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BPM 2.0 Enables Powers Processes in New Ways
By Jim Sinur | June 18, 2008
Today there is a strong emphasis on BPM because good processes enable the people in an organization, regardless of the business functional area they reside in at the moment.
Not only do processes enable functional excellence while saving time and money, they can easily traverse functional silos and engage people through a repeatable and somewhat standard and competitive process without forcing everything through a single application.
Today’s BPM-driven processes take into account the organizational structures and the skills of the job classes and people involved with handling a process (opposed to forcing organizations to reflect applications). Processes and applications working together in concert across the organization and leveraging compliant best practices with the help of SOA and workflow is a big step forward, but there is more to the story of running a competitive business today.
Organizations need to be agile and adaptable as well because of outside forces, the behavioral patterns of people (see BPM 2.0 Enables People in New Ways ) and shifting conditions. Processes have to be able to handle this kind of agility for not only the systems with dynamic service involvement, but for people, as they have evolving workloads and processing needs.
Processes Need to be Indeterminate:
In order to keep up with the dynamics of change, processes have to become more indeterminate in nature. Today processes usually require complete process models that are pre-planned with most all of the exceptions baked into their flows and subtasks. Most BPM tools are wired toward fixed processes with variability handled through rules, but the trend is towards having more dynamic and unpredictable processes.
These processes take fixed process snippets and/or business services and use them more dynamically bounded by business constraints and policies. This is a must for supporting knowledge workers. This means that BPM 2.0 has to handle multiple process patterns, even some that are indeterminate in nature (see Prevalent Process Patterns Enable BPM Benefits Differently).
Processes Need to Support Best Practice Discovery:
In order to take chaos and expense out of processes, BPM 2.0 will need to support process discovery. There are a couple of aspects of process discovery. One is to watch the high performers and see how they operate within fixed processes/applications. This may mean analyzing how an activity behaves within the bounds of a fixed and maybe legacy application.
The other is to observe patterns of collaboration between organizations and individuals in evolving knowledge work to find suitable patterns for fixed/standard processes. This might generate best practices and/or better rules for straight through processes. This practice is handy for driving out costs and taking evolving processes to their next step of productivity. This could be driving out the very indeterminate portion of a process as policies evolve towards determinate processes.
Processes Need to be Widely Inclusive:
The problem with most BPM capabilities is that they only understand their own process language and are generally focused on a primary technology platform. As processes cross functional stove pipes and/or organizational boundaries, they must include process snippets and complete processes that run on foreign engines and/or platforms. This is particularly true for supply and value chain processes.
The problem with most platform giants and BPM vendors is that they are self focused and are not inclusive in their attitude. We live in an environment where we assume that standards will lag need, so BPM 2.0 will have to handle multiple process platforms easily. The process models have to portable and the process should be able to be started on one platform and finished on another with many potential intermediate steps on other platforms.
Processes Need to be Intelligent:
In the world of BPM 2.0, processes will have to have levels of intelligence beyond BPM today. One facet of intelligence would be a self awareness in the terms of identifying work progress in an established process, identifying extraordinary conditions in an established process, identifying participant best practices in an established process, identifying extraordinary conditions in the context of a process and discovering work paths selected in indeterminate processes. This kind of intelligence is leveraged in process discovery and process visibility.
The other form of intelligence is related to notifying process owners and operators of evolving conditions that may require a future intervention such as a rule change or a new process path. In an advanced world, the process might suggest the answer to an evolving set of conditions or an emerging business scenario.
Processes Need to be Goal Driven:
In the ultimate BPM 2.0 scenario, the process would be able to take multiple conflicting goals and drive towards a set of outcomes that balance the best results amongst these conflicting goals. These goals will likely be tied to corporate performance plans and desired operational outcomes. BPM 2.0 might also automatically try various alternative forms of predictive behavior to suggest goal and resource adjustments.
Bottom Line:
BPM 2.0 affords a very different kind of process than what we know today. This will be a long journey before this is pervasive, but expect leading BPM providers to add features that will allow the processes to take more agility guided by context and intelligence.
Topics: BPM |