Jim SinurAs organizations mature in their use of BPM, they will find the need to more directly and automatically tie process activity and outcomes to corporate performance. The first steps in BPM are around process efficiency and effectiveness. The next steps revolve around continuous improvement and require a significant amount of watching to keep the improvements coming. Goal driven, the next step, directly ties the process behavior and activity to the desired goals of the process. Imagine processes that flex and define themselves according to goals. It’s kind of like dynamic sets of plays to score a goal in football (soccer for us Americans).
Goal Driven by Outcomes:
The technologies are converging towards being able to tie process activity and resource behavior to corporate performance as it dynamic redefines itself as a mix of weighted and potentially conflicting goals. As process become smarter and/or linked to decision related platforms, this will become a reality for many organizations going forward. Right now it is the leading organizations, but over time this will become the norm.
Goal Driven by Policies/Rules:
Even if there might not be a direct tie to corporate performance with auto-tuning, the next best thing, would have to be policy/rule driven processes where the process can change behavior as policies and rule change. This is certainly happening today and I expect much more of this kind of activity in the next few years.
Goal Driven by Constraints:
As BPM expand into social and unstructured processes necessary to help knowledge workers, there will be unfettered and evolving best practices and processes. It will be important to set boundaries as these processes evolve. This is where constraints can be set to keep unsuspecting knowledge workers out of activity that may spell issues for their respective organizations as they collaborate.
Over course, there will be combinations of the above guided by emerging patterns and management guidance, but it is clear that BPM has adaptability that will need to be guided. The guidance will come in the from of goals. We will have arrived at high levels of BPM maturity as more organizations grow into innovate use of goal driven processes.
Category: Applications BPM Business Process Improvement Business Rules Optimization Simulation Social Strategic Planning Tags: BPM, Business Rules
6 responses so far ↓
1 Tweets that mention Goal Driven Processes: The Future Target of BPM -- Topsy.com November 16, 2010 at 5:43 pm
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Jovi Umawing, Michael Chewter , Jim Sinur, Jim Sinur, Uptime Devices and others. Uptime Devices said: Goal Driven Processes: The Future Target of BPM http://bit.ly/9GW0YD [...]
2 Michael Felber November 18, 2010 at 4:35 am
Dear Jim
Goal Driven/Goal-Oriented BPM is indeed a very powerful approach to resolving the supposed conflict between adaptivity and control –
supposed because, as you say, the technology to make it happen exists today.
Of course the availability of usable software tools that enable
‘regular’ people in business and IT to design and run goal driven
processes is a precondition to more widespread adoption. But, as the users of our Living Systems Process Suite can attest, these also exist today..
Best
Michael
3 BPM Quotes of the week « Adam Deane November 20, 2010 at 3:34 am
[...] Goal Driven BPM – Jim Sinur The first steps in BPM are around process efficiency and effectiveness. The next [...]
4 Max J. Pucher - Chief Architect ISIS Papyrus Software November 20, 2010 at 6:34 am
Jim, thanks for a great post and for acknowledging the goal-oriented process concept that has been pioneered by Whitestein and ISIS Papyrus for different types of processes. Whitestein uses a forward planning solution that is great for predefinable processes with multiple solution paths. ISIS Papyrus uses additionally a heuristic concept for unstructured processes where the best path is determined by learning from business user decisions by means of pattern matching.
Let me add some more clarifications here:
Goal-Driven by Outcomes:
Goals are in principle rules, which means you need an embedded rule capability in the BPMS. But a rule does not yet make a goal. The difference is how are they connected and what metrics can be used to declare a goal being reached. In terms of outcomes it is customer perception only that will define a goal being reached. It is not just a milestone or subprocess that many are now renaming to be goals. A goal is not simply a container for a rigid flowchart.
Goals-Driven by Policies/Rules and Constraints
Constraints, policies and rules are not goals. If the goal is at the end of the playing field, it is the policies and rules that define the playing field (boundary rules), the authority of players and the game rules. So policies and rules make a goal oriented process possible but they aren’t goals. Constraints are mostly necessary to define automatic task selection based on previous process results without flow paths.
You are absolutely right that a goal-oriented approach requires a very adaptible process environment. A typical BPMS can not perform goal-oriented processes because they are not adaptible. Adaptible is not at all the same as agile. Agile BPM maturity is currently defined as a process optimization bureaucracy. Goals in agile would be just another name for metrics or KPIs.
Goal-oriented process behavior can be seen as an internal guide to a process that helps to clarify why we do the process and verify if we achive it. In a typical BPMS flowchart there is no need for that, because the path to the endpoint is strictly logically conditional. If the user can switch the execution path like the tracks on a railroad yard that still does not yet require goals. Clearly the tracks can also be switched by constraints. Goals in a rigid flow are just another form of automated path selectors.
True process goals linked to operational targets and strategic objectives are different. The final goals of an end-to-end process must remain the same but sub-goals and the activities necessary to reach them can change at any point in time. That is adaptive, referring to adding new goals, activities, resources and performers and the knowledge that is acquired in doing so is provided for future executions without needing a BPM bureaucracy for redesign. There is no overall defined flow, because in reality most processes have to deal with complex business events. Only some simple ones don’t.
One area where we apply such technology already today is in Adaptive Case Management where the necessity of the mentioned adaptiveness is understood. In BPM the faith still rests on predictability and control. I have said that TRUE process maturity is when the business does no longer need the process bureaucracy to do what they need but they can simply od it themselves!
Goal-oriented processes are a necessity for that!
5 Jim Sinur November 20, 2010 at 12:23 pm
While policies, rules and constraints aren’t the purest form of goals, when they are congruent with the desired goals and outcomes, they contribute to the goals strongly. This is particularly true with unstructured processes where the processes are free to roam and evlove (when people often determine the next steps).
6 Process Goals, Rules, Patterns and Templates « Welcome to the Real (IT) World! November 21, 2010 at 5:49 am
[...] first one is Jim Sinur of Gartner Group who wrote a blog post “Goal Driven Processes: The Future Target of BPM” in which he acknowledges the future importance of goal-oriented processes. Jim distinguishes [...]