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.

Steve Spear not only lectures at MIT and leads workshops on continuous process improvement throughout the US and Europe, but he has also authored a book on the topic called The High-Velocity Edge. Most interesting is how close Steve gets to his subject; he’s not content to observe from afar. For example, he embedded himself into a Toyota team to develop a tier one supplier and has since then worked with Toyota on supplier leadership development. He worked with a hospital’s clinical staff to eliminate terrible complications like infections and patient falls while increasing capacity and reducing cost; he also helped develop and deploy the Alcoa Business System at Alcoa. Steve’s clients range from healthcare providers to manufacturers to food service companies to high-tech companies — making him conversant in businesses producing everything from potato chips to microchips. As a result, he not only speaks as an academic authority, but can also claim insight into how work gets done in the real world.

Steve will speaking at Forrester’s Business Process Forum, which will be held on September 22 and 23 in Boston, and recently participated in a teleconference with Craig Le Clair and me. You can download that teleconference free of charge here.

What follows is an excerpt from the Forrester report “A Battle Cry For Clarity In Business Process Improvement Approaches.”

Have you ever thought seriously about the future of business processes? If not, it’s time to. With trends coming at us fast and furious — business transformation, the age of the customer, mobility, cloud, social, process outsourcing — processes of the future will look very different from how we work today.

Forrester is in the process (pardon the pun) of looking at business processes in 2020. We’ve interviewed 10 major thought leaders at large global organizations and a number of systems integrators and vendors in the BPM space. Wow, have we learned a lot from these deep thinkers! Many of the trends they identified are already being actively worked on in their companies — so these are not just pipe dreams — and include:

• A major strategic alignment between business process transformation and customer experience
• Very little concern about technology issues — because they believe the technology will work well (and this is not what keeps them up at night even now)
• A major focus on standardizing processes across the globe so that work can easily flow to the lowest-cost labor at any given moment
• The belief that processes will run in the cloud (private or public) and that businesses will consume processes-as-a-platform
• A strong conviction that IT will largely vanish into the business
• The need for access to global talent pools driving some of the need for business process transformation
• The expectation that being dynamic and turning on a dime will be critically important

Today we’re kicking off Forrester’s IT Forum 2011 at The Palazzo in Las Vegas. Prepare for three exciting days of keynote presentations and track sessions focused on business and technology alignment. Use the Twitter widget below to follow the Forum conversation by tracking our event hashtag #ITF11 on Twitter. Attendees are encouraged to tweet throughout the Forum and to tweet any questions for our keynote presenters using the #ITF11 hashtag.

Have you ever heard a business process professional pose these questions?

“How are other organizations managing their BPM efforts?"

"How are their teams structured?"

"Are we like other companies?”

We often hear these types of questions from business process executives who are involved in Forrester’s Business Process Council. To help shed light on how other companies approach BPM, we recently interviewed Business Process Council member Jeff Stone from Cabela’s and asked him to share the story of its BPM program — why it was started, his biggest challenges, and biggest successes.

1. Where are you right now in your BPM journey?

[Jeff Stone] Today we are beginning our BPM journey, but we have already put significant infrastructure in place to support our vision.

2. Is your BPM initiative being driven by a senior executive, from the grassroots, or both?

[Jeff Stone] Our BPM initiative is driven by our Lean Six Sigma Process Improvement Team, which ultimately reports to our COO. We also get strong support from our EA team.

3. What was the catalyst/driver for the creation of your BPM CoE?

[Jeff Stone] Because in our mind BPM is a culture, not just a framework or a system, we felt assembling a cross-functional CoE would provide the best chance of success. This is the reason we combined technical, business, process improvement, and change management expertise in the CoE.

4. How did/do you evangelize the need for a BPM initiative and/or the related change management activities surrounding it?