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

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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.

Product Description

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.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 311 pages
• Publisher: Meghan-Kiffer Press; 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: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (24 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #371,834 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

90 of 100 people found the following review helpful:

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

By	"slimeddy" (San Francisco, CA United States) - See all my reviews

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.

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent BPM primer, December 21, 2002

By	Roy Massie (Birmingham, AL United States) - See all my reviews

This is a well-written and useful book about leading edge enterprise business technology. I work in workflow systems development and I think this book provides a thorough yet practical vision of the next generation of business process systems. This book will likely launch a thousand ships with many winners among them. You do not have to be highly technical to get a lot from this book. In fact, it is written for business managers who have some sense of enterprise IT and its impact, both good and bad, in corporations. The authors rightly emphasize some of the current failings in IT and stress that much of the problem is the inflexibility of systems to adapt in the rapidly changing climate of business. Managers need to have control of the overall business processes to adjust quickly, but cannot because business processes are often "baked" into existing IT applications. The authors point to many examples in business history and in current pioneering efforts to show that managing business processes is a determinative factor of success. While this may sound obvious, the solution offered is potentially profound. Business Process Management Systems, or BPMS, are already being sold and deployed in real life environments and yielding benefits. While the authors admit that their full vision will only be realized in the decades to come, there is much that can begin today. Since the book is not highly technical, the authors do not address some of the hairier issues in systems integration (entity ontology for example) but they do outline their key assumptions such as the requirement for legacy integration (one time per system) and the pressing need for business process engineering/analysts. They also assume widespread adoption of a single process definition language. This will of course happen but probably not until after the various players try to sway the market towards their own standards. There are very good appendixes for the technical person and business manager alike. I love the book and recommend it highly. This book is short, insightful and packed with information from a variety of disciplines that are woven together to support the authors' primary assertions about IT for the coming decade(s). What is exotic today could well become a necessity tomorrow.

15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Revenge of the non-technical business manager, January 19, 2003

By	Celia Redmore "Celia Redmore" - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

"Business Process Management - the third wave" is aimed at experienced business leaders scouting the economic horizon. The book is buzzword heavy and assumes a great deal of prior knowledge. Terms like lambda calculus, process calculi, PKI, six sigma and BPML are scattered throughout and not generally explained. The authors make a rather poor attempt at explaining Business Process Modeling Language (BPML), which lies at the heart of BPM (BPML is similar in format to XML and generates flowcharts), but otherwise you're on your own.

The overall tone of the book is abrasive. Smith and Fingar rail against "technology gods" and "cast in concrete" data stovepipes. They lament the disruptive and "painful reengineering" second wave advocated by their former colleague, James Champy. They see the main differentiator of BPM as being its ability to connect outwards to partner businesses.

What Smith and Fingar hope to achieve with business process engineering is to cut IT entirely out of the business change loop. They envisage being able to completely describe all business processes in BPML diagrams - down to the "Coke" machine's inputs (coins) and outputs (cans of soda). This way, business managers need never deal with IT folk again, and they can outsource entire processes by exposing the relevant sections of BPML to subcontractors.

It's truly hard to tell from the book how much of this is blue sky and how much is part of the trend already underway. Either way it behooves anyone who might be in a position to benefit from BPM -- or to get trampled by the BPM steamroller -- to familiarize themselves with the subject.