On average I get about three mails a week with the question: " How can I become a BPXer" Many of you are coming from a technical background as well as people from a functional background. In this blog I will try to explain what I know, also what I do not know to date ( March 2008 ) and what we are working on within the BPX community network team.
Where to start first
I always suggest to people to start with going to the The Community Answers the Question: What Does a Business Process Expert Do?on BPX and click on what does a BPXer do:
There are some real resources provided by the community such as Mario Herger"s series.
Business Process Expert Part 1 - What Is the Problem Today?
Business Process Expert Part 2 - How Can the BPX Solve the Problem?
Business Process Expert Part 3 - What Are the BPX Skills and Tools?
Last year at TechEd in Las Vegas, I provided an introduction session on how to become a BPXer and that was recorded in video and is available to you for free.
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One of the key slides in the presentation is a spiderweb diagram that I provided with 6 key vectors an aspiring BPXer need to educate themselves on:
- eSOA & IT Knowledge Skills ( TOGAF, ESC, CE, Enterprise Architecture, etc)
- Business Process Modeling(& BPMN) Knowledge ( e.g. Six Sigma and BPMN )
- Application & (Industry) Solution Knowledge ( what is available, how to use)
- Composition Tool Knowledge ( such as ARIS & Visual Composer )
- Web 2.0 & Community & Social Media Knowledge
- User Experience and UI knowledge
- Soft Skills & Practical experience
Some people might think of this as 8 or more vectors. However when people ask me how can I become a good BPXer, from what we have learned so far these are some of the true essential vectors someone should have. Similarly we always say that a BPXer is someone with one foot in business and one foot in IT. As I have evolved my interaction with more BPX community members I think we should at least ad one extra vector (perhaps more as mentioned before)
- Ability to build and sell a business case & manage a project from start to post implementation & measure
Some people have told me: you should put that into the soft skill and practical experience bucket. I leave it up to you, the audience to decide.
So far SAP Education has not indicated that they will start providing certification in areas such as soft skill development, social & web2.0 knowledge development, or Business Process Management and Modeling ( But Bruce Silver in the BPX community took a good first stab at BPMN basics )
Certification by SAP
SAP education is starting to provide some certification and one of them is this starter certification for a BPXer: Associate Certification by SAP
I want to make a few comments here in that the first BPX associate certification from SAP Education only covers 2 of the 6 vectos as earlier defined by the BPX community. This certification currently focuses heavily only on SAP tools & integration aspects, instead of also a necessary generic approach (e.g. like modeling basics - ARIS is neither a generic tool, nor does it cover all standards, nor is it the most common tool in the industry - currently this is still Visio). This certification of reaching the associate BPX level would be probably not be enough to satisfy our customers. I think you should be able to add it to your skill set and curriculum, but I hope people understand that it does not mean that you can just become BPX associate in a few days - This would be both the demise of the carefully branded term Business Process Expert and would not help customers in the field. Currently the curriculum seems very "geeky" oriented and we should make sure that we cover BPX minded people from both sides: that means basic business classes for geeks, basic technical classes for suits. (we do cater to both audiences (demographics show) It is a start nonetheless.
There are also some industry specific certifications such as for Oil & Gas or by solution area such as ERP or for CRM or other solution certified consultant experience, you can go to: http://www.sap.com/usa/services/education/certification/index.epx
They also have an entry level certification for an associate enterprise architect and I suggest you have a look at the components of the course ( Enterprise Architect Framework , etc )
What is next
Our community network BPX team is currently working diligently ( together with SAP education and other experts from universities) to create a wiki where we will provide guidance on a per role basis on what courses to take ( as you can imagine this is not a small task) We want to include guidance for people in roles such as business analyst, application consultant, solution consultant, process developer, IT manager, LOB manager, BPM manager and more. We are thinking to provide that in a wiki, so that our BPX members can update, provide feedack, improve and share more. We only started recently, so I will be able to share with you more on timelines in a next blog. We also probably want to state that to become a BPXer at an associate level is really more like a MBA/MS study than just doing a 10 day course.
In the meantime I would like to invite you to add/comment at your disposal below in the talkback and comment section if you like... I also opened a forum area on the general BPX forum.
Hopefully this helps a bit
Marco
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