by: Adrian Tonkin - October 2008
We've all heard the saying: "It's not what you do, it's how you do it." This is a good life lesson in which we are taught the value of a considered approach to accomplishing tasks. In fact there are many aspects of life that are all about following processes. In modern society part of being a responsible citizen is knowing what you need to do in order to conform to the expected norms of society.
In earlier days of computing, the kind of power available to most businesses allowed them to capture and present data to users on demand. This was a revolution in it's time, because now computer users were able to store and retrieve client data on demand. Doing something useful with that data remained almost entirely in the domain of the user. If the user had clever ways of working with the data at their disposal, they could achieve great efficiencies in servicing the organisations customers. It was all about the manipulation of data. This was data centric business.
As time has passed and computers have grown in power and usefulness, we have witnessed the dawn of a new era in which there is sufficient computing power at everyone's disposal and adequately sophisticated process control software to offload the process of enriching data in a materially useful way to the computer. Consistency and uniformity of the customer experience through the appropriate application of automated business processes, has shifted the clever work methods of skilled workers into a structured process control environment for all users to benefit from the best practice way of doing things.
Through following structured processes, value is added to data in a significantly better way than in a purely data centric approach which simply seeks to provide data to users when they need it, but does not help them use that data effectively to service clients and accomplish corporate goals.
All businesses are ideally suited to profit from well defined, repeatable processes that conform to a set of rules. Consistency of your processes is very important as it often has a direct impact on the customer. In a process centric business, all corporate activities are broken down to processes that are meticulously followed and rigorously enforced and monitored. Process thinking is applied to all business problems and where appropriate a structured framework is used to bring them to the workplace. To achieve the benefits associated with economies of scale whereby customers enjoy consistent levels of service at an affordable price, it is necessary for a corporation to have well defined processes in place that can be executed many times over in a cost effective way.
Complexity is taken away (abstracted) from the staff members who execute individual steps in a given process. Knowledge of the "How" is well documented and understood before corporate best practice versions thereof are executed. The role of a key business champion changes from that someone who had all your process knowledge in their head to someone who builds processes that everyone can benefit from. Typically the best candidates for early process automation are those that are of moderate to high value to the organisation. It is not unusual to find that in a process centric enterprise, the complexity of tasks & the value added to work at hand is far greater than in a traditional business setting.
Several well known benefits of a process centric approach to business include:
Your choice of BPM framework is of vital importance to the potency with which your process centric business operates. Owing to the mission critical and high value nature of your business processes, you need to select a suite of BPM tools that will measure up. Commercial "off the shelf" software is in my opinion the only way to go. As many case studies attest, it is foolhardy to try and build your own process engine. Open source software has a very far way to go to catch up to the commercial alternatives and even when it has arrived, will not give you the kind of support one needs for mission critical systems.
Main tools of the BPM framework:
For a detailed explanation of each of these components, refer to our article entitled "BPM Explained".
