Business processes represent an opportunity for dialogue about collaboration, re-engineering and automation, within, and even outside, enterprise borders. The new issue of Alinement Magazine encompasses various aspects of processes: their models, their architectures and the required leadership, that allows the capture of the core business interactions of an organization.

The Greek philosopher Heraclitus is right: “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man.” Similarly, neither a business nor its myriad stakeholders remains the same for long and processes capture this dynamic aspect of business.

While most discussion of business processes (Six-Sigma, for example) focuses on customer interactions, modeling an organization’s internal processes can be as important as its external processes. The services offered by the IT department are a case in point, with Service Management frameworks like ITIL bringing them to business visibility, ensuring they can no longer be circumvented by the rest of the organization. Proper evaluation of these services is essential in order to show the value that IT can bring to the organization (as shown in Rahul Mohod's article). The need for IT departments to measure, and sell, their services and capabilities becomes clear when they have to compete for survival in times of mergers and acquisitions, or stave off the threat of outsourcing.

Even as we struggle to address the full implications, businesses have become heavily reliant upon software and IT. In this context, the Business Motivational Model (BMM – see Mark Walsh’s article) provides a valuable resource for organization's looking to transition to a process-based enterprise. The close relationship between processes and IT suggests that business process is not far removed from a software process. The Business Process Modelling Notation (BPMN) or, alternatively UML’s use cases and activity graphs, can be used to model a series of increasingly complex business processes that might then be enabled by IT. Excellence in process modeling not only serves to document the end-user interactions and aid in their optimization, it can also help to identify business priorities for IT automation, helping separate business needs from wants.

The value of an enterprise-level process architecture arises from the insights it can provide executive management and the promise of “creative and frictionless action”. Business intelligence (BI) embraces this concept by incrementally sifting through data, processes and corporate knowledge to create a dynamic matrix that brings together otherwise unrelated (or siloed) information. As argued by Tiwary, BI can also expand its horizons to include collaborative intelligence that takes the concept of BI beyond one organization. The key to future business success is to see beyond simply competition, and use the concepts and technologies of business intelligence to achieve collaborative intelligence.

These different facets of business process show why it is a driving force for innovation in the enterprise. And as we continue to use IT to enable, support and automate the execution of these processes, efficient business processing becomes a reality.