Gartner pushes business process management as a core skill

Businesses that prioritise Business Process Management (BPM) as a core skill will vastly outperform those that don't as the gap between companies that take advantage of the benefits it offers looks set to widen by 2014, according to Gartner.

Research director at Gartner John Dixon said the firm expects to see more businesses focus on making business process improvement (BPI) a core competency in the coming years and noted that intense engagement is crucial to deriving benefits.

"Organisations are realising that it's not enough to just focus on product delivery but you have to consider the entire business process from start to end giving a holistic view of the organisation to help meet customer requirements," he told V3.co.uk.

"As such the use of BPM software will grow in the coming years but firms need to make sure their staff are trained to use it to take control of their own business processes so the entire business is agile and can change dynamically."

He warned too that a failure to properly engage with BPM software will have a negative impact on businesses by intensifying the, "devastating consequences from public exposure of process weakness".

"If you don't have full end-to-end insight in to your business processes you are not aware of where you are taking risks and so you are not able to carry out proper risk assessments which could create a lot of damage to the business," he explained.

As such Dixon argued that businesses need to ensure they make staff aware of BPM technologies and create organisational competencies that create business process excellence among staff.

"Ultimately BPM is not about the technology itself but about enabling staff in the organisation to have the skill sets and the ability to be able to manage processes within the organisation," he explained.

He also said they needed to invest in the area, with dedicated business process analysts as well as purchasing the necessary tools and techniques that will help workers analyse and improve processes.

Gartner also said it expects the BPM industry to try and create certification schemes as the area matures and roles become more defined, but said it could be a while before this happens so businesses need to focus on in-house certification processes