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| Some Thoughts On Business Process Management And Information Technology |
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| Written by Kek Sei Wee |
| Thursday, 07 May 2009 14:35 |
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Companies have turned to reengineering as the response to being customer focused, given the rise in the shift from a producer controlled market (supply push) to a customer ruled market (demand pull). Companies are more attuned to the significance of business process and its management. This has evolved from merely seeing process management as the documentation of processes and procedure manuals.
Instead of simply having functional and data silos, the concept of process should be at the center of business strategy. As reengineering pioneer Michael Hammer put it in an article in the Harvard Business Review, there is a growing wave of process innovation and radical business process change, from the traditional “task based” organization of work. Many companies are tempted to feel that they have already reengineered, reinvented, mapped, analyzed and improved every aspect of their operation, but deep down know that they have only barely started. Reengineering provides a platform for the necessary change. But in practice, tend to create a discontinuity between “as is” and “to be” states of the company, which can only be achieved by intensive projects of organization changes and new systems implementation. Today, the advancement of enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications gives new visibility to business processes and focus attention on how to control an organization's behavior based on a shared data model. These developments increase business process visibility but also expose the growing disconnect between business requirements and Information Technology’s (IT) ability to deliver working systems. It is not uncommon that individual business application address the business needs for a specific department or role, without any sense of the end to end business process that they form a part of. This often results in employees devising workarounds to keep the process going, fixing the business-IT gap by manual forms, reports, telephone calls, emails and meetings. All these actions skirt the IT domain and over time, becomes habitual work patterns and practices that are crucial for a process to operate. Recent trends in data warehousing and business analytics can help to provide some business intelligence insights but there are more that can be done. There is a need to change from a data centric to a process centric perspective in order to manage the entire end to end business process, and their need to evolve over time. Technology will be required to handle both data and processes. While bottom up participation has been a hallmark of continuous quality improvement programs, process centric improvements is typically more top down, requiring strong directions from senior management for it to succeed. Drawing Michael Hammer’s words in viewing the Business - IT divide: Don't Automate, Obliterate! Footnotes: [1] Some examples of enterprise processes include: advance planning and scheduling, assembly, asset management, budget control, build to order, capacity reservation, capital expenditures, collections, commissions processing, compensation, component fabrication, corporate communications, credit request / authorization, customer inquiry, customer requirements identification, demand planning, distribution / VAR management, financial planning, financial consolidation, installation management, internal audit, inventory management, invoicing, knowledge management, manufacturing, market research and analysis, materials procurement, materials storage, order dispatch, order fulfillment, order management, payroll processing, performance monitoring and review, planning and resource allocation, procurement, product data management, product design and development, production scheduling, returns management, sales channel management, sales planning, service agreement management, service fulfillment, shipping, six sigma, sourcing, strategy development, succession planning, supply chain management, supply planning, timekeeping / reporting, training, cash management, warehousing, warranty management. [2] Companies put much time and effort to manage technology in order to gain competitive advantage. Even with considerable investments in IT, many are faced with the dilemma of ending up with IT implementations costing more than what has been estimated, while the delivery are much less than what are promised. Many are frustrated with the lack of delivery, finger pointing when things turn sour and the ever increasing IT costs. Many ineffective and inefficient processes are ingrained in the IT systems, which in turn become an easy target for blame when things go wrong. The answer to these lies in adopting a process (rather than data) approach. The introduction of a process modeling language standard looks to be an important enabler for this. The Business Process Modeling Language (BPML) published by the non-profit Business Process Management Initiative (BPMI) appears to be an emerging technology to fill this need. |
| Last Updated on Wednesday, 09 December 2009 11:49 |