Organisations increasingly recognise that their business processes and associated practices provide them with the necessary foundation for sustainable performance and business agility. These processes, both formal and informal, enable people and technology elements to come together and ensure the organization provides effective services and solutions for its customers. The need to understand and model these processes and practices to ensure that they result in an acceptable level of sustainable performance cannot be overstated. How can such modelling and optimization of business practices take place? How can we ensure that business practices result in an agile business, so vital in these turbulent economic times? Business Process Management (BPM) can offer the solution and this article shares some experiences and has the potential to provide answers to these questions.
BUSINESS PROCESS MANAGEMENT (BPM)
In the modern enterprise, BPM can be a foundation business function that supports all other business functions. BPM comprises a set of management and technology disciplines driving the implementation of formal business processes. The aim of BPM is to implement processes in a way that is sustainable and where the resulting performance is optimized. Such optimization of processes covers many aspects of their performance. For example, processes can be optimized to ensure efficient utilization of resources that form part of the process. Furthermore, improvements in the time required to undertake a process, its resultant quality and the end-user experience can be all under the umbrella of BPM. Finally, increasing awareness of the environment by businesses has also led to use of a BPM approach to model, measure and mitigate the carbon impact of business activities. Measures that determine KPIs and are based on their reporting provide sound basis for validation of process optimizations. BPM is thus the key to implementing business strategy and business architecture that is optimized, sustainable and of value to all stakeholders. Excellence in BPM is based on understanding and application of the concept in a holistic manner. Viewing the organization as a whole including its people and technologies is the key to applying BPM in practice. Such BPM, it should be stressed, is a combination of technology-enabled but business-driven. Every decision in BPM is based on the value that decision provides to business. The technology enables key business-related goals, which can be summarised as follows:
Business rule management that enables easier and dynamic creation and management of rules which support processes
Process control within workflow, to enable compliance with business rules
Capture of process metrics for understanding, analysing, reporting and improving performance of the processes, as well as related technologies and people
Early warning and escalation triggers that enable management to take rapid, evasive action.
PRACTICAL CHALLENGES
My experience with a diverse set of organisations (corporations, government agencies, small to medium enterprises), across a range of industries, has led to the realization that the greatest hindrances to business agility and performance are lack of formality in the processes and a lackadaisical attitude of senior management towards BPM. Following are the specific challenges that I have experienced in the implementation and use of BPM: • Informal practices/processes rely heavily on high-performance individuals (generally in the minority). These talented individuals, more often than not, move on without a succession plan to fill the gap • Failure to model business processes (especially within relevant BPM Suites), resulting in individuals who carry these processes in their heads or, alternatively, processes that are documented in a physical paper form that no one reads • Inadequate performance measurement of processes, groups and individuals, with little consideration of early warning systems to indicate performance breakdown • Inadequate commitment to formalized business processes for governance, risk and compliance, which leads to management by crisis cultures that are self-perpetuating • Lack of leadership in aligning process with Business Architecture and Strategy HANDLING THE CHALLENGES
The journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step. The pragmatic way of starting the BPM journey is to conduct pilot projects in key business process areas, exploring the critical aspects of BPM. This approach should enable the business to understand BPM and the associated implementation challenges and benefits. Preparation of a Business Case, to support investment in BPM technology and implementation programs/projects, should only be done after BPM pilot projects are completed. This ensures that the business aspects are well understood, otherwise investment will inevitably be driven by a technology acquisition agenda. Table 1 summarizes various BPM phases and provides corresponding explanations/comments when those phases are enacted.
Table 1: Key Aspects of BPM phases
BPM Phases
Comments
Identify
Business Processes from a Needs viewpoint
Needs
for business processes should be identified first. These should align with
Business Strategy and Business Architecture where they exist. Otherwise a
formal strategy and architecture should be created first or in parallel.
Design
Business Processes
Should
enable optimization or simply formalization of processes by bringing together
people and technologies in the process. The end-goal of each processes
corresponding to the needs of the business should be stated first before the
processes are designed.
Model
Business Processes
Should
use technology to facilitate process simulation and experimentation.
Capabilities and functional/non-functional behavior of the process should be
modeled (preferably in a BPM Suite) and be subject to formal Quality
Assurance techniques (such as walkthroughs and inspections).
Deploy
Business Processes
Incorporate
a business change management approach, including training for users of the
processes.
Execute
Business Processes
Measure
process performance, assessing the effectiveness of people and groups in the
process execution.
Analyse
Business Processes
Strive
to improve/optimize processes by analyzing metrics gathered during process
execution.
Powerful technology already exists to enable effective implementation of business processes. However, the effectiveness of BPM in an enterprise requires deeper understanding of the business processes and their relationships to Business Architecture and Strategy, which are clearly business disciplines. The future of BPM is in the hands of business leaders who must drive the BPM agenda in order to achieve business agility and sustainable performance. Executives and their management team carry the ultimate accountability for achieving business agility and sustainable performance across their enterprises. They have a responsibility to invest in BPM in order to ensure the long term viability and performance of the companies they lead.
REFERENCES
The following literature has been a source of learning and inspiration for my own journey of BPM practice and advocacy:
Harmon, Paul, 2003, Business Process Change: A Manager's Guide to Improving, Redesigning, and Automating Processes (The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Data Management Systems) – Morgan Kaufman Publisher, San Francisco, USA, 2003
Silver, Bruce, BPMN Method and Style: A levels-based methodology for BPM process modeling and improvement using BPMN 2.0
Stephen A. White - IBM and Derek Miers - BPM Focus, September 2008
Dale Nott is a Business Consultant and Project Manager, with a background in Software Engineering, Information Management and Business Analysis. Founder of Cinergi Systems, he has worked with local and international corporations and government agencies, always striving for business solutions focussed on achieving synergies between people, technology, processes and information. He is an advocate of management disciplines and standards implementation in areas such as Project Governance, Risk Management and Business Process Management, enabled by effective leadership at all levels of an organisation.
Organisations increasingly recognise that their business processes and associated practices provide them with the necessary foundation for sustainable performance and business agility. These processes, both formal and informal, enable people and technology elements to come together and ensure the organization provides effective services and solutions for its customers. 
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