Business Process Management (BPM): The Third Wave

Citation

Prom, C.J. (2003), "Business Process Management (BPM): The Third Wave", The Bottom Line, Vol. 16 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/bl.2003.17016cae.004

Business Process Management (BPM): The Third Wave

Business Process Management (BPM): The Third Wave

Howard Smith and Peter FingarMeghan-KifferTampa, FL2002311 pp.ISBN 0-92965-233-9$39.95 BPR, Database packages

Business Process Management, by Howard Smith and Peter Fingar, is a book that sadly spends a lot of words on relatively few ideas. That most of those ideas are already well worn, or that the often overblown narrative meanders vaguely and with a lack of resolution from one idea to another, does little to ameliorate the problem. Simply put, it cannot be recommended.

The basic premise on which Smith and Fingar stand is that the productivity paradox –’meaning, in this instance, the failure of computerization to produce significant gains in efficiency – is the result of inflexible, data-centric business designs and the ossifying effects of database technologies that cannot be adapted rapidly enough to meet changes in business conditions. They suggest, in turn, that the solution to this set of problems resides with new forms of business process management driven by Process Calculi, "the formal method of computation that underpins dynamic mobile processes, as opposed to static relational data" (p. 20). Yet, there is only one reference, albeit an imprecise one, to these calculi in the entire text. In fact, Smith and Fingar never present a coherently defined view of business process management, much less a rigorous one, leaving the careful reader to wonder if business process management is anything more than efforts to coordinate processes and tasks.

The book is fraught with other, related frustrations for the reader. For example, Smith and Fingar refer repeatedly to the comparative benefits of business process management, suggesting that a process-managed enterprise can make agile course corrections, increase quality, and reduce costs across broad value chains. But they rarely offer specific insights into how such benefits might actually be derived. Even when the book offers something bordering on the distinctive – namely, the notion that relational database technologies, notwithstanding their considerable power, tend to have a straitjacketing effect on how businesses manage data and data-oriented process – the authors fail to pursue the idea with any significant degree of insight or imagination. Yet another basic problem is that Smith and Fingar offer a strangely undifferentiated view of business itself. Purpose and size seem to be irrelevant matters.

Finally, Business Process Management warrants review on a second level, because its publisher, Meghan-Kiffer Press, has issued the book as a password-protected PDF (Adobe Acrobat) document, in addition to the hardcover, and it was this version that was reviewed.

Reading books in digital form is a new and highly varied experience, but it is probably safe to say that the digital reading experience is more satisfying than that of print only when interactive features and/or dynamic effects genuinely enhance the text at issue. For example, John Unsworth, a literary scholar at the University of Virginia, and the founder of the Institute for the Advancement of Technology in the Humanities, has argued compellingly that critical editions rendered in digital formats are far more useful and a far more powerful reading experience than their printed counterparts. Unfortunately, Meghan-Kiffer Press leverages almost none of the dynamic design capabilities that are available today in the digital publishing environment, opting instead for a remarkably unimaginative implementation of the PDF format that ignores most of the design navigational features that Adobe has developed to assist authors and readers. As a result, almost nothing about the digital format is of value to the reader, and at 311 pages (according to the Acrobat Reader), the book is difficult to read. (It is also worth noting that in the version of Business Process Management that was sent to me for review, printing was disabled.) Meghan-Kiffer's digital presentation of Business Process Management would be disappointing under any circumstances, but because they have positioned themselves as a digital publisher serving the business community and business education, it is fair to ask if that stance is anything more than a marketing ploy.

Christinger TomerAssociate Professor, School of Information Sciences, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, USA