4 different BPM Adoption Models followed by organizations for the deployment of BPM Processes

By "BPM Adoption" we understand the way that some organizations have undertaken to relieve, optimize, automate and outsource part of their business processes with the ultimate aim of achieving and maintaining the Operational Excellence that ensure them a sustainable competitive advantage.

Our view is that, to go this way, organizations must rely on two master columns:

1.     OPEX (Operational Excellence), BPM and Change Management methodologies, and

2.   A set of technologies that, combined together and integrated with corporate legacy applications, provide efficient solutions to automate its business processes.

For a few years (not more than a decade), organizations have implemented various strategies to make progress towards the adoption of BPM, strategies that we call "BPM Adoption Model" and discussed in this post.

To simplify our analysis, we have grouped the various strategies BPM Adoption Models usually followed by organizations in four archetypal models, which we have called "Process Team", "Cloud", "Consulting" and "BPaaS".

We have based the allocation of an organization to a specific BPM Adoption Model depending on its position in terms of two characteristics that have considered the most essential in relation to this positioning:

1.     As to the mode of development of the automation solutions, differentiating whether they do or plan to do by internal or external means; and

2.     As to the mode of exploitation of such automation solutions, differentiating if they do or plan to do either on internal systems (on-premises) or external (on Cloud or on an external Data Centre).

This dual classification allows us to define the following BPM Adoption Model quadrant:

Obviously, it could happen that a determined organization has applied or going to apply a strategy that, in fact, is a combination of several of the above listed  archetypal models.

Nevertheless, the simplification achieved by segmented the BPM Adoption Model analysis into the four models mentioned in previous paragraphs, will help us better understanding the scenario and to make a qualitative attempt and quantitative description of the situation of organizations in BPM Adoption Model and foreseeable future developments.

We have to keep in mind the fact that many organizations have evolved their initially established BPM Adoption Model depending on the results that they have been progressively obtained and the successive brakes and barriers they have been found along their BPM Processes implementation journey.