of this Third Wave vision. These deeper details can be found in a companion book, Business Process Management: New Directions.

Third wave BPM has two goals: hyper-efficiency and unprecedented agility. It aims to meet the needs of companies, including a means not only to conceive of new processes but to implement them, the alignment of processes with strategy, turning organizational change into an engineering discipline, and a “pervasive, resilient, and predictable means for the processing of processes. Unlike previous approaches, BPM can create a single definition of a business process from which alternative views of that process can be crystallized – for managers, business analysts, employees, and programmers. The authors make one of many excellent points when they note that “information processing” should, up to now, have been called “data processing”. BPM claims to finally move us from data processing to “process processing”.

BPM is not just another revolutionary three-letter practice intended to displace all that came before it. On the contrary, one of its multiple strengths is that it synthesizes and extends previous process representation and collaboration technologies and techniques – such as reengineering, EAI, workflow management, service-oriented architecture, XML and Web services, TQM, Six Sigma, and systems thinking – into a unified approach. The entire approach is founded on process calculus, in particular one form of this called Pi-calculus. This author does not pretend to possess sufficient mathematical background to assess this as a foundation in the sense that electrical engineers rely on differential calculus as a foundation. However, the claim could be given added plausibility by noting that the recent field of social network analysis makes use of the mathematics originally developed for quantum physics.

Unlike the previous data-centric approaches, BPM’s process-centricity equips its adopters to proactively rather than reactively manage change. Included in this is an ability to simulate change and its effects, making the authors’ choice of the term “top-down” perhaps misleading. As Smith and Fingar explicitly say, by “top-down” they actually mean “the ability to model processes simultaneously at all levels in line with business strategy”. The ability to simulate is tucked away in the last of eight broad capabilities of BPM: discovery, deployment, execution, interaction, control, optimization, and analysis of processes. The authors’ understanding of “analysis” is generous enough to firmly include the synthesis resulting from business simulations. For those executives stung by business process reengineering (BPR) a good place to dip in would be the chart beginning on p.108 that looks at the BPR advocates’ reasons given for failure and the third wave perspective as well as the p.118 chart relating BPM to Davenport’s Process Improvement and Innovation.

While Michael Hammer comes in for repeated hammering, the authors look far more favorably on Thomas Davenport’s angle on reengineering. To their credit, they do not present BPM as springing fully formed from their brains but as essentially an inevitable evolutionary development driven more by economic than technological forces. Further helping the reader to place BPM in context, the book explains how this approach relates to and subsumes John Hagel and John Seely Brown’s recent work on loosely-coupled business processes. Chapter 7 is devoted to showing how BPM, far from being a usurper, is actually a supporter, accelerator, and amplifier of existing management approaches such as Six Sigma and Change Management.

A book this rich in big ideas defies adequate reviewing. In addition to the aspects mentioned here, the authors also explain how to measure the return on process investment, ten capabilities embodied in a business process management system, the three competencies required to build BPM competence, and how to apply Page-Jones’ 7-stage model of expertise to BPM implementation, along with four informative appendices. No doubt BPM enterprises will experience difficulties not well anticipated in this book. Yet the skeptical eye of this reviewer cannot help count off the large number of nuggets of wisdom, and the seeming inevitability of this vision.