Unlocking the Potential of Business Process Management

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.

What has emerged as a key organizational approach is being called Business Process Management (BPM). 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 lingua franca of the organization and this common information is leveraged to make the organization more agile and responsive.

Business Process Management Suite (BPMS) solutions are a new breed of enterprise software for organizations that leverage this process centric perspective to accelerate process automation. However, if BPMS solutions are viewed as the same thing as BPM then organizations will fail to achieve their potential and companies will continue to struggle to effectively manage their ever-changing business processes.

Pitfalls in the BPM Highway

Although the promise of BPM is significant, organizations need to be alert to the limitations of BPMS software solutions and the obstacles these limitations can place in their path to successful BPM.

One of the major pitfalls that any BPM effort must avoid is being too IT and process automation centric in its Business Process Analysis (BPA) and modeling. Many BPMS solutions provide, in essence, a visual programming environment designed to support their specific execution environments. Few people outside the IT organization have programming skills or consider themselves to be programmers.

These kinds of solutions are very difficult to push into the business analysis and process initiative communities: they are fundamentally designed for IT implementers and bias their views and interfaces toward process automation implementation details. The capabilities needed by business analysis and process initiative professionals: ¬¬methodology support, process design, and analysis capabilities - are overlooked or poorly supported. Also, important dimensions of process information are often not addressed at all. Examples of these include areas such as policy and regulatory requirements, risk management, controls, and control verification information. Finally, processes that are outside of the scope of “automation” are often simply left out.

IT-centric BPMS solutions can greatly reduce the reach of a BPM environment into the organization. Business analysis and process initiative professionals end up being forced to find tools that better fit their needs but end up not integrating with the rest of the organization; significant training and communication challenges result. This is similar to the challenge created when business people try to communicate with IT using other implementation focused vehicles. One example many organizations have experienced this with is the Unified Modeling Language (UML). The very nature of the approach introduces translation and communication issues between the IT organization and the other BPM constituents, undermining the potential benefits of BPM.

Another major pitfall to avoid is getting tied into a specific execution environment. The very promise of a BPM approach is process-centric communication, and as such, it should allow targeting to different implementation methods. Ideally, the BPM solution should support the spanning of multiple environments; it is not unusual for a process to extend across more than one execution platform and incorporate activities which are not automated at all.

The core process information captured to design, communicate, implement, and manage the process should be independent of a particular BPM execution environment. Vendors commonly put extensions in standards or have special functionality in their proprietary execution languages that, if used as the core process knowledge, would create significant obstacles to retargeting and reusing the process knowledge for other purposes or environments
Finally, there is the one-size-fits-all pitfall. Many BPMS solutions in the market are promising to be the monolithic solution for every part of the BPM equation. History shows that for any problem that involves something as generic as processes and touches systems and people throughout an organization, a monolithic approach is likely to have many problems – and ultimately fail.

Avoiding the Pitfalls

In order to avoid the pitfalls of BPM, organizations must focus on the people issues associated with BPM and take an architectural approach that independently captures and manages the information. The most effective approach to avoiding these pitfalls in deploying BPM is to use an independent BPA solution.
Specific BPA solutions, by the fact that they target various implementation environments rather than provide them, facilitate the separation of process information from the process implementation. They also offer a broader set of functionality addressing the full range of process information needed in the areas of process definition and analysis as compared to a BPMS solution.

By taking this important architectural approach, of intentionally separating the process knowledge from the implementations, organizations ensure long term agility while focusing on capturing the truly valuable information they need. They also help address the over-riding people issues of BPM which more than anything else can make or break the success of BPM efforts.

The Solution: BPA That Spans the Enterprise

The BPA solution should provide a single environment for process definition that encompasses: the IT user’s needs for process modeling for implementation; the business analysis community’s needs for process modeling for change, compliance, and management; and the process initiative community’s needs for process methodology support. By bridging the gap between these groups of stakeholders, recapture of process information is eliminated and one group’s changes can be leveraged by all of the other groups. The solution effectively adapts to the specific user requirements based on the task at hand.

This kind of BPA solution begins with easy-to-use process design, which typically encompasses a graphical representation of the process using traditional department-level or Swimlane® process maps. By its nature, the process map identifies the inputs, outputs and connections between tasks and across departments. More advanced solutions enable the decomposition of a higher-level process through the use of sub-processes. Process data, such as arrival rates, attributes, resources, task durations, and costs can also be captured in the product, thereby creating the process model. Additional dimensions of information such as risks, controls, requirements are seamlessly part of the process landscape. This type of adaptive BPA solution supports design capture within the scope of a variety of process improvement initiatives such as Six Sigma, Lean, ISO, Sarbanes-Oxley, and ITIL.

Another key element is the ability to handle implementation-specific data as well as process-analysis-specific data to the same model. This allows for the IT implementer and the business analyst to work from the same source for those processes that are going to be automated. Further optimizations to the process model are easily incorporated into the actual implementation because the changes only have to be made once. This is critical for keeping up with increasing process change demands but at the same time maintaining the flexibility to target a different implementation vehicle if desirable in the future.

Once the process map and process model are created, BPA solutions provide what-if capabilities via simulation. Simulation enables the business analyst to experiment with numerous options to identify the optimal process design, cost structure, or resource distribution and utilization. BPA solutions should also have the ability to allow the business analyst to leverage diagrams and models created by other users in the organization via comprehensive import from common tools such as Visio®. The ideal BPA solution would provide the flexibility of a product suite, allowing for full sharing of models with process designers not focused on simulation and analysis.

A major effect of this approach is that it can reach much further into the organization to pull the most complete process knowledge into enterprise-wide BPM efforts. Solutions without this capability typically draw upon a small fraction of the process owners within the organization, thereby risking incomplete requirement gathering and sub-optimal process implementation.

Process management in today’s world is an enterprise-wide endeavor that involves participants from all areas of the organization. Process stakeholders can include business unit managers, line managers, process owners, quality associates, line employees, and others. Many of these people have not yet considered their function as a part of a larger process, or have not considered how their process impacts other processes.

To support a wide range of process awareness and knowledge within an organization, the BPA solution must enable the user to focus on the process and its operation – not on the tool itself. Archaic, unnatural, or unfriendly user interfaces are a critical roadblock to wide acceptance of a solution across an organization.

Processes are dynamic entities that need to continuously adapt to a changing business environment. The BPA solution is the front line for defining and analyzing new or improved process maps and models. The solution must facilitate updates to process diagrams that may undergo substantive changes over time. If the threshold of pain for the designer is too great, utilization will drop off and the benefits will be lost.

BPA solutions should also focus on support for process improvement initiatives such as Six Sigma, Lean, ISO, or Sarbanes-Oxley. The benefits realized by these improvements can be much more rapidly implemented if they fall within the BPA umbrella.

The old adage, “fix the process before you automate it”, holds true for BPM as well. In fact, automating a process with a BPMS can exacerbate the problem of a poor process, as they are now harder to see and change, once embedded in an automation system.

The BPA solution must be able to support process initiatives that cross particular environments and process activities that may not involve any kind of IT automation. It is critical that the captured process information is the whole process and not just the part being automated.

BPA solutions must also have strong team collaboration capabilities to help organize the wide range of processes in the enterprise, and track the (typically frequent) changes to these processes.

Processes affect many parts of an enterprise. In turn, an enterprise affects its processes. A process-centric enterprise understands this clearly and implements systems to support and enable cross-departmental integration and communication. The BPA solution must provide not only the visual representation of the process, but must also support cross-departmental collaboration, knowledge sharing, and process documentation management.

A central process repository is a key component of any BPA solution. It provides overall management and control of process information. Process repositories manage process information change, control simultaneous access, track history of changes with the ability to roll back to earlier versions, coordinate process change approvals, and enable automated web publishing of process documentation.

The best BPA vendors offer the repository as an option – not a requirement. Optional repositories provide a more pragmatic approach that facilitates and encourages day-to-day process activities and allows faster time to deployment. Solutions with mandatory repositories generally suffer from lack of flexibility and design flaws which require constant network connectivity to the repository, as well as a more difficult-to-use user interface. The difficulty in understanding and effectively working with a repository immediately presents a usability obstacle first-time and infrequent users may find difficult to get past.

Conclusion
In order to unlock the potential benefits of BPM, organizations must focus less on the specifics of process automation and more on the people and overall process information.

BPA solutions specifically focus on enabling a broad range of people in organizations to contribute to and interact with their organizations process information. By doing so, organizations will also be able to reap the benefits of bringing a process-centric view to IT solutions. Success at BPM overall will enable them to more easily and quickly implement systems that support, simplify, enable and automate the way a business operates.

Today’s BPMS solutions are a promising vehicle for achieving quick IT automation. On their own, however, BPMS solutions are not the complete answer.

BPA solutions that effectively span the various process perspectives within the organization will help unlock the potential of BPM and BPMS solutions by bridging the chasms between the major organizational constituencies and providing a common language for the progressive, agile enterprise.