Expanding Your View of Business Process Management

Automation, automation, automation. Like the old maxim concerning real estate ("Location, location, location ...") it sometimes seems that business process management (BPM) software vendors tout the virtues of process automation to the exclusion of all else. Yes, process automation is a significant BPM benefit. But today, BPM suites bring together a set of process-related technologies in a single solution, suitable for a broad range of uses across enterprises and across industries. Just as you expect more from your home than mere proximity to other things, process automation is only one essential factor for you to consider as you evaluate how BPM can improve the way you run your organization.

First, Understand Your Processes

Business process analysis (BPA) enables you to discover, analyze and improve processes before you automate them. BPA helps you understand how processes work and, perhaps more importantly, how they don't work— and then it helps you deconstruct and redesign processes to create an improved future state. In addition, BPA can identify process resource needs, the relationships among separate processes, as well as best practices that can then be propagated enterprisewide.

Consider a manufacturing operation that takes orders, builds and ships products, manages parts and finished goods inventories, receives and disposes of returned products, processes bills and payments and so on. To maximize operational efficiency, each process must first be evaluated on several criteria: individual objectives, organizational objectives, resources utilized and interaction with other processes.

Rather than treating processes as individual, isolated cases, your organization can build a contextual library of processes for meeting overall goals and objectives—a dramatic shift that can have far-reaching effects. For instance, BPA evaluates processes in the context of individual activities as well as the overall organization. So it can help a department respond to a change in one process without adversely affecting the other processes in which it participates.

BPA, once a distinct discipline, is now an integrated offering inside advanced BPM suites.

Don't Forget the People

The vast majority of business processes involve people; while completely automated processes do exist, they are few and far between. You might think that goes without saying, but proponents of enterprise application integration (EAI) may argue otherwise.

EAI technology, which enables disparate applications and systems to communicate with one another, has evolved to the point that today it can orchestrate numerous systems-based interactions. An interesting recent development is the advent of business process execution language (BPEL), a services-based approach for managing system-to-system process interactions. BPEL, though powerful, doesn't account for the human workflows within business processes. Systems-based integration is vital, and BPEL's ability to automate redundant or unnecessary "human-based" tasks certainly boosts employee productivity. But to solve the equation entirely—that is, to collectively manage both human- and systems-based process activities—your organization would have to cobble together separate BPEL and workflow-focused BPM solutions.

Let's look at an IT service management scenario to illustrate how sophisticated BPM suites can combine personnel and systems activities—in this example, to automate the process of assigning and queuing cases.

Imagine a self-service BPM application that enables end users to input information, which can then be used to pull user and other case information from various systems and databases. Based on the combination of user input and imported information, other activities can be automated by, say, pointing the user to appropriate documentation. Yet typically, to complete the case an IT professional will have to assist the requestor. BPM orchestrates these activities from initiation through monitoring, thus ensuring tasks are handled quickly and the process is moved forward efficiently through its remaining phases.

Another important aspect of how people interact with processes is collaboration. While individual process tasks are typically handled by a single person, there are many situations that require teamwork to complete. Process exceptions are a good example of where collaboration is required. Going back to the IT service management scenario, consider requests that fall outside of standard procedures. One way an IT professional might deal with this would be to start an email thread outside the process in order to get input from other team members or groups. But this significantly reduces the advantages of BPM orchestration and management. The ability to initiate collaboration activities within a structured process allows groups to work collectively to resolve issues, while containing this activity within the process. Some BPM suites provide the ability to initiate collaboration activities, such as creating team workspaces for sharing content and data, capturing discussion threads, allowing the results of collaboration activities to be used to move the process forward and making this information accessible within