Jim Sinur

As more organizations are looking to save time and money by having better processes, the residual of most of these efforts is a target process model. Typically process models have the essence of productivity secrets along with organizational differentiation. How are we treating these assets?

Process Models as Analytical Assets:

Some organizations document their current and target process and use the resulting models as a target and a transition guide for one or more projects. Often these documentation efforts deliver the low hanging fruit and the resulting models are left gathering dust on the shelf or locked in to some proprietary repository or file format. The most frequent depository for these models is Microsoft Visio. We all know the limitations of Visio today. There is little model versioning, merging and nor links to other models that can be easily leveraged. Microsoft is promising to change this in the future and I am looking forward to evaluating the resulting solution that ties Visio with SharePoint.

The next most frequent use of process models is in a strategy/enterprise architecture capability that links the evolving process models with business strategies and goals and in some cases with technology assets. These tend to be very valuable for getting process context right, but quite often these technologies do not take results quickly to an executable stage where the savings really occur. Consequently we are seeing partnerships with process execution partners, mergers and process execution vendors building lightweight versions of business/process strategy capabilities. Today, we are finding that most of the stand alone process-modeling tools are adding these capabilities. The trouble here is keeping these modeling in synch with the executable processes.

Process Models as Executable Assets:

Many organizations want to see processes in action gleaning the benefits that BPM offers. While many benefits can be gleaned for the analytical stage and the chances of sub-optimization are reduced, most managers with guns pointed to their head for savings tend to go for the executable process that can be measured, tweaked and optimized for more savings. In a world that is susceptible unanticipated exceptions and conditions, the process models are changing frequently. In addition, more fluid process models are being demanded for new kinds of unstructured processes. In some extreme cases the process model is just an audit trail of what the process decided and process discovery capabilities can look for best practices. Once process models get into this kind of environment, the analytical use of process models can be reactive and not linked to the strategy unless the process is guided by rules that are linked to strategic policies and scenarios. This will be a challenging going forward.

Process Models as Currency:

There are a couple of ways to use process models as currency. One is to make them interchangeable across technologies. The other is to package best practices and sell them as a customizable asset in the form of a process model with associated rules and services.. Of course a good process model would be portable and interchangeable. Today the common format is BPMN 2.0 that is portable through XPDL 2.0. There are folks who specialize in this kind of portability certification/enablement because each vendor has their own variation of the combination of these core standard pairs.

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Category: BPM Business Process Improvement Business Rules Optimization     Tags: BPM, Business Rules, Optimization

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