If we're ever going to move away from the anecdotal style books, we're going to need experiments that show the recommended changes actually work. The material to the left, Code of Best Practice: Experimentation is one place to start.
In the beginning of Agile it was all anecdotal. Strong push back came when there were questions about applying those practices outside of personal experience. It is a trait of many disciplines that the early developers have a good idea, but resist attempts to have others assess and verify their ideas. Just try it you'll discover what I discovered. That's good when the project is low risk. But when you're using someone else's money, it's a bit harder to just try it.
Same situation in the business process management domain. Listing all the problems is possibly good, but I doubt many are unfamiliar with all the problems. Listing solutions to those problems in the absence of a domain and a context in that domain, mean the anecdotal information is stuck in the domain and context of the author.
In order to move - credibly move - to another domain, an experiement is needed to show the suggested solution methods will actually work.
This is another aspect of popular books, they are usually missing that experiment in another domain.
Here's my working example
Agile development in the form of Scrum has been around for a long time. It is used in many domains.
There is conjecture that it can be applied to government IT programs. There are conferences about this topic. I've spoken at several and introduced the idea that the Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) and the Defense version (DFAR) have much to say about how you manage a program and what methods are used.
The work now is to connect the two ideas - Agile and FAR/DFAR/Earned Value - so both can work in the ways they are supposed to work.
So Back To Business Processes
We've got lots of suggestions on how to un-stick business management. Got any experimental evidence that any of those suggestions actually work? No? Then we're at the same place we were when XP started. You gotta try it before you can say it doesn't work. Not likely when someone else's money is involved.
