Risk Management and Business Process Management have long been acknowledged as distinct disciplines. They seem to be getting more comfortable with one another. Business Process Model & Notation (BPMN) has emerged in the past decade as a powerful tool for visualizing and even operationalizing business processes.

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.

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.