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HOAX - "Industry Best Practices"

I have seen a few major software vendors in the Business Process Management(BPM/BPA) domain demanding their customers to get rid of their processes and align the business with a general practice. The popular slogan they use to alienate this idea in your mind is

"Industry Best Practices"

Do we really need to be in what they called "industry's best practices" ?? What actually are the industry's best practices??

This is my little two cents about it........

Most of the time it's the uniqueness of the processes which makes the business a success. Hence you often find a well-defined set of processes behind every successful business.

In IT, this is a key principle to understand as continuous improvement and continuous delivery play crucial roles in the novel day IT world. Only a successful process pipeline can ensure your survival in the industry.

This processing pipeline you build in your organization should match your business modal. In that case, that pipeline can be a general one or a custom-made one that is unique to your organization.

For an instance, if you are running a typical software development company, you can use existing process pipelines as it is. But if you run a tech support company that provides support to a unique market like Oil & Gas, more often you should have your own ways of delivery other than the things mentioned in the book.

If your business is running in a common domain such as software engineering, your practices should be aligned with the competitors + you should have something unique to be on the top to get more on your plate. In supporting this type of modal, the best recommendation is to go with a popular tool stack to cover that common part to match your competitors and then select or implement a new tool to manage the unique part of your business.

If you are in a focussing a market niche (i.e Oil & Gas mentioned in the example), you should have unique processes to cater to those specific requirements. In such cases, you should explore and stack your processes to match the requirement and later need to decide on a tool stack to match your requirement. The only best practice you should care for should be "Flexibility" as being in a niche requires it a lot to match with the changes of the parent business modal.

Personally, I haven't seen BPM software that can make a successful business modal nor do I believe that can be done. But a successfully selected software or a set of software can ensure the success of your business modal.

So anyone who wishes to digitalize their business processes should be mindful when a vendor asks you to be aligned with "Industry Best Practises". First, understand what makes your business a success. If it's a set of unique processes, just find a tool or set of tools that cater to it. Not vice versa.

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