One of the most successful innovations of the BPMS vendors to date has been incorporation of process modeling within the suite. Process modeling used to be a standalone business activity, requiring expensive proprietary tools that gave little thought to any automated IT implementation.

The first time I heard the phrase business process reengineering was over ten years ago, and I was a system analyst working with a utility industry software vendor.  A California locality had purchased our product to address Y2K issues, and automate all the city services. When I arrived at my client, I found that some of the city services were automated, some were not, and I had to determine a way to fit the manual approach into the system.

I found myself wearing multiple hats, and using my journalism training, which enabled me to research and identify the right people, determine a method of relating while building trust, and eliciting the necessary information to define the current and eventual future state of the processes and impacts to workflow with the new system.

Many companies which have begun applying lean or agile practices in their work place are now finding they need to reconsider who they hire to fill the more collaborative and facilitative roles required by those methodologies. Unfortunately, most companies believe they can magically transform their firm into a highly productive and enjoyable place to work by asking traditionally trained managers to simply apply a few new practices like value mapping, iterative development and an intense focus on quality. 

Chances are good that your company has embarked on efforts to document processes and procedures at the departmental level, creating a collection of swim lanes and flow charts that might soon reside forgotten on servers and hard drives.