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What’s the Big Deal about Agility in BPM?
By Jim Sinur | March 26, 2008
One of the biggest differentiators between workflow and BPM, besides real-time visibility through activity monitoring, is agility. Agility is defined as the ability to think and draw conclusions quickly to exercise nimble movements easily.
This could be in response to real-time monitoring and/or policy changes needed by management and/or behavior changes required by clients. BPMS technologies are instrumented to be agile; therefore allowing for rapid response to business conditions.
BPM Agility Comes in Several Flavors: (Aiming at Agility)
BPM has features that allow it to exercise agility. First of all, BPM allows for agility in the process development phase in that it can leverage SOA. BPMS capabilities have the ability to search directories for reusable process snippets and/or business/technology services.
Secondly, BPMS platforms have the ability to externalize rules, generally in business rules engines, to allow for dynamic changes in the execution of processes. An example would be to change the limits on the size of a loan that would require extra underwriting steps in light of the tightening credit market and better risk underwriting practices.
Thirdly, the sequence of flow can be dynamically determined and late bound. This could be the dynamic creation of a composite flow by combining unrelated existing process snippets and/or services based on the needs of the knowledge worker directing the processes or intelligent controlling heuristics.
Policies/Rules are Central: (Applying the Forgotten Ingredient)
Rules have a significant impact on the agility of a process and permeate many aspects of a business-change-friendly process. The ways rules can have an effect on process include the following:
- Process Flow Control
- Variable Tolerance Levels
- Goal Representations and Constraints
- Recognition of Relevant Events
- Recognition of Complex Events
- Recognition of Optimization Opportunities
- Guidance for Optimization Outcomes for Processes, People
- Complex Decision Assists
- Recognition of Emerging Business Scenarios
- Suggestion for Policy Changes
- Service Orchestration Order
- Service Logic
- Composite Application Flow
- Legacy Application Control & Leverage
- New Scenario, Policy and Rule Rollout
Exploiting the Strength of Explicit Processes: (Ascending to Proactive Management)
There are two ways to exploit the strength of explicit processes, rules and services (refer to figure 1). One is in a reactive way where the need for changes are recognized, evaluated, implemented quickly, and can be handled as they occur. The implication here is that knowledgeable process managers can anticipate the impact of change and not cause cascading effects.
Figure 1:
For organizations and/or process managers that are proactive by nature, there are techniques for anticipating conditions and scenarios. By linking policies and rules to likely scenarios, managers can have predetermined courses of adjustment waiting in the wings for the right set of conditions. Sophisticated organizations might want to create scenarios around strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (SWOTS). Keep in mind that these methods may work slightly different for each type of process pattern (see Prevalent Process Patterns Enable BPM Benefits Differently).
Bottom Line Process: Leveraging Agility for Advantage
If your processes are quite fixed and oriented to straight through processing, you may not need the agility afforded by BPM suites. Even the most stable of companies seem to be affected by the swings of a world market and the resulting economies, so I think these kinds of situations will become rare over time.
If you suspect that change is headed your way, the agility afforded in today’s BPM suites will become a welcome friend. Be prepared to declare your management style for agility, but it will likely include both reactive and proactive methods over time. This will usher in a period of enterprise decision management that will help guide process behavior.
Topics: BPM |
April 3rd, 2008 at 10:16 pm
This article brings out some interesting thoughts about Agility and the emerging management science behind it. From a process viewpoint, the two diagrams depict a Prescriptive business process (one with predefined and ordered activities) and an Empirical Process (one based on changing dynamics and feedback mechanisms). BPM tools have provided enormous benefits to both process types, both in developing such systems, and in managing them once they are running. The very process of building a system to support either type of business process is itself an Emprical Process, and the BPM tools provide rapid and agile development components that support the creation and ongoing maintenance of such a system. The reason is that we can use BPM to quickly create business process interfaces, get feedback from users and customer, use that feedback to adapt the system, and respond to change in the process itself. Agile and BPM are really so complimentary that it is hard to achieve one without the other.