Business Processes Counter-Culture

The Enterprise Application Pipeline at Techweb has picked up an interesting analysis from Forrester Group on the effectiveness of ERP and Business Process redesign in large organizations. The results are not flattering to organizations that spend millions of dollars deploying ERP and other cross functional systems (think CRM, SCM, etc). This should be familiar to developers in the Enterprise space. Just as happened with groupware, knowledge management , project portfolio management – the success rate and ROI for ERP or Web Service inspired BPM is considerably diminished by organizations inability to setup effective business process and workflow systems that effectively cross functional boundaries and constituencies.

EAP-EnterpriseAppPipeline notes: ” The problem is often one of business culture, and not only one of technology, according to Forresters Miller. Companies are simply not ready to encourage or allow the functions to morph into cross-functions and into processes, Miller writes. With all the talk there has been about processes, there hasnt been enough movement toward them. “ In effect, EAP is frank about the management problems that are will beset development teams attempting to install SOA-Service Oriented Architectures and BPM – Business Process Management systems. The challenges will be as much social/political culture and management of change as technical implementation difficulties. Check out other “no-punches pulled” EAP articles here.