The Rise of the CPO

In the future, Fingar sees more and more companies emulating the business model of Dell, where design, manufacturer, assembly and even customer support are all outsourced. Operational connectivity under this model is not just about organizations and individuals being able to talk to each other, but about organizations being able to orchestrate the operations of an ever-expanding web of suppliers. That will be the real significance of BPM into the future, Fingar says, and that is why CIOs will inevitably morph into CPOs.

"The first thing I would say is that a lot of people who are CIOs today came up through the technical route: they might be Java people at heart. Well, if you want to stay being a Java architect, do what David Chappell suggests: move to Bangalore, because that's where your job is. On the other hand, if you want to do what companies need you to do and work where the budgets are going to grow, you had better get directly involved with process. We've got plenty of applications. You know, we've been doing that for the last 50 years.

"But what's happening now, to do these things I am talking about, requires what I call supra processes - processes that are being created that never existed before and that help companies form these new virtual companies if you will, these new value chains."

Business re-engineering was about using enterprise networks to break down the stovepipes between departments in order to streamline the company. Now companies must use a worldwide network, the Internet, to tear down the stovepipes between companies using different ERP, CRM and CAD/CAM systems. CIOs - or better still the CPOs who should soon replace them - must now learn to build a level of process, an architecture if you will, that allows systems to be re-purposed and extended to build end-to-end business processes across corporations and countries.

Technical skills and programming ability will barely enter into it, Fingar says, and developing the detailed components can still safely be outsourced to the "lowest cost Java shop". What will give the new CPO his or her edge will be the ability to build those custom processes that involve multiple companies - the ones that will distinguish his or her company and give it its competitive edge. When an Exxon Mobil decides to go into the gourmet coffee business, to capitalize on the customer demand created by Starbucks and in order to satisfy the customers who visit its retail outlets, the CPO will be there to build a whole new value chain.

While the focus of BPM vendor offerings today is on machine-to-machine and application-to-application type systems, what is largely missing has been work on human-to-human interaction.

"A lot of people say: 'Oh well, that is workflow'," Fingar says. "Well no, workflow is human-to-machine and it's with predefined flows of work for documents and approval to be flowing around. The breakout area in this whole field is going to be what I call a human interaction management system, which has formal underpinnings for actually bringing together what I call a world wide workspace.

"And I am not talking instant messaging, I'm talking about how people actually work when developing a new product or when they're bidding on complex sales activity to rebuild the World Trade Centre or whatever. There are a number of collaborative activities that go beyond workflow and knowledge management, which I call human interaction management and that is going to be the next envelope pushed in the whole BPM space."

By giving business analysts software to build and manipulate end-to-end processes, companies will dramatically improve response times to routine customer transactions and emerging market demands by bypassing lengthy software development cycles.

Faster Time to Products and Services

A real-time enterprise is agile, Fingar points out; it executes new business strategies when they can deliver the greatest benefit. The CIO, or rather the new incarnation, the CPO, should push analysts and enterprise architects to start with just that kind of business-oriented vision of real time and consider how best to make it happen.

"Business process management systems and methods hold promise as the means of reaching the next threshold - but only if BPM is viewed as something more than just an extension of current software development strategies. Living closer to the development of business strategy, BPM can offer a global perspective on how to integrate cross-functional processes for dynamic execution," he says.

But just as time-based competition does not apply only to the manufacture and distribution of physical goods, becoming a real-time enterprise demands more than fast technology. It depends on how quickly an organization can transform itself or add end-to-end processes to execute new strategies (restructuring time) and the ability to share business events in real time across multiple applications to deliver compelling value to customers (response time).

"A customer order is significant to many business processes. Thus, the faster related processes can be triggered, according to embedded business rules, the more real-time an organization becomes. For example, an order might alert a CRM system to instantly bring forward cross-sell or up-sell opportunities," Fingar says.

"The real-time enterprise isn't just about speedily handling routine transactions. Restructuring time and response time can only be substantially reduced if business processes can be quickly and easily changed. That's why BPM is the real-time trend's cornerstone."

The process-managed enterprise represents a management strategy - not a new killer application technology - that places the business process centre stage as the critical technology abstraction. That means that IT itself must rise to a new level of abstraction to meet the needs of the process-managed enterprise. Indeed, IT must move from the Information Age to the Process Age if it is to enable a company to become a process-based competitor and set the pace of innovation in its industry, Fingar says.

It is indeed prime time for process management to supersede information management as the ultimate goal in the world of business technology.