Articles

What About Unstructured Processes?

Author(s):

Gagan Saxena

VP Consulting & Principal Consultant, Decisions Management Solutions

The race to define, standardize, automate and improve processes started with Henry Ford’s assembly lines. This ‘structuring’ of processes has driven tremendous productivity benefits for organizations, and managers are therefore trained to consider the organization to be a sum total of its processes. A key management goal is to drive more structure into business processes with automation being the desired end-state. While most data-driven, transactional processes have been automated over the decades, there is a class of knowledge-driven processes that have eluded efforts to structure or automate them. These ‘unstructured’ processes are variously referred to as Manual Processes, Expert Processes, Case Management, Supervisory Functions and similar. And the goal has been to apply process-centric thinking to structure and automate these pesky but high-value-add processes. This is not working and a new decision-centric approach needs to be considered.

Enhancing the Value of Your Government Transformation Road Map

Author(s):

Ken Mullins

Senior Principal, MITRE Corporation

“All you need is the plan, the road map, and the courage to press on to your destination.” – Earl Nightingale

If you are a government program or project manager, let’s say in the IT solutions (or services) delivery business, you’re probably devoting a lot of thought to the long term view of how you plan to deliver on the promise of your product(s), solution(s), or services(s) – even as you grapple with the day-to-day challenges, risks, and issues that inevitably arise to frustrate your best laid plans. I suspect that you’re also maintaining some form of a road map for each of your projects, to highlight the many intermediate goals that need to be accomplished along the way – perhaps feeling frustrated at times by the need to maintain all that information on a single, fairly intuitive page.

Wanted: A New Business Architecture Framework

Author(s):

Drew Guitarte

Enterprise Business Architect, Wells Fargo & Company

We’re familiar with the enterprise architecture (EA) frameworks such as those of Zachman, TOGAF, and Federal EA Framework (FEAF). These frameworks provide a conceptual structure of ideas (Merriam-Webster, 2014) that helps us understand the process, value, and function behind EA. Is there one among these more popular frameworks that adequately expands on the business architecture value proposition of aligning strategy with tactical demands? Probably not.

What we need is a new business-oriented and customer-centric business architecture framework. Allow me to introduce a set of concepts and principles for this new framework that’s closer to the essence of business architecture. Let’s call this new framework, for lack of a better term the Enterprise Business Architecture Framework (or EBAF).

Difficult People in the Virtual World: Part 2 of The Virtual Team Facilitator

Author(s):

Shelley Sweet

Faculty Member, BPMInstitute.org and President, i4 Process

Difficult people can disrupt any meeting, and we all know their frequent styles and behaviors from face-to-face meetings. These are people such as the Heavy Talker, the Technical Expert, and the Know It All. Below are some more difficult people that apply in the virtual meeting. (Of course many of these roles apply in the face-to-face meeting as well.)

The Late Comer. You need to have the virtual tool set up at least 15 minutes ahead for a long meeting (over 2 hours) and 10 minutes before for a shorter meeting. Welcome people as they come on. Then at the start time, tell everyone you will start now or wait for 2 more minutes, and then start. When new people come in, welcome them and move along.

First and Last: A Tale of Two Enterprises

Author(s):

Brian Stucky

Managing Director, Business Decision Management, Allegiance Advisory Group

Far too often these essays are motivated by an observation of, or conversation with, an organization that has gotten itself into some trouble. Their pain becomes a springboard to discuss how things should be done in the world of decision management and provides an unfortunately steady stream of topics for forums like this. That said I am quite pleased to be able to report some generally positive recent experiences with Enterprises that are making great strides as they embrace business rules and decision management. We will use these as exemplars that other similar organizations might look to as they plot their decision management.

Business Architecture & the Role of the CIO

Author(s):

William Ulrich

President, TSG, Inc.

I get a chance to work with CIOs in various capacities that usually involve major business challenges their organizations are facing and how IT can collaborate with business to address those challenges. These discussions are generally a precursor or follow-up to a strategic assessment, which tends to surface the expected technological challenges along with a few surprises. The surprise is not that IT has layer upon layer of fragmented, heavily redundant application and data architectures built on aging technology. This is unfortunately the norm. The surprise lies in why these problems keep multiplying and attempts to address them often turn into the next failed project. The fact is that issue analysis, problem definition, planning and funding all begin with the business and more often than not, these concerns lie behind a shroud of organizational siloes, fragmented customer perspectives and myriad business dialects.

Driving Improvement With Management Reporting

Author(s):

Karen Tricomi

Consultant, The Process Geek

Introduction

Companies spend a lot of time and resources reporting on their businesses. There are balanced scorecards, KPIs, executive, management and status reports done daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly and annually. Executives and managers have so many reports they have trouble reading them all and employees complain that reporting takes up more time than the jobs for which they’ve been hired. After all that, the sad fact is that many reports are read and deleted, read by the wrong people, or not read at all.

Here we’ll talk about how to streamline the number of reports produced, and how to tell the right story to the right people.

Simplifying Complex Processes

Author(s):

James Taylor

Faculty Member, BPMInstitute.org and CEO and Principal Consultant, Decision Management Solutions

There are lots of good reasons for adopting business process management as an approach, and a Business Process Management System as a technology. The benefits that can be gained are real but they can be undermined by over complex process designs. If the process you end up designing is the BPMN or BPEL equivalent of spaghetti code, then your process won’t be agile and it won’t be cost-effective. It’s also unlikely to deliver a positive customer experience or to be easy to continuously improve. The benefits of BPM are dependent on you developing processes that are reasonable, that are not over-complex.

Five Steps to a Data Driven Organization

Author(s):

Shelley Sweet

Faculty Member, BPMInstitute.org and President, i4 Process

Big Data is all the rage, but how should we use it, and how does it relate to process improvement and BPM?

Big Data is really just a new category of data, but one that has gotten a lot of buzz because it

is a catchy term
casts a wider net – out to external customers, potential buyers, suppliers, other networks in the general market place
requires more sophisticated methods of gathering, modeling, and analyzing the data

So add Big Data to your organizational tools, but make it an integral part of a data-driven organization.

Foundational Principles
The two critical underlying questions before any organization starts gathering Big Data or data of any kind is:

To Deliver Business Value, Avoid Paving over Cow Paths

Author(s):

Ken Mullins

Senior Principal, MITRE Corporation

“Yesterday’s adaptations are today’s routines”–Ronald A. Heifetz, The Practice of Adaptive Leadership

I opened an earlier article[1] published in this forum some time ago by setting up the following scenario, which concludes with a simple question:

Imagine yourself as the owner of a business domain within a government agency. Let’s say you’re the Deputy Administrator of entitlement programs in an organization that processes claims for benefits. No matter the type of benefit(s) or entitlement(s) your agency administers, whether loan guarantees, educational benefits, [or] disaster-recovery relief . . ., your business model – at some level of abstraction – is as simple as receiving applications (or claims) for benefits, qualifying them, and dispensing an appropriate response to each . . . of your applicants (or claimants).

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Introduction

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