My daughter lives in Washington, D. C. I visited her a couple of days ago and we were having a conversation about NGO's, non-governmental organizations. They are having quite an impact on the lives of people, especially in developing countries. Governments are sometimes non-responsive or they are pre-occupied (for good reasons and bad) with other things - so NGO's can deliver services where governments can't.

Sometimes, government agencies have the weight of regulation hanging around their necks. Sometimes it is the weight of the past. NGO's can react quickly where governments don't.

And sometimes there's a sticky situation where a group of people are simply caught in the crossfire of two governments bickering; inter-country politics preventing either from dealing with a situation. NGO's can deliver when these governments won't.

In short, NGO's can be more agile at dealing with peoples' needs and desires. It's not that they replace government, they augment it.

Now, there's nothing too subversive in any of those statements. If you're aware of NGO's and the work they do, I suspect you agree. (You may or may not agree with the politics, the goals or the means of some particular NGO. There are NGOs educating people on abstinence just as there are some delivering condoms. NGOs are the mechanism used to deliver services, they are not inherently left, right, good or bad.)

In thinking about this; about the rise of NGOs, their usefulness and whether they are fundamentally altering the way in which services can be delivered, it occurred to me that these were equivalent to changes we are seeing in large businesses - particularly global businesses - today.

Today's businesses mimic the state of today's governments. Businesses are arranged with powerful divisions - whether functionally- or product-centric. And these functions serve their purposes... i.e. no single organizational perspective achieves all of the business goals. Any particular arrangement is optimized for some important driver. Of course, the "non-optimal" drivers are also important.

Today's businesses have the weights of regulation and history hanging around their necks. These take the form of manual practices put in place to, say, capture information for government-required (or auditor-required) reports. Legacy systems also enforce workflows and practices that may be out-of-step with today's products, supply chains and customers.

Also, companies have built-in functional silos, and processes that cross those functional groups inherently reflect political conflict that may not be aligned with, say, customer satisfaction. These "silos" may be functional departments (Quote-to-order involves sales, legal, accounting, etc.) or they may cross business divisions (a sale to a global customer may cross US, French and Polish operating divisions).

The issue isn't one that can (or should) be solved by a "reorganization." It is an issue created by new demands placed on a business (customers require more custom deals than they used to) or because we are doing business in new ways (unifying the sales to a global customer, for example). Like NGO's, companies deploying BPM competencies must use BPM to solve tactical short term issues that may be solved in the long run using more structural techniques (in the same way that governments will subsume some of the services currently being offered via the more agile NGOs). In other areas, BPM competencies will be the strategic delivery vehicles (in much the same way that old-school non-profits like the Red Cross are now strategically deployed and aligned with governments).

BPM is more than the technology, although the technology enables the competency.

BPM is the Big Idea for 21st century business organizations. It is a competency that will be the key influencer of corporate - and therefore worldwide - economic success and growth.