Howard Smith (1) (1957–)

There are a lot of engineering and management processes and schools of thought that come and go faster than one blinks. Furthermore, even those that have in some way or the other made an impact on the way we perceive and implement information systems and related technologies, tend to be disjointed, self-contained and propriatory. What the various parts of a business want in order to function successfully is very often lost in the haze of prototyping, budgetary restrictions, and most show more importantly in the lack of understanding software engineers have of a business function, inasmuch as business heads do not understand the subtle intricacies that make software work.

All this Howard Smith and Peter Fingar argue should now stop from being a stumbling block in the way a company responds to market forces, globalisation, market share and quality of service. Business Process Management is a means that allows business managers and engineers to be able to think and solve problems together efficiently and without having to rely on new technologies to achieve their goal. The important thing is the Process. Process understanding, and how different processes interact with each other and with processes from suppliers and customers gives the Business the edge because, BPM is not built to last but to adapt.

The authors propose that in order to achieve adaptation, we have to treat Change Management as a process – as well as everything else – including Return on Investment (ROI); they go on to propose that the most important thing in order to achieve this goal is to be able to make learning part of the everyday business of a company. Start small and do things in parallel while you are in a transition stage, and test things as you go along. Do small projects both ways and then see which one worked better and why.

All in all, agree or disagree with the authors point of view and approach, there is one thing that the reader can get out of this book: application development should be done with and not on behalf of the Business, it should be flexible, and all parties involved must be open to learning from the others (including competitors as well as partners), making flexibility and adaptability of a Process its most important software constituent.

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