An Interview with Jim Boots, Enterprise Architect at Chevron

What does “BPM” mean to you?

It helps to say “Business Process Management” and think about the words! I like the Gartner definition of it as a “management discipline that provides governance in a business process environment with the goal of improving agility and operational performance”. It all needs to be about performance and real business benefits. BPM seems to get hijacked as a technical construct, but some 80-90 percent of the things that have to be done in big companies, including Chevron are, and will remain, manual. The big question is – how do you apply BPM to those?

There is a lot of focus in BPM on automation of processes. For me though, it’s about how we manage the whole process – manual and automated. We need to address the different and overlapping needs of both technical and mainstream business people. Otherwise you are not really addressing BPM as a whole.

How do you reconcile different requirements of Business and Technical audiences?

Let’s start with the overlapping requirement and focus on operational performance as the goal. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter how good processes are. If people don’t understand how to apply them, whether automated or manual, they will not drive the expected performance. My focus is on deployment and adoption of processes. End-users need information they can find quickly, understand and easily act on. They also need to trust the information they are following is up to date and relevant for their operation.

The biggest gaps between technical and business audiences tend to be in both process governance and process deployment. The fundamental problem tends to be that traditional approaches to BPM ignore the need for managing change to process over time as well as the need to make process information accessible and usable by business end users. I would posit that once business users own a clear picture of their process, getting the technical side developed, whatever approach you take, is actually very straightforward, and getting faster all the time. I believe that BPM is really about a business managing its processes as a living asset. Therefore any BPM work must be captured, governed and communicated in a way that end users can understand.

So is there one tool that can address both audiences?

No. Our view is that there is no single tool that can meet the needs of both audiences. At Chevron we have a single tool for end users to define, govern and communicate business process information. When, in the course of the process decomposition, there is a need for automation or more detailed technical analysis, there are various toolsets (e.g. workflow, data modeling, etc.) that can be employed.

Where and how has this approach been applied within Chevron to date?

We have run multiple projects over the last couple of years across all areas of our business. Our shipping company is a good example. The chartering group has operations in England, Singapore and the U.S. and is responsible for arranging ships to move crude oil around the world. They were having issues with the different operations executing the same processes but in slightly different ways. This was causing delays and risk management issues. We looked at how each location handled the task and came up with a best practice approach termed “the truth”, documented it using a common language, added the necessary contextual information (i.e. policies, procedures, screen shots, etc.) and deployed it to 50 employees responsible for managing operations, using our web-based process management application. We very quickly saw incidents reduced and also found we could bring new staff up to speed much more quickly with this common approach.

Where is this going within Chevron

Chevron, like most companies, has been practicing some form of BPM for years. What we haven’t had, until recently, is a unified strategy and approach about how best to leverage our BPM efforts to maximize operational performance. Last year I led a team that defined our corporate approach to BPM. As a result we have agreed on a number of tools and more importantly on an integrated methodology to ensure that as each operating company moves forward with BPM we maximize our return. Our goal is a central repository of business process information that is easily accessed by any of our 100,000+ employees and contractors.

So are there real benefits from these initiatives at Chevron?

I cannot disclose specifics, but we believe that cost savings alone are worth several hundred million dollars over the next five years. More importantly, however, we believe that our approach dramatically impacts long term sustainability of our process improvement efforts (e.g. improving adoption and extending the effectiveness of a new system by years). It also delivers a process based knowledge management system that insulates us from the brain drain due to the retirement of our aging workforce. The results speak for themselves. I’m excited about the future of BPM within Chevron.