Business Process Pros Hold The Key To 21st Century Business Transformation

Many companies engage in business process transformation without understanding the profiles of the executives charged with bringing these initiatives to success and without clear, formal role descriptions for the business process professionals involved in the projects. Today's business process transformation mantle dictates the need for six roles that span the gap between traditional IT and business functions: stakeholders, change agents, gurus, prodigies, wannabes, and operators. Our research shows that these six role profiles fall across three types of organizations: companies with immature BPM practices, those aspiring to continuously improve or transform their business processes, and mature companies that have achieved process excellence through established approaches like Lean and Six Sigma. Taken collectively, business process professionals' jobs and responsibilities are in transition because of the shift from IT to business technology (BT) — largely moving from a traditional IT supplier role into BPM practices fully integrated into the business, and with a heavy focus on increasing the overall process skills up and down the organization.