We live in a process powered world and the only thing the customer is interested in is WIFM (What’s in-it for me?). Customers are tired of hearing phrases such as “customer centric” and “world class” and “service oriented”. If your process outcomes are not aligned to the customer’s goals and you do not provide an excellent service (note: not a superior product) – guess what?

How does this affect Enterprise Architecture?

If an organisation doesn’t change its way of developing products for more than 40 years, do we expect that organisation to stay in business for very much longer?

Neuroscience articles are becoming common when looking for new changes in organization change management methods.  These articles shed new light on how organizational change strategy and the approaches being use may need to be modified. Some current change management methods may be causing more harm than good during change efforts.  Learning about neuroscience will shed a new reality on change challenges and change management practices used today.

If the purpose of Government is to serve the needs of the public, as many agree, the main objective of Governance is to ensure that public needs are efficiently, effectively and impartially served.

Governance mechanisms can help to achieve that objective by providing well-defined processes and structures for all aspects of procuring, deploying, and managing the use of government resources. A recent study by the World Bank found a strong relationship between good Governance and good Government performance. Other studies have revealed similar findings[1]. The purpose of this article is to underscore the need for investing adequate resources in (and leadership of) an agency’s Governance processes.

Many large organizations lack process documentation.  But how do you solve the problem of too much documentation, and not enough organization?  We suggest implementing a Process Catalog.

Process awareness is growing across the company with which I am working and business units are focusing on process modeling and improvement efforts.  However, this work is typically initiated by mid-level managers and neither methods nor deliverables are standardized across the company.  I am working on a pilot program in a small business unit, approximately 7 departments and 50 people, to create a Process Catalog as an aid to their more detailed process modeling and improvement efforts.  This and subsequent articles will chronicle the experiences and learning as this effort progresses.   

It is common place to find managers of complex, high risk, and business critical processes, making operational decisions using data gathered and manipulated within a series of spread sheets that have grown organically over a period of time.

Technology is clearly not a pre-requisite in developing and maintaining good processes. However, when it is used, I believe that a BPMS should be the first choice for managing processes rather than spread sheets.

Limitations of Spread Sheets

Spread sheets were designed to support modelling and they are fantastic for this purpose. They were not intended to manage operational processes where the requirement is to track task assignment and completion versus targets (granted that many managers would disagree with this). They present a number of key challenges when they are used in this way, including: