Departmental BPM joins Enterprise BPM - IBM Acquires Lombardi

I agree with Forrest Gump's assessment:

"I don't know if we each have a destiny or if we're all just floatin' around accidental like on a breeze... but i think, maybe it's both. Maybe both are happening at the same time..."

Whether by destiny or by accident, this week IBM announced that it will acquire Lombardi Software and my professional life got a whole lot more like a box of chocolates.

As a Lombardi employee there's not a lot that I am at liberty to say about this, and I don't really know any of the details anyway, but I wanted to throw in my two cents regarding the mention of "Departmental" versus "Enterprise" BPM in the announcement.

There are many many approaches to BPM adoption in a company, but if you just look at the ends of the spectrum you can categorize the extremes as "Top Down" versus "Bottom Up"endeavors.

"Top Down" BPM is a great idea - That's where your company executives make a firm transformation commitment for the entire enterprise.  Beyond just rolling out a few managed business processes, the entire IT infrastructure of the corporation needs to be analyzed, expanded, and updated.

"Bottom Up" BPM is also a great idea - That's where you have an operational problem that could really benefit from the application of BPM, so you take the bull by the horns, attack the problem, and deploy a managed business process to save the day.

The "Top Down" approach is most likely going to be an SOA based - ESB centric - BPM solution.  A lot of hard-core, high-powered Software Engineering is involved when your entire company depends on the solution - and that sounds a lot like IBM to me.

The "Bottom Up" approach is much more of a "just get it done" approach.  You need to deploy a managed business process as soon as you can.  Stop the bleeding now.  Once you've got the process deployed, you can evolve the solution over time... but time's money and you've got to do something now - that sounds a lot like Lombardi's Teamworks to me.

It's not really a technology issue - Lombardi's solution scales quite nicely.  It's a methodology issue...  Some tools really enhance the "Top Down" (Enterprise) approach, while others really enhance the "Bottom Up" (Departmental) approach.

Offering BPM tools that support both types of projects seems like a pretty good idea when you think about it, because (as Forrest muses) "maybe both are happening at the same time".