Identify specific value sources. BPM investments are often justified on their ability to reduce costs and improve decision-making. Such justifications have two fundamental flaws. The first is that BPM systems don't always save companies money. While they may reduce the time managers spend on activities such as budgeting and reporting, the end result is simply freeing up their time for other activities; spending isn't reduced just by taking away 5 percent of the activities performed by managers. The second flaw is that the BPM champion doesn't specify how BPM will improve decision-making. He or she doesn't identify which decisions BPM can be expected to influence or define the value associated with changing how those decisions are made.

Nevertheless, BPM can generate real value by coordinating decision-making and resource allocation across functional boundaries. A classic example of this is in accounts payable and accounts receivable. In many cases, a large proportion of work performed in these functions entails fixing errors caused by "upstream activities" in other areas of the company. These non-value-added activities are typically required because people outside of A/P and A/R are making functionally-focused decisions about how work should be done or how problems should be resolved, without considering the impact on the organization as a whole.

BPM provides three capabilities that can help organizations influence decision-making and thereby streamline cross-functional execution. First, it can measure process performance, as shown in exhibit 1, in a manner that presents information from a broader business-process perspective. Second, it can be used to establish performance measures that focus people from different functions (such as purchasing, receiving, and accounts payable) on broader business-process objectives. Third, it provides the means to establish formal budgetary and performance accountability (e.g., productivity, service, and quality objectives) for end-to-end process measures.

These three BPM capabilities create value by improving how organizations coordinate cross-functional activities. In fact, the absence of these capabilities is one of the primary reasons why organizations fail to fully achieve the objectives of Total Quality Management (TQM), ERP, and CRM programs; BPM can even help organizations realize the untapped value of investments in such programs. BPM champions should look for specific situations in which performance management capabilities can produce ROI. Shared-service functions, such as customer call centers, human resources, and IT are often a good place to start.

Individualize BPM's benefits. One of the keys to getting people to change is to clearly answer the question: What's in it for me? If they agree to be more open and honest about performance and budgets, what rewards will a new management process offer them in return?

A good place to start is with one problem that affects people everywhere: difficulty managing expectations. For example, as budgets are reduced in shared-service functions, the departments are often expected to maintain existing service levels despite having fewer employees. Because the company does not explicitly link budgets and service-level targets in terms that are meaningful and relevant to internal customers, the organization's expectations become skewed. Others within the company may develop the perception that the shared-service center's costs are too high and service levels too low. The net result is stress for both managers and employees.

BPM can help address this problem by structuring planning and performance measurement processes around service definitions that are meaningful and relevant to internal customers. For example, IT functions often express costs and performance measures in terms of service definitions such as help desk, desktop support, and hardware repair. BPM can be used to express performance in terms of different types of users. Employees using desktop computers with a standard configuration are likely to require completely different resources from those using laptops remotely with nonstandard configurations. BPM can explicitly link user-oriented costs to performance measures that demonstrate objectively, on an ongoing basis, the service levels the department is providing to internal customers.

Clearly, BPM software's ability to quantify costs and performance in this manner can promote more explicit dialogue between shared-service managers, their internal customers, and senior executives about how budgetary constraints affect service-level targets. BPM champions who explain this ability to the managers and employees in the company's shared-service functions will have a much better chance of enlisting those people's support of the initiative.

Define the change. One thing that is often overlooked is that BPM creates significant and sustainable business value only when people change how they make decisions and how they behave. BPM champions need to develop (and disseminate) a management-process vision that defines clear linkages with strategic objectives. For example, an organization's vision may include the following objectives: to increase the company's customer focus by managing customers' expectations about service-level objectives, to improve its agility by reducing the cycle time of the budgeting process from three months to two weeks, and to empower employees by promoting a business-owner mentality and equipping them to manage their own budgetary and service objectives.

Once the vision is clear, BPM champions need to define the specific changes required to achieve it. Exhibit 2 (below) provides examples of such changes. The problem for many organizations is that they focus too heavily on the technological gaps and not enough on behavioral ones. What is often forgotten is that successful BPM programs are 80 percent emotional and 20 percent technical -- not the other way around. Experience shows that when organizations don't clearly define what they're attempting to change, those affected by the change will make assumptions, and those assumptions will often be incorrect. The result: Getting buy-in for BPM becomes difficult because the project faces change barriers.