Often, competitive environments change faster than a firm’s responding processes and decision making abilities.  Most organizations fail at executing strategies designed to improve their position in the market.

Organizations improving performance and aligning or reengineering processes endeavor to define their core business processes. They often use ‘happy days’ use case scenarios, or they create workflow diagrams in Visio. A ‘happy-day path’ only considers flows that occur when no exceptions are encountered. So, someday the team needs to visit ‘unhappy’ branches. Converting the use case or work-flow into the formal needs of a business process model can be challenging. So I offer these simple guidelines.

From management and economic theories through technical architectures, many ideas offer the promise of creating a perfect realm for businesses competing in today’s globally networked world.

All organizations strive to meet their commitments to customers, employees and partners. By definition, ‘high performance’ firms fulfill commitments with correct decisions and precisely completed process cycles. Yet almost no company is perfect. Improved performance means improving maturity in many areas. Enterprise Maturity is a goal I find in the work of several important authors.

Business Agility is the ability to run profitably in changing economic conditions by producing high-quality, customer-focused goods and services. Theorists in business management and technology agree the key to achieving agility is in a focus on business processes.

For instance, In the February, 2007 issue of Harvard Business Review, “How Managers’ Everyday Decisions Create or Destroy Your Companies Strategy”, Bower and Gilbert describe intransigence of sales personnel at dealerships for a leading automotive manufacturer.

 Readers of the Business Rules topic section have probably found Barbara von Halle’s writing on the Rules Maturity model RMM. The model depicts an enterprise’s staged understanding of business rules and their progressive benefits. The model starts with stage zero, no recognition of importance of formal processes of managing policies and corporate guidance through business rules. In short, the stages are: