Gauging Maturity of your BPM Strategy - part 1 / 2
- by Sanjeev Sharma
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In this post I will discuss the essence of maturity assessment
and the business imperative for doing the same in the context of BPM. Social psychology purports that an individual progresses
from being a beginner to an expert in a given activity or task along four
stages of self-awareness:
Unconscious Incompetence where the
individual does not understand or know how to do something and does not
necessarily recognize the deficit and may even deny the usefulness of the
skill.
Conscious Incompetence where the
individual recognizes the deficit, as well as the value of a new skill in
addressing the deficit.
Conscious Competence where the individual understands or
knows how to do something but demonstrating the skill requires explicit
concentration.
Unconscious Competence where the individual has had so much
practice with a skill that it has become "second nature" and
serves as a basis of developing other complementary skills.
We can extend the above thinking to an organization as a
whole by measuring an organization’s level of competence in a specific area or
capability, as an aggregate of the competence levels of individuals it is
comprised of. After all organizations too like individuals, evolve through experience,
develop “memory” and capabilities that are shaped through a constant cycle of learning,
un-learning and re-learning. Hence the key to organizational success lies in developing
these capabilities to enable execution of its strategy in-line with the external
environment i.e. demand, competition, economy etc. However developing a capability
merits establishing a base line in order to
Assess the magnitude of
improvement from past investments
Identify gaps and
short-comings
Prioritize future
investments in the right areas
A maturity assessment is essentially an organizational
self-awareness check that is aimed at depicting the “as-is” snapshot of an
existing capability in-order to guide future investments to develop that
capability in-line with business goals. This effectively is the essence of a
maturity
Organizational capabilities stem through its architecture,
routines, culture and intellectual resources that are implicitly and explicitly
embedded in its business processes. Given that business processes underpin
realization of organizational capabilities, is what has prompted business
transformation and process management efforts. Thus, the BPM capability of an organization needs
to be measured on an on-going basis to ensure delivery of its planned benefits.
In my next post I will describe Oracle’s BPM Maturity
assessment methodology.
