Book Review Strategy and Business Process Management by Carl Lehmann

Strategy and Business Process Management: Techniques for Improving Execution, Adaptability, and Consistency

by Carl F. Lehmann

This is a very useful resource if you are interested in continuous process improvement and ensuring that your processes support your business strategy. It is probably most applicable to medium and large organisations of a size and maturity to adopt approaches such as Six Sigma or CMMI (Capability Maturity Model Integration).

The forward, by a senior VP at Gartner, sets the context for the book by predicting that services, healthcare and pharmaceuticals will see similar turmoil and market disruption to that seen in media, advertising and retail. It points to Business Process Management (BPM) as being a vital discipline to help manage the changes that will be needed to survive and succeed.

The main part of the book is in three sections. The first section - on Strategic Planning - has four chapters, each of which gives an introduction to a best-of-breed approach to the four key strategic topics: Competitive Strategy from Porter (the 5 Forces model); Market Leading Operations from Treacy and Wiersema; Balanced Scorecards and Strategy Maps from Kaplan and Norton; and the Adaptive Enterprise from Haeckel. Although these approaches are not without their critics, they are commonly applied and good overviews are given.

The second section then looks at Execution in three chapters - a short chapter on organisational behaviour, and detailed chapters on business processes and IT.

The chapter on business processes is the longest in the book and is central to the book's BPM theme. Lehmann recommends very detailed analysis across all business processes, the implementation of metrics to provide reporting on the processes and modelling of new processes and potential changes to existing processes. It is the likely cost of this approach which makes the book more suited to medium and large organisations.

Lehmann set himself a difficult challenge in the IT chapter (albeit a challenge that couldn't be avoided), particularly as different organisations have very different IT needs. His summary of some IT trends and his checklist approach to IT readiness assessment need, I think, to be taken as starting points for a more specific analysis. He does though make a good case for taking a process-centric approach to IT strategy and recommends an incremental approach to change.

The final section looks at how to Align Strategy and Resources using "Derivative Analysis". Derivative analysis takes the elements of the business strategy and links these to what resources are needed in the organisation to achieve these elements, together with any actions and investments that are needed to fill any gaps. This section is the least developed, has the least theoretical underpinning and to my mind is the least convincing.

There are areas that aren't covered, such as the role of wider innovation (ie outside of process innovation), but these could be considered to be outside the scope of the book.

In summary, this is a very useful book that introduces and links together a number of different approaches to strategy and process management.

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