Process Power | December 12, 2012, 6:44 pm

Is it bottom-up or top-down? (Does it matter? Just download the Intelligent Guide on the Kindle!)

I am very excited to announce the ‘Intelligent Guide to Enterprise BPM‘ is now available in ebook format on the Kindle. We published the hard copy book back in June but now you can read how to create a sustainable Enterprise BPM program on your kindle. On the road to Enterprise BPM success, you would ideally:

  • Start by describing your corporate strategy and then break it down to Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
  • Derive your process and IT landscape and create the link with strategy and KPIs
  • Transfer business process models to technical models. Allow business and IT to collaborate guided by process governance
  • Deploy the processes and make them operational
  • Monitor and improve the executed processes, and then manage risks and possible compliance issues

But since we don’t live in a perfect world, it’s not always possible to start at the first step and then move to the next step accordingly. Often a process improvement initiative needs to be lightning-fast. There is no time to start defining a corporate strategy before you design and improve processes. You start by fixing  the obvious problems.

Let’s say the ad-hoc process improvement will lead to better KPI’s. Better KPI’s will also have a midterm impact on the corporate strategy. With this you can influence the corporate strategy overtime following a bottom up-approach. There was – and still is – an intense discussion about bottom-up vs. top-down approaches when it comes to BPM.

What do you think? Does a sustainable BPM approach need to start bottom-up or top-down?

Let me know what you think. You can always start by downloading the the Intelligent Guide to EBPM on your Kindle and then decide what approach works best for you.

About Joerg Klueckmann

Joerg Klueckmann has written 11 posts in this blog.

Joerg Klueckmann is head of Enterprise BPM at Software AG. He studied sociology, business administration and intercultural communication at FSU, Jena, Germany, and at Louisiana State University in the U.S., where he graduated with distinction. Prior to joining Software AG, Joerg was head of product marketing at Intershop and IDS Scheer. He has written numerous articles about business process management, business innovation and process intelligence.

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Author: Joerg Klueckmann is head of Enterprise BPM at Software AG. He studied sociology, business administration and intercultural communication at FSU, Jena, Germany, and at Louisiana State University in the U.S., where he graduated with distinction. Prior to joining Software AG, Joerg was head of product marketing at Intershop and IDS Scheer. He has written numerous articles about business process management, business innovation and process intelligence.

2 Comments

  • Ronald Verhaaf December 28, 2012 9:38 am

    Its easy. From both sites. But social innovation starts bottom-up.

    Reply
  • Joerg Klueckmann January 3, 2013 10:33 am

    Thanks for your comment Ronald. I have seen plenty of BPM initiatives which started bottom-up. But at a certain point, C-level awareness and support is needed to tap the full potential. Especially change management is hard without top management backup. Also the definition of standards and governance routines is eased if there is a central BPM unit. Establishing such a unit is often driven by the COO. Same applies in my opinion for social initiatives. Social needs to be driven bottom-up but at a certain point top management needs to support the initiative by giving it an official mandate. With this each and every corner of the organization will be integrated in the social initiative. Also concrete working tasks should be assigned to give social collaboration certain directions.

    Reply

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