Over the past several months, I’ve been helping my company establish a BPM Practice. One of my last practice startups was in Revenue Assurance, so I made sure to take into account both the factors that made it so successful as well as the complexities I encountered. After compiling my lists, I realized the complexities for BPM were very similar to those of Revenue Assurance. I attributed the majority of these to a single root cause, namely that both solutions required cross-organizational decision-making and collaboration within the client to sell and deliver successfully.
Ask yourself these questions:
- Who owns it and who is empowered to make the purchase decisions? When was the last time you met a VP of Revenue Assurance or VP of BPM?
- Is the value proposition of the solution enough to deliver into a single organization or is the ROI dependent on realizing value across multiple organizations with multiple people involved across these organizations?
- How then is collaboration across the organizations to be facilitated? BPM pundits have come up with this great concept of “BPM Governance”, although it seems to me that no two groups define it the same way.
The intention of this posting is not to discourage the pursuit of either Revenue Assurance or BPM solutions. On the contrary, by recognizing these obstacles from the start, you’ll hopefully come up with the right strategies for navigating around them. Our Revenue Assurance Practice ended up being a very successful endeavor and we’re on the right track to do the same with BPM.
