Adaptability: The Essence of BPM
"Change is the mother of obsolescence."
Adaptability, which also goes by the name "agility" in IT literature, is the Holy Grail of BPM. Yes, a small class of processes can be automated using software solutions that are rigid and immune to change because of their reliance on coding. However, such rigid solutions are limited in their scope, expensive to maintain and susceptible to obsolescence spawned by constant change. A new breed of adaptive BPM enables organizations to automate and manage processes while at the same time fostering adaptation. Adaptation falls into three major categories: 1. adapting to people and the continuous, ad hoc changes in their work patterns; 2. adapting to the ecosystem which includes front-office and back-office applications; and 3. adapting to change itself.
To enable adaptive BPM, process artifacts need to be extracted, so they can be changed by business analysts and IT without recourse to coding, which is the antithesis of agility. The goal is to empower business users to own more and more of these artifacts and free-up IT to focus on the core infrastructure, providing a balanced division of labor and responsibility that optimizes the skills of both roles. This concept is illustrated in the diagram, followed by an explanation of how it engenders adaptation:
Roles are the most dynamic aspect of a business organization and change frequently, often on a daily basis. Graphical user interfaces are used by business managers and analysts to quickly change roles and indeed, the organizational hierarchy if needed. Processes change instantaneously to reflect changes in the organization chart.
Rules governing business process also change frequently due to numerous internal and external factors requiring them to be externalized so they can be changed easily by business owners/analysts using an intuitive GUI. Additional support is provided by systems that sense the absence of rules, or the inapplicability of rules, due to changes in real-time and notify business analysts that a rule must be defined or changed. The business analysts can then graphically define or change the rule which is incorporated in the rules library for subsequent use. The business process therefore adapts in real-time to changes in rules, and the solution "learns" as it is used.
Steps in a process also have to change frequently and often in real-time. Users want to discuss, assign tasks or collaborate with their colleagues. Managers want to change the work load to optimize processes or account for special circumstances. Exceptions happen and users need to resubmit information previously submitted or return their tasks for further information or clarification. All these activities require changes in specific instances of a process. Adaptive BPM solutions need to provide numerous out-of-the-box capabilities for accomplishing this, including the ability to confer, assign, share, return, resubmit and collaborate on an ad hoc basis. Ideally, business owners and managers are provided with digital dashboards that display process key performance indicators (KPIs) as well as interactive controls that empower them to change the process flow in real-time based on achieving a KPI threshold.
Forms are the electronic user interfaces that enable participants to interact with the business process. They change regularly due to business and aesthetic reasons. When a form changes, there are numerous running instances of a process that use the form which also need to be changed. This demands an agile solution. Shared repositories for form objects foster reusability of components and a consistent look and feel across forms. More importantly, when a form has to be changed, the process builder only has to change the appropriate component in the repository and publish it. All forms that use the component are automatically updated.
Integration is essential for an adaptive BPM solution to provide seamless interaction with front-office and back-office applications in the ecosystem. Even more important is the need to adapt when other applications change so that the business process continues to function with minimal interruption and reasonable cost. The fastest way is to use automation agents that are trained to perform specific interactions with third-party applications with no coding. In addition, agile BPM solutions must integrate with third-party applications through industry-standard Web services without coding, which is the paramount benefit of a true SOA architecture.
Data models are the short-term memory of a business process. It is vitally important that the data model adjusts to the type of information it has to deal with or else the short-term memory of the process will not be in sync with reality. In an increasingly complex ecosystem consisting of many applications, the information that BPM has to deal with is also becoming complex. Trying to capture this complex information in flat, one-dimensional data models relying on database records as found in many BPM solutions today causes loss of fidelity and increased need for the use of "brittle" coding. The BPM ecosystem is moving quickly toward SOA which has a preponderance of XML as the data-model. XML provides a three-dimensional data model which enables it to adapt to all types of information. Truly agile BPM solutions must natively use XML as the data model and also incorporate and use data models imported from other applications as an extension of their internal data model.
Change is the mother of obsolescence. By systematically abstracting and extracting artifacts of a business process and exposing these artifacts in secure, easy-to-use applications targeted at the business and IT users, adaptive BPM enables rapid deployment of processes and the ability to adapt in near real-time. The end result of this architecture is the reduction of the cost of process automation and the prolonged lifetime of automated processes that can adapt in a way that provides enduring value, avoids obsolescence and generates a long-term return-on-investment.
To learn more about Adaptive BPM, visit Ultimus at
www.ultimus.com, call 919 678 0900 or e-mail info@ultimus.com