BPM for All

One of most evident but widely neglected reasons for poor process performance in a company is a failure to recognize a process as such. Systematic process mapping is an essential factor for efficient process governance and optimization of business performance. However, organizations often miss to distinguish processes they run and to reveal them as business models. Another even more typical and closely related reason is that a company creates abstract to-be processes and strives running them while ignoring objective reality. Again, essential mapping of as-is processes is neglected for the sake of an imaginary abstraction often borrowed from a book or ready framework and disregarding crucial aspects of the specific organization. Not seldom, externally enforced processes are even artificially simulated by workers to satisfy inadequate management requirements. It creates additional inefficiency due to a friction and time loss by workers to observe such a fake compliance. Fictitious proc...

Every company runs certain business processes, either documented or not. These processes can be simple or complex, depending on how big and complex is the company. Collection of processes comprises certain structure. To name this structure 'architecture' or not, is a matter of taste. Suppose you decided for a short trip outdoor and intend to pitch a tent for a night. With some skill and common sense, you can arrange pegs and pins, spread a canvas and have a reasonable shelter for a while. Should you hire an architect for this purpose? Probably, not. Suppose now that you decide to build a house. You can affordably buy some bricks, tiling and cement. With a bit of luck and advise you can compose these into a sort of walls and a roof. However, there will be a risk that the construct will eventually collapse right on your head. Detailed architecture and professional builders are always advised to avoid a trouble. Enterprise architecture is a comparable challenge. If you keep a stal...

Digital transformation is often seen and promoted recently as a primary factor of success for a company. IT is a resource delivering implementation of the challenge for digitization. This might create a false impression about IT as a primary driver of business. Despite its growing power, IT is and will always be just a technology . As a technology, IT has its own logic of functioning and evolution. Even despite functionality and design of IT are largely shaped by demands of business, still principles and internal alignment of IT remain in a primary technical scope. If left alone or followed as a beacon, IT will drive a company from its true business goals into a virtual world of elusive digital harmony. This danger is getting more and more real in the course of rapidly increasing role of digital governance and real time reporting. As a result, management tends to see the whole business through an IT prism creating a potential for a noxious aberration. Deviation of a company from an ar...

Cross-disciplinary architecture is among crucial and often neglected factors of BPM initiatives. Compatible multi-domain modeling is rarely available or seen as priority in BPM projects in favor of local automation tasks. However, exactly transparent and scale-able process collaboration  across an organization determines long term success of the digital transformation. The ability to capture a consistent view of an organization through precise mapping of relevant notations is a cornerstone of all subsequent BPM implementation. The goal of BPM is not a replacement of existing processes and technologies but their skilled alignment, which should ensure most  effective and transparent interaction  of the existing corporate infrastructure at minimum cost and modification. Unfortunately, too many BPM initiatives go as vendor driven disruptions, revolutions, breaks through and other scenarios similarly dubious in terms of attractiveness and suitability for a  continuous cor...