Rating: 
Summary: Controversial yes, but BPM's "third wave" rocks
Review: I first came across this book as an excerpt in Darwin Magazine. It immediately hit home. Business Process Management - the third wave" is NOT only aimed at experienced business leaders scouting the economic horizon, its for everyone as its themes are universal--in business and in IT. The book is certainly NOT buzzword heavy, in fact the authors go to extreme lengths to make sure they dont talk down to non-technical readers. As they say, managing the processes of a company is about business AND technology (period). Smith and Fingar have made it UNDERSTANDABLE to BUSINESS PEOPLE for the first time (imho) WHY their IT systems often let them down and what they can do about it. Appendices are provided for people who want to geek out. But how Celia can say the book is abrasive beats me. It is so friendly, but at the same time focussed and inspirational. (Peter and Howard - I love the Zen stuff). Yes, they talk about "technology gods" and "cast in concrete" data stovepipes, but that's REALITY guys, that's WHY there is a business-IT divide today and why the third wave BPM could move us all forward, whether we are on the business side of the house or the IT side. I'm an obsessive process architect. These guys have hit the nail on the head. Its true that Smith and Fingar lament the disruptive and "painful reengineering second wave advocated by their former colleague, James Champy." (Champy was CSC, Smith is CSC, for those who dont know). Well, as I said in my comments at Darwin, it looks like the industry is finally moving on and I am simply AMAZED at the clarity of the analysis in the Reengineering Chapter as to how modern BPM systems can now DO what the reengineering guys said they wanted to but gave no solution, other than to employ expensive consultants. Its just plain SILLY for Celia to say that what Smith and Fingar hope to achieve is to "cut IT entirely out of the business change loop". That's not what they say at all. They show how IT can provide BPM capabilities so that business people are EMPOWERED to manage their own affairs. The only thing that Celia says that IS correct is that "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." As I said at Darwin, its refreshing to see processes coming back center stage, but this time with TEETH. The books controversial elements may be missed by some readers, but will be understood by those that have REALLY worked at the intersection of business and IT. Clue, read the Epilog. --- Yours truly, a frustrated (with data) business process analyst just starting to get some understanding of the potential of the third wave.
Rating: 
Summary: Lots of proselytizing, little guidance
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Lots of proselytizing, little guidance
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: A little old, a little borrowed, very little new
Review: I spent many years as a manager and business consultant. I am now doing a little consulting in my retirement years. I bought this BPM book when it first became available. I read about 50 pages and was unimpressed. Recently, thinking I should spend more time "keeping up," I picked it up again.
My reaction today remains the same: for me not worth reading. After reading recent reviews here by YingAsReader and "slimeddy" I better understand why it is not worth my time. "Proselytizing" as "slimeddy" writes, says a lot of the story. This book reminds me of the hard selling "you've got to get with the quality revolution" books that were so popular in the 1970's. They told why American management is "backward" and broadly described the potential of TQM and other formulas. They also told nothing of the "how." As YingAsReader writes "the 'why' and the 'how' are missed."
If you've somehow missed the points:
Business, life and the universe are moving (process). There are no safe, static havens. In management the old functional "silos" (production, systems, finance, etc.) are gone. We finally understand business as process rather than
a world of feudal domains.
Digitalization has made offer, acceptance, and contract execution "lickety split" fast, world-wide. Therefore we must
grasp, integrate and innovate quicker than ever.
Like the troops on the high ground, the business person who has the highest, and broadest view of what is going on has the advantage.
"Taking the high ground" in business today requires that you speak the latest "biztech" language, reflecting your clear understanding of the concepts involved, so that you may
adapt them intelligently to your specific business.
And while your doing all this be sure to keep in touch with the customer.
This is all good advice but not exactly new.
Gene Stickley
Rating:
Summary: Correct thinking about IT
Review: Nicholas Carr's article in the Harvard Business Review has taken the backlash wave from the IT overspend in the 1990s to spin a sensational story, a story that some rebuttals have called "dangerous," for it distorts the role of IT in creating competitive advantage. Companies are indeed struggling with the issue of IT's role, and it is difficult to break out of existing misconceptions of IT. This is evident in David Forbes' review of this book. He seems so locked into his perceptions that he distorts what the book actually says. For example, he says the Smith & Fingar's vision is that of expensive ERP sysems of the past. He must be so busy railing against ERP systems that he failed to actually read the book's related discussions that are in fact in agreement with him. And, about Forbes' comments about usability... did he actually read the section on amenity? Again, agreement. The point is that when it comes to IT, many people bring much baggage to the subject, for IT means many things to many people and is an emotiaonally charged subject for those with a particular stake in IT. Many read a book like this and filter it through their individual bias to the point where they distort what the book actually says. As a business manager using the book to foster discussion in our company, I suggest readers go through it twice: once quickly with their defensive mechanizms in place, and then again with a keen eye on what the IT issues portend for their company going forward. We are doing precisely that in our company and find the book to be the focal point of our deliberations, for it covers all the key issues of the past and those setting the stage for the future. Correct thining about IT, not preconcieved notions or turf bias, is essential for companies to move forward, for as the book says, IT is not about the past fity years of business automation and its inherent limitations, IT is about a "change in kind" in business automation where the focus is not on data and record keeping, but on the way business is conducted. And yes, the authors totally agree that usibility is key to that, for it's business people who must manage their own business processes.
Rating:
Summary: Most Fascinating Biz-Tech Idea
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: A brilliant, practical vision of 21st century companies
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Missed being at the lead of the last revolution? 2nd chance!
Review: Remember reading about Codd and Date's RDB theory and wishing you had been there at the start? Most of us just read about innovations after they've occurred. Rarely do we get to take an active role. This book provides all the ingredients for those who want to get involved in what could be an extraordinary new phase of business development. Read this one now!
Rating:
Summary: Pure Fecal Matter - a Waste of paper, ink, and time
Review: This book is horrendous. The whole concept of BPM and all the consultant idiots who run aound extolling its virtues are just a bunch of people trying to seize the next silver bullet of IT. BPM has nothing to do with implementation and has everything to do with spending money on crap. Isn't this just workflow revisited. There are no silver bullets. If you see anyone on your staff reading this crap, talking about this crap, or trying to get you to buy this crap, fire them immediately before they become a cancer to your organization and ruin any chance of getting even one iota of work completed. BPM is pure pie-in-the-sky garbage.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent BPM primer
Review: 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.
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