BPM Celebrities in San Francisco next week

PEX BPM Summit USA San Francisco

Global Top BPM Speakers

 

Michael Brown
Director, Process Improvement and Service Quality
TD CanadaTrust

 

Clay Richardson
Principal Analyst
Forrester Research

 

Atul Bhatt
Vice President, Business Architecture
Wells Fargo

 

Carol Guedez
Global Head, Quality & Efficiency
Orange Business Services

 

Mallikarjun Angalakudati
Director, Meter-to-Cash Process
National Grid

 

Matthew Morgan
Head of Business Systems & Improvement
Bridgewater Associates

 

Vinod Jain
Vice President, Transformation Strategist
BNY Mellon

 

Paul Harmon
Executive Editor, Business Process Trends
Chief Methodologist, BPTrends Associates

 

Elizabeth Johnson
Director, Process
Capital One Bank

 

John B. Bertolet
Director, Global Process Management
Schneider Electric

 

Richard Whitehead
Chief Operating Officer
CSL Software Solutions Inc

 

Ian Clayton
Author USMBOK™ , Senior Vice President, Operations
G2G3 Americas

 

Adam Golden
Principal and Founder
Major Oak Consulting

 

Steve Towers
SVP and Founder
BPGroup.org

 

Lawrence D. (Larry) Duckworth
Principal
BusinessExcel, LLC Author of Primordial Leadership©

 

Dan Roberts
Director of Product Marketing
Software AG

 

Neil Nobie
BPM Practice Leader
KEDARit

Download the Agenda

Download the Brochure

 

Process Excellence in Africa - keynote presentation

The second global Process Excellence conference completed this week in Cape Town, South Africa. The IQPC team are noted for their organisation and excellent speaker profiles and this event was a great example of the very latest thinking, in depth technical reviews and guidance for Process people throughout Africa.

Highly recommended for any conference the next in the global series Europe with London in April. You can review that event here: http://bit.ly/PEXLondon2012


The following is Steve Towers presentation which examines how some organisations seem to defy the recession and achieve ongoing success for their customers, employees and shareholders.
It looks like magic until you know the trick!

Steve towers process excellence _africa_2012_cape_town

View more presentations from Steve Towers.

Successful Customer Outcomes & Process Excellence

Creating Successful Customer Outcomes (SCO's) must begin with the understanding that process is a means to an end, not an end of itself. I do not want a doctor, a medical or a diagnosis. What I need is to get well.

We also should avoid another trap. That is capturing requirements on the solution rather than describing customer needs. All the customer focus groups, surveys and quality reviews are looking at current stuff, not on the SCO. Therefore they are limited and may even completely derail customer delivery, sometimes with tragic consequence.

Processes that clearly align with SCO's achieve five times the success rate of processes that have a poor fit with customer need.

The Future of Business Process Part 2: Outside-In, Lean Six Sigma, BPM and all that....

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“Not everything old is bad and antiquated and not everything new is shiny and good. The real secret to success is to combine the best of both.”
Rene Carayol (left),  Senior Executive & Former Board Member for Pepsi, Marks & Spencer, IPC Media & The Inland Revenue

The world's leading companies have come to realize that only when their customers are successful, will they be successful. In pursuit of their market leadership not only they need to spend time to look inside their business to know how things are getting done but also look outward to get deep understanding of their customers.

Process has indeed come a long way from it humble routes amidst the early industrial revolution and Adam Smiths ‘Wealth of Nations’.

Although many in Western economies are (still) in a state of denial, we are undergoing the greatest reorganization in the business world since the Industrial Revolution. No matter what industry you are in, no matter how successful you are, it's time to get ready for the world as it will be --a world where your customers have new choices from a sea of suppliers from across the globe. Peter Fingar   Author of Extreme Competition: Innovation and the Great 21st Century Business Reformation

One of the first people to describe process was Smith who in 1776 describes a new way for process in a Scottish pin factory. He outlines the production methods and created one of the first objective and measureable enterprise process designs. The consequence of 'labour division' in Smith’s example resulted in the same number of workers making 240 times as many pins as they had been before the introduction of his innovation.

Adam Smith participated in a revolution that transformed the planet. He lived at a time when the confluence of factors, political change, emergence of the New World, industrialization and a new optimism that the world could move from the shackles of the past.


In heralding a movement that developed into Scientific Management the foundation was laid that established a way of working that has survived and thrived for 200 years.


And yet now, more than ever, is a time to perhaps take a careful glance back to the past to guide the way for not only surviving the current economic turmoil but to also prepare us to thrive in the seismic shifts of the 21st century ‘new world’ order where the customer has become central to everything we do.


Leading global corporations are now evolving their tried and tested approaches into methods suited to the changed challenges of customer promiscuity, globalisation, IT innovation and the Prosumer. That is the essence of what we call Outside-In.

"The Customer Experience is the Process"
Outside-In can really be summarised in the statement that “the customer experience is the process”.  We can no longer just look within our organisation boundary to create a sustainable competitive advantage. We have to extend our scope and embrace a broader view of optimising process by understanding, managing and developing customer expectations and the associated experience. We need to articulate Successful Customer Outcomes and let those guide our product and service development as we move beyond the limiting scope of silo pyramidal based left to right thinking.

In 2006 BP Group Research identified the ‘Evolution of Approaches’ and how steps can be taken to grow Lean Six Sigma’s influence and success into a strategic Outside-In toolkit. In fact the last 4 years are seeing the fruition of these advances with Best in Class 2009 & 2010 Award winners PolyOne, a dyed in the wool Lean outfit, advancing their stock price six fold in 18 months on the back of radical and innovative changes across its customer experience.

Some see Outside-In as the death knell for approaches such as for old style BPM, BPR, TQM and Lean Six Sigma. This is not so. This narrow and simplistic view does not acknowledge the stepping stones available to embrace the new customer centric order. In fact the foundations of our futures are always laid on the learnings of the past with those innovators who recognise the need to evolve leading that charge.

Victory will go to the brave who seize the moment and push forward their approaches into the brave new world of Outside-In. The sector leaders have set a precedent - can you embrace the challenge?

All the Best, Steve

* * *

If you wish to read and listen more on this theme the following references are useful.
Join the community discussing these issues, challenges and opportunities.

	Community and social networking – Join the BP Group	LinkedIn	http://bit.ly/joinbpgroup
	Outside-In The Secret of the 21st Centuries leading companies	Book	http://bit.ly/OutsideInApple http://amzn.to/Outside-In
	Interview Harvard Business Review with HBS Professor Ranjay Gullati	Video	http://bit.ly/RanjayOutside-In
	Interview Wharton Business School with WBS Professor George Day	Video	http://bit.ly/WhartonGeorgeDay
	Interview Affecto University with Steve Towers	Video	http://bit.ly/SteveTowersOutside-In
	Interview by Megan James (IQPC)	Video	http://bit.ly/MeganJamesOutside-In
	Downloadable keynotes and slide shows	Presentations	http://www.slideshare.net/stowers/
	Professional – Certified Process Professional program	Qualifications	http://www.bpmbox.com
	Don’t give customers what they think they want - Steve Towers	Article	http://bit.ly/3xUIn4
	Evolution of Process Excellence Approaches - BP Group	Research	http://bit.ly/Fw5Kv
	Outside-In - Interview with Blog Radio’s Gienn Weiss	Podcast	Outside-In (15 mins)
	The Best Performing companies Millward Optimoor	Research	http://bit.ly/uAyVW
	UPCOMING CONFERENCES ON THE THEME OF PROCESS EXCELLENCE, ENTERPRISE BPM AND OUTSIDE-IN	Resources	http://linkd.in/EventsOutside-In

The future of Business Process. What is your take?

Forrester and Gartner, those behemoths of Business Research, are battling for the mindspace associated with that question at the moment.

Forrester leader Connie Moore has just posted the current trends, based on latest research with "10 major thought leaders at large global organizations" and include the following seven points:

• A major strategic alignment between business process transformation and customer experience
• Very little concern about technology issues — because they believe the technology will work well (and this is not what keeps them up at night even now)
• A major focus on standardizing processes across the globe so that work can easily flow to the lowest-cost labor at any given moment
• The belief that processes will run in the cloud (private or public) and that businesses will consume processes-as-a-platform
• A strong conviction that IT will largely vanish into the business
• The need for access to global talent pools driving some of the need for business process transformation
• The expectation that being dynamic and turning on a dime will be critically important

What I will say is that for those of us busy linking Successful Customer Outcomes (SCO) with process for the last several years that first point is no great surprise. Mind you I can also think of some supposed major thought leaders who are still blind to the reason why all our jobs exist - the customer. Aligning everything we do to SCO's is about connecting the dots between every task and activity all the way to the customer. Jeff Bezos (Amazon) refers to it as 'working backwards' aka Outside-In.

I certainly give the thumbs up to Forrester for this efforts, especially since the next couple of weeks sees a couple of Forrester hosted webinars to share their views. Interestingly now Gartner will have to respond otherwise they will see themselves as sidelined into little more than the technical aspects of BPM.

Go read Connie Moores blog at: http://bit.ly/BusinessProcess2020

Do you agree with the points Forrester is making? Contribute to the LinkedIn thread on this theme at:

http://linkd.in/BusinessProcessFutures

Recommended Upcoming 'be there' events to meet, share and learn:

BPM Leaders hosted by PEX: 

Amsterdam – October 20-21: http://bit.ly/rhqLHP
Leaders Blog http://bit.ly/p6AIuI 

MasterClass (Led by Steve Towers)
Barcelona - October 3-7 - Certified Process Professional & Master: http://bit.ly/MastersInBarcelona

BPGROUP CONFERENCE IN ASSOCIATION

WITH IQPC – PEX 2010
Lake Buena Vista, Florida - Jan 16-19: http://bit.ly/PEX2012