The Service Portfolio of a BPM Center of Excellence

Managers newly in charge of the setup and delivery of the enterprise-wide Business Process Management (BPM) capabilities in an organization often struggle with the identification of the activities as being part of their role. This paper proposes the productization of BPM as a starting point. A set of fifteen distinct BPM services is described; from this, managers can select the potential services on offer by a centralized BPM Center of Excellence (aka BPM Support Office). A portfolio management approach is suggested to position these services. The approach allows identifying specific normative strategies for each BPM service, such as further training or BPM communication and marketing plans. A public sector case study provides further insights into how this approach can be populated. Typical Stages in BPM Adoption Business Process Management (BPM) has risen in attractiveness for organizations as a holistic management practice dedicated to enabling and sustaining corporate success. The organizationwide implementation of BPM is a challenging task and not trivial. In fact, the enterprise-wide adoption of Business Process Management in organizations typically goes through multiple stages. First, an awareness of the benefits and methodologies of Business Process Management has to occur. In many cases we see a failure to adopt BPM simply because of a lack of a deeper understanding of BPM. This might be explained by the already high activity levels of an organization, its previous commitment to another methodology for organizational engineering or a simple lack of demand for change and improvement. Also, even the BPM proponents in an organization often lack the required comprehensive appreciation of the methodologies, merits, and challenges of BPM. Overall, an inhibiting lack of awareness is often due to lack of training, which, once conducted, is the most promising means of creating, increasing, and maintaining awareness. Second, this awareness and understanding of BPM has to convert into a desire to adopt. This is a critical stage and requires a driver (e.g., a large system implementation or a corporate merger) and a champion, i.e., at least one individual with passion for the idea of BPM. Such drivers and champions can be found in various parts and on alternative layers of the organization. In some cases, IT systems managers build the business cases for BPM while in other cases the desire to adopt BPM is triggered by business improvement teams, HR departments, business stakeholders, such as line managers or chief executives. It remains without a doubt an ongoing challenge for the community that BPM has no classical home in an organization. Third, and assuming the business case was successful, individual BPM projects have to be set up, executed, and monitored, often with the desire to achieve quick win situations that can then be used to market and expand the BPM ideas across an organization. This is typically the phase in which organizations build up BPM capabilities and credibility [1]. It also often means that individuals develop a fascination with BPM, see potential career paths in its development, and take (often unofficial) BPM ownership. Fourth, assuming that individual BPM projects have been successful, organizations seek a wider capitalization on the BPM idea and convert from multiple BPM projects to a governing and typically more centralized BPM program. In this stage, an overall BPM methodology needs to be designed. Methods, techniques, and tools have to be specified, documented, installed, communicated, and maintained. A main challenge in this phase is the design of a BPM strategy