Putting the BUSINESS in Business Process Management

The set of ideas, tools, and methods that have been labeled BPM have evolved into what has emerged as a key organizational approach to business success. BPM is a process centric approach to managing an organization. Looking at the strategies and objectives of the organization, making sure the processes in place support them, and continually looking to adjust and improve the processes to increase effectiveness and efficiency. In effect, processes become the communications backbone of the organization and this common information structure is leveraged to make the organization more agile and responsive.

Too often organizations simply approach BPM as a tool to accelerate application development. Although more efficient and responsive application development is one of the benefits of BPM, having only this focus leads to long term problems that ultimately compromise the overall benefits achievable with BPM.

This does not mean that you have to use the big bang theory, capture everything at once, and will be unable to proceed until some grand unifying model is in place. Rather, it means that you need to start with a broad perspective and understanding that guides particular projects and initiatives.

If projects and initiatives are not approached with a broader perspective, then although the immediate localized issue may be addressed, the silo method will result in significant rework over time, lack of alignment with other projects and initiatives, and a loss of agility. When this approach is replicated many times in an organization the resulting islands of automation evolve into a virtual ball and chain slowing everything you need to accomplish.

Why Bother with BPM?

Significant investments in IT infrastructure have fallen short in enabling a more nimble response to changing business needs. At the same time, increasing competitive and economic pressures – and the resulting focus on improved processes – are increasing the need for an effective way to manage and implement business change.

These pressures have grown as enterprises strive to become more agile and increase the rate at which they deploy new or improved processes. Additionally, participation in process improvement activity is rapidly increasing across all segments of the enterprise, as organizations engage in initiative-based or regulatory-required activities such as Six Sigma, Lean, ISO9000, ITIL and Sarbanes-Oxley.

BPM implemented well can greatly contribute to bringing complexity under control and to breaking through the organizational barriers to change, while accelerating an organizations ability to implement business changes.

Business Elements of BPM

To get that broader perspective and to put the business in BPM there are 5 critical elements that should be incorporated into any BPM efforts:

• Accessibility

Everyone in an organization is involved in processes in various ways. Some simply interface with or are serviced by a process, while others are responsible for implementing or managing particular processes. It is critically important that the information being captured and used for the purposes of BPM be in a form understandable by all the organizational constituents and accessible and usable by anyone needing it. Ideally, this information should be supported by a range of tools and interfaces that are scalable and able to support the various constituents in their needs without burdening them with complexities only some constituents need.

• Process Excellence

Businesses need to continually improve to survive. A BPM effort should incorporate tools and methods that support leading process excellence methods such as Six Sigma and Lean. The BPM effort should enable organizations to optimize the key dimensions of a process.

• Compliance

Any BPM effort should incorporate compliance considerations into its efforts. Any process implementation, improvement, or change needs to have fully factored in compliance requirements, risks, controls, and tests enabling this information to be used in the BPM efforts.

• Alignment

The BPM effort should enable the management of Value Chains and incorporate Key Performance Indicators that can be correlated back to the strategies and objectives the organization is pursuing.

• Sound Architecture

The architectural approach of the BPM efforts should not be tied to any particular implementation system or approach and should incorporate all the important dimensions of information for successful BPM. Important information about the business processes should be captured and managed in such a way to make it easier to evolve, migrate, or support multiple implementation environments. There should be a clear process landscape design, which is capable of handling the full breadth of BPM information, even if the initial projects are only starting with a subset or single process area.

By incorporating these principles into BPM efforts, organizations are much more likely to achieve the broader benefits of BPM. They also will avoid investing time and effort in a dead end application development project or putting lots of effort into capturing process information in forms that cannot be reused and repurposed.

Business Questions to Ask

The following are key questions that should be asked about any BPM effort to ensure the business perspective is being addressed:

• Does everyone in your organization know where to go to find answers about what needs to be done, how it needs to be done, why it needs to be done, and who is responsible for it?
• Is this information available in forms that everyone can understand?
• Is there visibility to the key performance indicators associated with the processes individuals are responsible, accountable, consulted, and informed about?
• Is this information up to date and can the appropriate people find what has changed, what is approved, and what is proposed?
• Can this information be used to fulfill the various compliance requirements and initiatives your organization has?
• Can impact analysis and gap analysis be done?
• Can this information be used to drive the deployment of various automation systems while still being useful for non automated processes and giving a holistic view of your process landscape?
• Can this information be reused and help you when you need to evolve your implementations of these processes?

Conclusion

Putting the Business in BPM requires the enablement of all constituencies in the organizations in the BPM effort. Too much emphasis on the IT and application development aspects will create longterm barriers to change. Organizations must focus less on the specifics of process automation and more on the people and overall process information.

A sound architectural approach to the design of the process landscape and focus on the process information as opposed to the specific implementation will enable process excellence, increase agility, and facilitate true BUSINESS process management in an organization.

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