Process Management
The Ideal Meeting Place for Business and IT

The long-standing separation of business operations and IT has become an unpleasant landmark for many organizations. While progress has been made in some cases, inconsistent agendas and vocabularies still hide areas where common ground is needed. Today, the process management movement is becoming a bridge for both the cultural and tactical aspects of the divide.

Generally speaking, business management specifies what should be done, and IT implements how it occurs in technology. The combination of "what" and "how" is the essence of a process. Business applications have traditionally been built assuming a certain role in an overall process, but the process itself was often obscured by the specialized, hard-wired capabilities of the application. The common ground has always been the process, but today we are more aware of its presence and impact.

Defining the word process is more troublesome than it might first seem. Rather than explore the competing formal definitions available, some examples of what processes are and are not can shed some light. Open new account addresses a process because it has a definite beginning and ends in one of a few predictable outcomes, whether successful or not. Pay invoice and disconnect service are processes for similar reasons. A process can be measured end-to-end, on at least its input and outputs, each time it occurs. Terms like logistics, accounting, form HT-705 or website XYZ represent functional areas or objects in processes, but are not processes.

Modeling a process for long-term improvement requires a complete set of symbols to provide a view of the process as the backbone of operations for both business and IT. In business and IT, flowcharts or unified modeling language (UML) activity diagrams have been the preferred notations for process documentation. However, by only showing the flow of activities to be performed, these notations lack the precision needed to depict people, systems, data and other elements in a fully integrated process.

Business process modeling notation (BPMN) has become the new standard for comprehensively diagramming a process. Contemporary process modeling in business process management suites (BPMS) or enterprise architecture (EA) tools uses BPMN to illustrate activities, flow, decision rules, data, personnel roles and other dimensions, through explicit and detailed diagramming.

Initially, business or IT can create a BPMN process sketch without detail, much the way it appears in flowcharting. As knowledge concerning the process grows, BPMN accepts more details which can lead to a model complete enough to be executed. The ability to describe a process in the detail needed for enforcement and measurement, not just documentation, is a powerful enabler to close the gap between business and IT. Being able to verify that your complex organization is running as designed, at very granular levels, is financially compelling for both growth and savings goals.

An organization with the discipline and technology to consistently enforce and maintain well-considered processes can expand efficiently. The process improvements may begin in back-office high-volume areas to complement previous generations of investment, or in customer-facing areas where opportunities for differentiation abound. In any case, business and IT should use the same process model as the basis for improvement.

Process: The Harness for Unbridled Technology
Today, many organizations have amassed a collection of different technologies to address specific pain points over time. Technologies such as websites, email, imaging and mobile devices have solved many localized problems. In some cases, they have also provided competitive differentiation.

However, this incremental silo approach lacks an overall harness to transform these islands of value into a coherent whole. These islands of technology can lead to discontinuities in which external customers or partners find their transactions that started in one area of the organization out of sync in other areas, and management cannot consistently improve the situation.

For example, a customer mails in a paper form containing data that goes through three departments for various decisions. After a week, the customer calls customer service, re-checks the status on the website the same day and two days later receives a reply letter.

Is everything in sync from the customer’s perspective? Does management know exactly how many of those requests are handled within a 10-day turnaround? What were the shortest and longest end-to-end times this quarter? How much more does it cost when a request takes 14 days instead of 10, and where are the bottlenecks? What are the predicted throughput and cost benefits of increasing staff in one of the departments as compared to upgrading one of the record-keeping systems involved?

Because business process management (BPM) solutions include technology integration features and report process execution details, they can harness technology silos to become part of a managed process. For business, a guiding hand (the process engine) consistently moves enterprise data between people and systems across departmental boundaries, thereby increasing value to the customer. For IT, a related set of core technologies is used repeatedly as the backbone of nearly all implementations, rather than continually building purpose-specific application silos.

There are still calculations and algorithms needed for specific solutions, and these are still bought or built. But the most common productivity reports, work-delivery mechanisms, data-integration features, personnel roles and technical interface settings are consistently available. Applications, whether old or new, are linked in an overall process and horizontally integrated rather than vertically isolated.

Same Process, Same Environment
To achieve long-term business improvements through process management, business and IT require a rich, shared environment where they can improve processes as part of each business project. Process initiatives properly done are not short-term affairs. The software selected must grow into the future as technology blasts forward on its roller-coaster pace.