Procesos

Service Process Management
Several years ago, Brett Champlin, a founder of abpmp.org, piqued my interest in service science and its applicability to business process management. I’ve been researching, writing, and talking about this emerging field ever since, and you should too. After all, the services sector makes up 70 to 80% of GDP in advanced economies. The best way to define the servicessector is to understand what it is not. It’s not agriculture or manufacturing or construction – the shrinking sectors. In the U.S., agriculture accounts for only 1.4% of the gross domestic product and less than 2% of employment. Meanwhile, 4.3% of firms fall into the manufacturing sector, accounting for 12.5% of employment. In the UK, agriculture accounts for around 1.5% of employment, manufacturingfor around 10%, and services for over 80%. In short, up to about 75 % of wealth in industrialized countries is created not by growing food or making things, but by performing services: teaching, designing, delivering health care, banking, retailing, consulting, delivering IT services, and so on.

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The link between science and agriculture and manufacturing is now a given and was ushered inover the last 200 years with the advent of the Industrial Age. But what about the link between science and services? The information technology driving innovation in services has really only been around since the Web came on the scene in the mid-1990s. This column isn’t a tutorial on service science and BPM, so I’ll point you to the same place Brett pointed me to a while back:http://tinyurl.com/lq4s97 IBM has been playing a leading role in this emerging field, which is no surprise, for IBM had to transform itself as it looked over the abyss in the early 1990s. Lou Gerstner left RJR Nabisco to become IBM’s CEO in 1993 and led the way to unlocking talent inside the once stodgy company. Hmm, a move from the “cookies and crackers company” to mighty Big Blue. What’s up with that? Services.Today IBM pulls in the bulk of its revenues from services. Noting the lessons learned by IBM, HP bought EDS in 2008 and Dell bought Perot Systems in 2009. And last June, Howard Smith, my coauthor of Business Process Management: The Third Wave, and I were invited to speak at GE Global Research’s Whitney Symposium09 in Niskayuna, New York, a 600 acre research campus on the banks of the MohawkRiver... the legacy of one Thomas Edison. It was a huge honor and an eye-opening experience (1,000 PhDs representing 22 disciplines in one campus!). And you guessed it, the theme for the Symposium was The Engineering of Customer Services. GE gets it.

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My talk on Business Process Management and Systems Thinking was followed by Robert Morris, V.P. of Services Research and former director of IBM’slegendary T. J. Watson Research Lab. Morris’ talk was The Transformation of IBM to a Technical Services Company. To say the least it was an intense two days on the banks of the Mohawk River. Why, you might ask, were we BPM types at a services symposium? The following call-out from an IBM publication says it all in one sound byte: “Service science melds technology with an understanding of businessprocesses.”

While much activity in BPM centers on supply chains, logistics, and other physical means of optimizing value delivery systems, that’s not where the innovation action is in a service economy. Yet, we have done little to take on services as the object of BPM initiatives as we don’t really know much about what it takes to bring innovation to service processes. As Smith and I wrote inBusiness Process Management: The Third Wave, “A business process is the complete and dynamically coordinated set of collaborative and transactional activities that deliver value to customers.” Well it’s the collaborative part that is the challenge when it comes to services. Just consider the very nature of service processes:

Intangibility: May be some combination of both intangible and...