Jim SinurThere is a business design decision that occurs pretty early in the life of a process. It may be a deliberate decision or not. In most cases it is not even considered, but there will be a time in the future that this will become an important step to allow organizations to adjust to respond to changing business performance levels. Today most processes are flow directed
![MPj04389080000[1]](http://blogs.gartner.com/jim_sinur/files/2009/04/windowslivewriterohprocesshowdoyouflow-da6ampj043890800001-2.jpg)
Flow Directed:
The flow directed process is planned to a good enough level of detail to map out the “happy paths” and the accepted exceptional paths ahead of time with incremental improvement occurring over time. The way a process instance flows down the paths is often determined by predetermined rules, tolerances and constraints. Generally these guidance mechanisms are built into the flow. Wise designers anticipate where change might be likely and build in explicit rules that do not require the constant difficult changing of the process flows. The rules are quickly changed to alter process flow behavior. These flows are monitored and flows/rules are adjusted to keep the process in balance or adjusted to reach acceptable business performance levels
Goal Directed
Goal directed flows may or may not have a process map predefined. These flows have target goals to reach and the intelligence baked into the process (usually through the use of business rule technology) and the behavior of all actors, (people, composites, services etc) are aimed at accomplishing these goals. These goals are usually tied to business performance levels and can shift the direction of the flows and the actions of all actors (carbon based or not). Advanced flows involve optimization technologies to balance conflicting goals to point the goals to a balanced outcome. Case based versions of these kinds of process flows allow people to direct the flow, but the goals will remind the people if goals are slipping in any way.
(see http://blogs.gartner.com/jim_sinur/2009/03/17/rule-guided-processes-are-the-way-of-the-future/ and http://blogs.gartner.com/jim_sinur/2009/01/29/bpm-needs-to-add-more-intelligence-to-decisions-surrounding-processes/
Today most processes are Flow directed, but the future will likely require goal direction for at least a portion of the process. This is what we call unstructured processes that are composed of process snippets that are flow directed and portions that are completely dynamic. A combo looks to be the way forward.
Category: BPM Business Process Improvement Business Rules Green Optimization Simulation Tags: BPM, Business Process Improvement, Business Rules, Green, Optimization, Simulation
13 responses so far ↓
1 Neeli Basanth April 21, 2009 at 3:02 am
Jim,
Agree, in the environment of frequent changes, the goal driven approach certainly helps.
For Goal Directed process, do you see a declarative kind of representation? What about the control and administration needed for typical processes in an enterprise?
2 Jacob Ukelson April 21, 2009 at 8:09 am
Jim,
I agree that goal directed proesses make much more sense in the context of unstructured, ad-hoc human processes. The people involved in the process decide on the flow, based on their expertise,, experience and the specific process context.
However, people also appreciate the value of a defined procedure flow or best practice to help them decide what to do next – especially if they are relatively new to the job, or it is a task that they don’t do quite that often. We are looking into the notion of a “recommended next steps” that enables the process owner shape the flow, but the actual decision regarding the next step is left up to the user – they can accept the recommendation, or do something else.
3 Jim Sinur April 21, 2009 at 8:38 am
I do see unstructured processes having a bit of both flow directed and goal directed. There will be standard actions that will require process maps, but for collaboarative work I see more goal directed as the next step might not be known. I also see strucutured processes leveraging goals as desired and/or required outcomes guiding decisions through out the flow. I see the goals as values to achieve which will be declarative.
4 Neeli Basanth April 22, 2009 at 1:30 am
Having declarative processes is really sounds interesting but i am not sure how comfortable business users be with such modeling. Infact even BPMN is seen to be pretty technical for business users. If the idea is to provide control and flexibility for business users to manage processes in the enterprise, it really a very intuitive declarative modeling mechanism.
5 Sandy Kemsley April 22, 2009 at 10:12 am
Many processes need to be a combination of flow-directed and goal-directed: parts of the process need a pre-defined path for regulatory reasons or to guide tasks done by less-skilled or outsourced workers, whereas other parts need considerably more flexibility for knowledge workers to make choices about what steps to take in order to achieve the goals.
6 Jim Sinur April 22, 2009 at 6:05 pm
Neeli,
I meant that the goals become declarative rather than the complete process. The flow direct portions will have declarative process models. Most good BPMS technologies can support BPMN and other easier to deal with modeling representations.
JIm
7 Jim Sinur April 22, 2009 at 6:07 pm
Sandy,
Agreed. Even in the case where the flows are goal directed, there will be an audit trail for governance and process discovery to find best practices
Jim
8 Goal directed processes « Pragmatic 2.0 April 23, 2009 at 1:17 am
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9 Stefan Brantschen April 24, 2009 at 6:08 am
Jim, I couldn’t agree more. That’s why we developed our goal-directed process engine, which selects and combines flow-directed process elements to achieve the goals under the prevailing conditions at run-time.
For example, Daimler AG is using our goal-oriented Living Systems Process Suite (fka LS/ABPM) for their Agile Change Management solution for managing the engineering changes to their car models, where you need a combination of predefined process steps and a high degree of ad-hoc flexibility.
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