Business Process Management (BPM): The Third Wave [Hardcover]

Howard Smith (Author), Peter Fingar (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 2003

This book heralds a breakthrough that redefines competitive advantage for the next fifty years. Don't bridge the business-IT divide: Obliterate it! The book is the first authoritative analysis of how third-wave business process management (BPM) changes everything in business and what it portends. While the vision of process management is not new, existing theories and systems have not been able to cope with the reality of business processes --until now. This book describes a radical, simplifying shift in process thinking and technology that utterly transforms today's information systems and reduces the lag between management intent and execution.

A process-managed enterprise makes agile course corrections, embeds Six Sigma quality and reduces cumulative costs across the value chain. It pursues strategic initiatives with confidence, including mergers, consolidation, alliances, acquisitions, outsourcing and global expansion. Process management is the only way to achieve these objectives with transparency, management control and accountability. The process-managed enterprise grasps control of business processes and communicates with a universal process language that enables partners to execute on shared vision --to understand each other's operations in detail, jointly design processes and manage the entire lifecycle of their business improvement initiatives.

Process management is not another form of automation, a new killer-app or a fashionable new management theory. With the third-wave BPM breakthrough and its solid mathematical underpinnings, business processes can now be unhindered by the constraints of existing IT systems. Short on stories and long on insight and practical information, this book will help your business become the company of the future, the real-time enterprise, the fully digitized corporation --the process-managed enterprise. The book also offers continually updated information and a dialog with the authors at its Web site.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Corporate re-engineering was a hot trend in the early 1990s, when businesses started streamlining to save money and "downsizing" came into vogue. Now it's economic uncertainty all over again, and managers are looking to shave costs while still dominating their sectors-and Smith and Fingar want to give them the management tools to achieve that. The authors, both IT experts, insist their management theory and practice will guide business leaders through the next 50 years. While many companies are savaging their tech budgets to survive, for instance, Smith and Fingar hold up General Electric as a current ideal; the company has actually boosted its information technology dollars, as it sees the next wave of business automation as full of promise. While heavy on corporate bafflegab, this book does break down how companies can boost productivity, discover savings and thrive in a harsh business environment.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From the Publisher

The first limited distribution edition of this groundbreaking book was published in September 2002, and subsequently designed for "fast track" reads by either business or technology readers. The business impact is covered in the first 197 pages. Ten years ago, Computer Sciences Corporation's James Champy co-authored the New York Times best seller, Reengineering the Corporation, that set the world alight with over 2,000,000 copies in print. But that was last decade. Ten years on, Computer Sciences Corporation's Howard Smith, has co-authored the book that reinvents reengineering and sets the business agenda for the decade ahead.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 311 pages
• Publisher: Meghan Kiffer Pr; 1 edition (January 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0929652339
• ISBN-13: 978-0929652337
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.2 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (26 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #370,460 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

98 of 108 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Lots of proselytizing, little guidance, September 5, 2003

By 

Jason Ambrose "slimeddy" (San Francisco, CA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Business Process Management (BPM): The Third Wave (Hardcover)

I got about 100 pages into this book and checked the cover to see if I was reading an L. Ron Hubbard book. There was a lot of trumpeting of the party line "The third wave of BPM is not a fantasy ... or hype. For BPM, like other true breakthroughs, is based in the mathematics ... as opposed to static relational data". Praise the Lord, I'm saved!
There's only one chapter on implementation, and even that provides very generalized guidelines - start small, prove the concept, pat yourself on the back in these ways. Admittedly the audience is so general as to set the lowest common denominator pretty low, but the argument is pretty simple: the old way of provisioning services in IT is restrictive and inefficient. If that's the case, could we not expect to see a glimpse of the new IT business processes that support a BPM management model and encourage its adoption?
If you need to be convinced that managing your environment to your business processes is a good idea, this book delivers that message loud and clear. If you're a believer, though, it does little to put you on the path to salvation.

24 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Most Fascinating Biz-Tech Idea, July 11, 2003

By 

Frank Debenham (Minnesota) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Business Process Management (BPM): The Third Wave (Hardcover)

OK, here's the story on this one: Some obscure mathematician (Milner) has found a way to model the real world by unifying computer algorithms and communications protocols and this has been picked up by an equally obscure open source community (exolab) which founded a standards group (BPMI.org) and tech company (Intalio) who are building a new class of enterprise system (BPMS) which the book claims will be as important as databases. (you see, I can do research) The book, by CSC Index, the reengineering company, claims some new benefits for this process based approach to building business systems. At this point you might have decided not to buy this book. You'd be wrong. What the book describes is one of the most fascinating Biz-Tech new ideas this reader has ever encountered, period. And from the endorsements in the frontis, it looks like this might be a major trend. My best line from the book .... "As Walt Disney once said, objecting to a proposed sequel to his Three Little Pigs cartoon, "You can't top pigs with pigs" In the world of business, stacking a thousand doghouses one atop the other to build a skyscraper is a great proposition for doghouse vendors, but not for future occupants. Skyscrapers need an architecture of their own -- their own paradigm, not a sequel to the doghouse paradigm" Read and enjoy.

21 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Corp 3000 Idea Starter, June 20, 2003

By 

Prof David T Wright (Vancouver, BC) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Business Process Management (BPM): The Third Wave (Hardcover)

...

Aimed at university students, those in business and industry, as well as consulting firms, Business Process Management (BPM) provides answers to achieving operations excellence based upon the best from engineering, computer science and executive management/consulting/practice.

The entertaining and confidently written, content-rich, adequately illustrated, balanced (business: IT) chapters span:
>The next 50 years- forecasting and inevitable uptake of business process management;
>A walk over the hill- taking a helicopter view of functional IT stovepipes shackling business;
>Enterprise business processes- current status, many processes, collaboration, excellence, user-led demand;
>Business process management- lessons learned, from modeling to management;
>Reegineering reengineering- critique of the past (including Davenport, Hammer/Champy);
>Business process outsourcing- new ways to outsource;
>Management theory, ROI and beyond- six sigma, change as a process;
>Tomorrows interview in BPM3.0 magazine- converting the jargon into digestible meaningful chunks; and
>An appendix containing- the language of process; BPM systems; theoretical foundations of BPM; lessons learned from early adopters; and a new MBA curriculum.

Book Strengths:
>condensed review/viewpoint of literally 100s of major transformation approaches over last 2 decades
>endorsed by credible organizations including BPML.org and WfMC
>harsh yet (often) justified criticism of IT industry, and the usefulness of their products in enabling competitive advantage
>BPM based upon main open standards approaches (BPML, UML, SCOR, XML, webservices etc.);
>synergetic (overall enterprise) optimization rather than functional silos
>vision of massively scaleable, fault tolerant, data transaction processing platform linking fuzzy-boundary enterprise with suppliers and customer

Book Weaknesses :
>little supporting evidence to base (any) project upon beyond 29 outline paragraphs of lessons from early adopters in appendices
>reads somewhat like a literature-research thesis based upon analysts and general business press (or with a different perspective) a sales brochure for new consulting services

Overall: a very worthwhile addition as a strategic corporate workshop discussion starter; or supplemental materials for graduate students.