very nice read, infact a pioneer book in this field

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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

• Amazon Sales Rank: #115719 in Books
• Published on: 2006-10-15
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 312 pages

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.

About the Author
Howard Smith is Chief Technology Officer (Europe) of Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC) and co-chair of the Business Process Management Initiative. With more than 24 years in the IT industry, he is a sought after speaker and advisor. His work in predicting and shaping technology at the intersection with business led him to take an active role in the development and application of the third wave. He is currently researching the application of business process management to corporate sustainability, innovation and growth, for which he has global research and development responsibility at CSC.

Peter Fingar is an Executive Partner with the digital strategy firm, the Greystone Group. He delivers keynotes world wide and is author of the best-selling books, "The Death of 'e' and the Birth of the Real New Economy" and "Enterprise E-Commerce." Over his 30-year career he has taught graduate and undergraduate computing studies and held management, technical, consulting and advisory positions with GTE Data Services, American Software and Computer Services, Saudi Aramco, EC Cubed, Noor Advanced Technologies, the Technical Resource Connection division of Perot Systems and IBM Global Services.

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Customer Reviews

This really could be a breakthrough
One could be forgiven for approaching books declaring themselves to be a breakthrough with some scepticism, but I think in this book the authors may really be on to something highly significant, for both IT and business administration.

The first part of the book is an interesting review of the development of management theory as it relates to business processes. I found this useful and relatively easy to read and it would make a helpful source for management students.

However, the gold is buried in the later chapters. Here, the authors develop their thinking about how business processes could be computerised in a radically new way. They discuss modelling business processes themselves, as processes, in a computer system. Such process management systems would form the building blocks of truly electronic commerce in the same way that database management systems enabled large scale electronic data manipulation.

In so doing process management systems would allow, for the first time, the creation of truly computer assisted business administration. This book describes what really could be the next big thing in both IT and business administration by creating a synthesis of both disciplines.

A book about the expected organizational revolution in the management of business processes
This book makes a case about the benefits and the expected revolution that business process management (BPM) will bring to organizations.

This could probably make a good consultant case to sell to organizations. As an aid for someone interested in business process management however the book is not very clearly written. Many things seem to be repeated from chapter to chapter, which makes reading difficult as one moves along. However, I pressed to finish the book, as it contained some islands of useful information regarding BPM.

The authors need to rethink the structure of the book. It would help if a summary of each chapter with the main ideas and contributions also existed. There is also very litte mentioning of Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA) and their link with BPM, clearly if you want to sell BPM you have to have agile and interoperable services which you can turn into processes.

I give the book 3 stars instead of 1 or 2 as it does contain some important and useful information regarding BPM. I do not give it any higher however because of the rather poor explanation of those concepts in many places.

WHY, more than a HOW
Pressured by forces such as globalization and commoditization, companies of today need to be able to respond to ever faster changing market conditions both proactively and reactively. And since business processes is the business, companies must adopt some kind of business process management. Business processes becomes the "unit of work" that businesses must deal with. This essentially the message in this highly interesting book by Smith and Fingar.

The nirvana of BPM third wave is the situation where the business analyst can redesign a business process, simulate the new process, and then move the new process to production in the IT-systems by himself. In this way "the business" becomes empowered and the divide between IT and business is not just bridged, but simply obliterated!

A central theme of the book is how silo-based application architecture is a major problem in creating agile companies. Business processes are being too tightly coupled to the individual applications, that were never designed for participating in end-to-end business processes . The authors also points out, that the current application integration paradigm is overly data-centric, focusing more on moving data back and forth between systems, rather than enabling the use of functionality across business processes. The current application stack paradigm must be eliminated in order to realize their vision of BPM.

It's not surprising that the authors spends quite a bit of energy on trying differentiate third wave BPM from previous reengineering methods such as BPR (which had spectacular failure rates of 70-80%) or ERP implementations (which gave companies the flexibility of a large rock). The third wave is differentiated by being more incremental than the big-bang reengineering attempts of the 1990's, as well as it's heavy reliance on information technology not just in supporting the business, but also in managing the business processes. While the criticism of earlier reengineering attempts is very thorough and fair (although heavy handed at times), the authors does not attempt to "eat their own dog food" by criticizing their own flavour of BPM.

The Good:

The book is very well written and lays out a compelling vision on how the business can be empowered. Great description of the problems facing companies today and convincing arguments on the importance of business process management. Finally, a very good description of the problems faced with the current application stack architecture. Gets IT right.

The Bad:

The book is not overly burdened by reflective self-criticism (which happens to be a problem with most business literature). Statements such as "in the third wave companies will be much more savvy at..." and "we can take the technology for granted as good enough" are not uncommon. Too often the text reads like a sales brochure. This does detract from the value of the book, especially as the authors does not really attempt to argue or investigate the underpinnings of third wave BPM.

Overall:

Despite the criticism it's still a great book. It's more a WHY book than a HOW book. If you are looking for the nitty gritty implementation details, this is not the one to look for. But for what the book does, it does very well. The book serves well as a primer on BPM as well as a vision on how BPM should be.