Linkedin: From a business management standpoint, which is more important: Business Capability (the WHAT) or Business Process (the HOW)?

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Support Gaby about “focus on business performance”. In my books, capability is the possession of characteristics required to produce a particular outcome. The latter is a pair “right things” (assets) and “done well” (performance, reliability, etc.) as the result of work of a function (regardless how this function is implemented). So, a capability combines functional and non-functional characteristics (timeliness of outcome, data accuracy, quality of result, efficiency, effectiveness, impact on stakeholders, SLA, SLE, etc.) of a function. See http://improving-bpm-systems.blogspot.com/2009/11/linking-concepts-and-expressions-used.html

Sure, decision-makers should monitor the business performance. Such a monitoring may be reactive by measuring the outcome (function is a black-box), or it may be proactive by measuring the process of achieving the outcome (function is a white-box and its business processes are visible). My experience – business line managers like the proactive monitoring, because it helps them to prevent problems.

Actually, we speak about GRANULARITY of performance monitoring which may be different for different decision-makers and may change over the time. I would recommend asking decision-makers explicitly about their needs for performance monitoring. Then it will be clear where to measure – just at the level of some capabilities or add a few check-points within some business processes.

Thanks,
AS

Linkedin: Which of the two should be key metrics for measuring successful BPM?

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In favor of a more generic measure. BPM as a tool for improving enterprise business performance is capable to carry out different combinations of different types (operational, tactical, strategic, competitivity) of improvements as required in different moments of time. So, a set of KPIs may be different at each particular improvement. Thus the key metric is how easy to apply/use BPM to improve the enterprise business performance.

Sure, that your BPM system should be very flexible and this flexibility should be architected.

Thanks,
AS