My colleague, Principal Analyst Derek Miers, wrote something so significant in an email today that it gave me pause:

“It’s all about helping the executive understand the causal relationship between customer (success), process (how it gets done), and business results (revenue growth, profit, and sustainability of the business model). They are all tied up together.”

I could even see the picture in my mind:

Yet all too often CIOs and other business process leaders focus on getting the business process right and explaining business process methodologies to others. They use many comfortable and familiar terms, like:

• Process improvement
• Process excellence
• Process quality
• Business process management
• BPM suites
• Business process transformation
• Lean
• Six Sigma/Lean Six Sigma
• Or even: swim lanes, BPMN, process models, roundtripping, and so forth.