We’ve all heard this one: “Don’t automate a process until you optimize it.” That’s sound advice to avoid automating unnecessary steps or, worse, institutionalizing a completely broken process.
Rethinking how we manage the process. The problem is big. The developed world is aging. Japan went through it first and everyone will follow by 2050. During this time, a much larger population will depend on their own investments or investments made by their employers and governments as their primary sources of income. Also, the number of working people compared to the number of people beyond retirement age will decrease significantly. This number, called the support ratio, is a key indicator for social services agencies and the trend reveals a big problem.
Over the last year much of my thinking and conversations with colleagues have involved an examination of corporate culture and how it affects various initiatives and attempts to make organizational changes. Enter “corporate culture” in a search engine and you see millions of links to classes, articles, academic papers. All of them discussing, explaining, or positing about corporate culture.
Many business and IT professionals have realized that one simple and easy way to describe the Business Architecture (BA) is to say that it represents the “sum of all business processes” for an enterprise (or business unit). In fact some refer to this sum or integration as the “Business Process Architecture.” While this comment is basically correct, it does require a broader perspective and more detailed description.
In spite of significant advances in both improvement methods and enabling technology, the success rate in implementing complex process redesign projects still hovers around 33% and has not changed that much over the past decade. When a good process design does not get implemented, it’s often due to insufficient focus and attention on accountability, governance, resources and momentum. Results can be compromised whenever there is insufficient attention to one of these factors.
As with many IT professionals, I was first attracted to BPM by the capabilities offered by BPMS technology to increase business agility and reduce costs. Working as an IT Director, I identified two compelling reasons to invest in a BPMS. The first was that it offered a low cost and effective solution for automating administrative business processes, thus reducing operating costs. I secondly saw it as an effective solution to achieve a stated business aim of continuously improving processes at low cost, where the pace of change would be rapid.
(How to Recognize, Classify, and Validate Common Logic Structures)
It is not by accident that all decision models look similar. The similarities reflect the rigor of The Decision Model principles, the most important being mandatory adherence to Decision Model First Normal Form. These similarities are useful because they make it easy for people to understand and validate decision models, as there is only one way to interpret one. This is a major advantage of The Decision Model over other approaches for representing business logic.
However, this month we focus, not so much on the similarities among decision models, but on their differences. More than that, we explore the idea of classifying decision model structures based on differences in their logic.
Below, Part 1 summarizes the similarities among decision models. Part 2 does the same for their differences. Part 3 introduces three fundamental Rule Family classifications so you can recognize them and use them for validating business logic.
According to AIIM & Accenture Surveys report – in the next few years’ volume of information produced by our civilization will be doubled. Report also points, that arrangement will be split into 20% of structured data and 80% of unstructured data. Following this analysis, Gartner (Feb 2008) points that “By 2009 ECMs will become the focal point for empowered managers, enabling proactive or reactive responses to opportunity and threat scenarios”.
This article is the second article in this series. These two articles look at organizational culture and three strategies to become a more process oriented organization.
Process maturity assessment has become popular in the last few years, as companies want to understand their current level of maturity and what it entails to get to the next level. But once you assess where you are on a process maturity scale, what kind of approach is best for your organization – top-down, middle-out, or bottoms-up? How would you know, what steps should you take, and what challenges might you anticipate?
Automated business decision-making provides a significant competitive advantage for companies today because, generally speaking, the faster you can decide on the right response to an opportunity or risk, and consistently act on it, the better the business outcome will probably be. By automating key operational decisions, those day-to-day, repeatable decisions that run the business — like what loan application to approve or reject, what product to offer a new customer, when to trigger an agent to call back a client to assist, when to re-route cargo, etc.
Everyone starts here.
You're looking for a way to improve your process improvement skills, but you're not sure where to start.
Earning your Business Process Management Specialist (BPMS) Certificate will give you the competitive advantage you need in today's world. Our courses help you deliver faster and makes projects easier.
Your skills will include building hierarchical process models, using tools to analyze and assess process performance, defining critical process metrics, using best practice principles to redesign processes, developing process improvement project plans, building a center of excellence, and establishing process governance.
The BPMS Certificate is the perfect way to show employers that you are serious about business process management. With in-depth knowledge of process improvement and management, you'll be able to take your business career to the next level.
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