Within a day of each other, specialist BPM technology vendors Appian and Active Endpoints earlier this week both announced continuing strong market momentum.
Appian highlighted the growth of customer orders by 58% from Q4 2009 to Q1 2010 (and this isn’t a seasonal thing with Appian; in 2008 its Q4 was its largest quarter). Active Endpoints highlighted revenue from new customers: it tripled in Q1 2010 over the same quarter in 2009 – contributing to an overall doubling in revenue against the same period a year earlier.
Although these companies can’t be directly compared – they don’t compete very much in reality – they both share something important, and that’s that they’re at the forefront of driving specialist BPM technology to new audiences. Appian is doing this in part through its hosted Appian Anywhere offering, which is arguably now the centre of gravity of the company’s development efforts; Active Endpoints is doing this by targeting regular developers – helping them build process applications more quickly and cheaply using model-driven tools than they could by hand-building custom systems.
The distinction between “old school” and “new wave” process improvement approaches (I’ve called these “high church” and “low church” before) is just continuing to get stronger. 10 years ago, the vast bulk of process improvement activity used to be driven by the “high church” crowd: lots of ceremony, burning of incense, and so on. Scientific improvement efforts driven by highly-qualified specialists are essential in situations where there’s a lot at stake (for example when you’re reengineering an auto manufacturing line: get it wrong and it’s going to cost you a lot to put it right). And don’t get me wrong: there’s definitely a place for this.
But process management thinking and tools have now well and truly broken out of this niche – focus has shifted to being more about service improvement and knowledge work – and here the scientific approach isn’t the only game in town. If you’re looking to improve a customer service process, the cost and risk of a sub-optimal change is much lower than if you’re changing a manufacturing plant layout – for one thing, you can probably make further changes to tweak things relatively straightforwardly. What’s more, many customer service processes are so poorly understood that even sub-optimal improvement – “good enough for now” change – can be hugely valuable. Particularly if you have tools at your disposal that help to involve all the stakeholders in change as it’s being mapped out – helping ensure that the good enough changes stick.
Vendors serving the old-school crowd (IDS Scheer, Lanner and more) are reinventing themselves to be relevant against this broader new-wave canvas of “good enough for now”, where speed and agility are the watchwords and scientific accuracy driven by specialists can be balanced against successful organisational change management driven by inclusivity. Companies like Appian and Active Endpoints have been able to stand on the shoulders of those that came before, and are taking these ideas to a mainstream audience.
It’s easy to get carried away with this, of course – the truth is that in Europe at least, the organisations actively taking advantage of new-wave, “low church” approaches and tools in process improvement are in the minority. Nevertheless, this number is growing daily – and I’m consistently seeing organisations get ROI in months rather than years.
What do you think – are you seeing the same split between old-school and new-wave approaches? Do you think that this is a good thing – or maybe you think that a scientific, structured approach like Six Sigma is always important to have in place? I’d love to hear from you.
Tags: Industry news
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