Most BPM practitioners already know that social networks and analytics play an important role in today’s BPM suites. Here’s how:

• Social BPM provides an effective way to bring more workers into process discovery. This is true both for the “as-is” phase and, more importantly, for the “to-be” effort. The result? More voices are heard and more knowledge gets captured, providing better insights into process improvement and transformation. This leads to more buy-in from workers. Plus, companies can go to social BPM sites, like IBM Blueworks Live, and share process best practices, frameworks, and code with others outside their company. In short, social BPM helps expand the inputs during process discovery.
• Analytics provide performance metrics and KPIs during the optimization phase. This gives business and IT leaders more insight into operations. For example, the business can quickly spot bottlenecks and take action, monitor customer service levels, track how top-tier customers are served, and determine if SLAs are met. Using analytics to monitor performance greatly enhances the value of BPMS from the executive perspective.

My “Stuck in Cement” research is up on Forrester.com today. I have to say, I really wrestled with the title. It’s just incorrect to say “stuck in cement,” because technically cement is only the active ingredient and needs to be mixed with sand and water to make concrete. So it should be “stuck in concrete,” although somehow this doesn’t quite sound right. But really, who but a chemist would lose sleep over this or even catch the distinction? The real issue is whether packaged apps really are a barrier to innovation at this point — or does our research just reflect the high level of frustration that our clients feel trying to manage technology in a world changing so quickly?

The basic idea is that industry-specific or packaged apps — and these are currently mostly on-premises applications — aligned with organizational silos have worked well for well-defined, highly structured processes where volume, scale, and straight-through processing dominate system design. But these apps are difficult to change, appear increasingly less relevant, and form a barrier to innovation for companies in fast-moving industries like energy, healthcare, and financial services now facing advancing consumer technologies that threaten business as usual.

Happy New Year! As we kick off 2012, I’d like to reflect on what was accomplished during the past year in the “trusted data” areas of master data management (MDM), data quality (DQ), and data governance and consider what we might expect in the year to come. I also hear quite a bit of noise from vendors and analysts alike about what they want the MDM market to be in 2012, so I wanted to share my thoughts on what’s real and what (in my opinion) remains hype. 

I also just completed Forrester’s December 2011 Global MDM Survey of 274 MDM professionals. While the majority of those results will be shared in the annual MDM Trends research that I’ll be publishing later in Q1, here’s a taste of some of the intriguing results.

Let’s first reflect on what I’ve witnessed from my clients’ MDM journeys throughout 2011:

• Data governance remained a challenge. In the abovementioned MDM survey, only 20% responded that they have a high or very high level of data governance maturity, indicating that significant work remains. But on the positive side, I’m witnessing increasing business sponsorship and prioritization, which has helped many organizations pilot programs to cut their teeth and build some repeatable processes, foundational policies, and early measurements to start building a case to increase data governance investment and momentum.
• Multidomain MDM hit its stride. User interest in multidomain MDM strategies has finally caught up with vendors’ product capabilities and messaging. In Forrester’s MDM Survey, 47% responded that the scope of their MDM programs include more than two data domains to master, while another 9% are focused on dual-domain solutions (e.g, customer and product).

Social media are the intelligence powering modern marketing. Not only is the Twittersphere dominated by marketers keen on the promotional power of social channels, but it seems everybody in the marketing profession everywhere is obsessed with this new world of ubiquitous chitchat.

Everybody comments on social media analytics, so what I’m saying here isn’t news to most of you. But I recently stopped to ponder what’s truly disruptive about social media’s role in the modern economy. And then it hit me. From the dawn of marketing, we’ve always hunted and gathered customer intelligence, using massive amounts of sweat equity to bag the beast. Before social media emerged, market research was almost always labor-intensive. No matter who you were — enterprise, agency, consultant, analyst, etc. — you had to put your nose to the proverbial research grindstone. You conducted panels, surveys, focus groups, interviews, field studies, usability testing, case studies, literature searches, and the like. Most of the intelligence-gathering burden was on you, with the subject of your studies — the customer — either putting in less effort or not having to lift a finger at all.