After several years of sluggish adoptions, tech consultants now predict a steep trajectory for growth in the market for BPM software: – AMR Research pegs the BPM market at $5.6 billion in 2001 and predicts it will more than double to $12.2 billion by 2006. – Gartner expects that while today only 5% of U.S. companies have implemented some initial phase of BPM, that figure will rise to more than 50% in just two years.Either of these projections spells fast growth for the market. But a BPM solution is not cheap, running from $130,000 to millions of dollars for a larger enterprise, and it's certainly not easy. "Our initial project took about a fiscal year to complete," reports Burke. Much of that time, he explains, was spent "defining what data we wanted and what we wanted to do with it." Then, there was the problem of getting people who were accustomed to spreadsheets to accept a new way of doing things. "People start out being very skeptical," says Burke. "You have to show them how this is going to free them up to use higher-level brain power."

"The key mistake people make is biting off too much," says Craig Schiff, president and CEO of BPM Partners, a performance management consultancy. Schiff and other experts agree that too often, especially in the early days of BPM, companies pursued a "big bang" approach to BPM adoption, with the result that nothing worked as planned and employees became resistant to change.

That said, most companies today that decide to shift their operations to a performance management approach start with finance and treasury. "It makes sense," notes Schiff. First, he says, because people in finance are used to working with numbers and computerized systems, and second, because the return on a BPM investment is greater in departments like finance that crank out lots of reports. "We had a number of people globally whose entire job was producing reports," says International Rectifier's Burke. "Now, nobody has such a position in our company."

The next most common error in introducing BPM is leaving it to the IT department, or simply, as Schiff puts it, "failing to have strong project management." Says Gartner's Geishecker, "Even when you're doing a phased approach, this is not just an IT project. It's a cross-functional collaboration that involves cultural change and information sharing. That means you need the blessing of people at the executive level–the CEO, CFO, COO and CIO."

Michael Morrison, vice president of enterprise planning at Cognos, a major BPM provider, goes further. "You need to have an owner who is responsible for the success of the whole project," he says. For example, he suggests, if performance planning is being introduced in a finance department, that project should probably be "owned" by the company's CFO.

The third common error made by companies is viewing BPM as just another software upgrade. "You can put in a dashboard and get pretty graphics," says Steven Pugh, CEO of CODA Financial, a maker of BPM software aimed at the financial services industry. "But if you haven't looked at your key issues and your programs, it's really a waste of time." Rather, he says, a company introducing BPM "needs to ask what I call the 'meaning of life' kinds of questions, like where do we see the company going in five years or what are the key metrics for success in this business."

First, Know What You Want to Know

Henry Morris, group vice president for applications and information access at tech research and consulting firm IDC, agrees. "The software isn't the driver; business issues come first," he says. "If you don't know what your key metrics are, you won't even be capturing the data you need." As a corollary to that, John Kopcke, chief technology officer at Hyperion, warns of another common mistake: trying to measure too many things. "You need to boil it down to what metrics are most important to running a successful business," he says. "If you try to measure 200 things, you get overwhelmed."

Finally, most experts agree that it is critical to address the fears that arise when workers are asked to share data that formerly was their responsibility. This is particularly true with BPM since it is capable of making people accountable for their performance on a daily, even hourly, basis. Don't start off with a balanced scorecard that addresses individual accountability, cautions META Group vice president John Van Decker. "Start off by developing key metrics for a department or functionality."

Instead of simply imposing a BPM system on a department, "You want people to buy into it," says Gartner's Geishecker. "This is not about taking away jobs. It's about showing people that they no longer have to ask, 'How did we do?' Now they can ask 'How are we doing?'"

Hyperion's Kopcke gives a personal example, noting that Hyperion is in the midst of implementing its own BPM system. "Every department in any company has to do budgeting," he says. "And as CTO, I have always hated that process! People from the finance department would come in, they'd ask questions, I'd finally give the right answers and they'd finally go away. Putting something on my desktop that helps me plan and handles the finances is a big help. It's not something I dread any more."