… check, define, manage
Where would you start with Business Process Management?
No, where do you start…? It’s such a huge area. Covering everything from workflow to IT, enterprise architecture to HR.
And, depending on who’s writing, everything in between.
The software industry has their own definitions. As do organisational development specialists. Strategic consulting companies offer solutions based on their own answers to the question…
And here’s how Wikipedia, addresses the question:
The term Business Process Management (or BPM) refers to a set of activities which organizations can perform to either optimize their business processes or adapt them to new organizational needs. As these activities are usually aided by software tools, the term BPM is synonymously used to refer to the software tools themselves.
But is that enough?
Wouldn’t you like to find a way of seeing this that doesn’t require any special knowledge of software development or organisational theory. Something that is so simple, it just makes sense…
All you need to do is get beyond the software industry definitions and bring this whole subject into the realm of people and processes.
All you need to do, is…
Put Your Customers in the Centre…
When you describe your organisation in terms of its business processes, you automatically put your customer at the centre of your organisation. How so?
Because your core business processes are kicked off by more than mere inputs. They must be triggered.
And your core processes must be triggered from outside your organisation.
The only people outside your organisation that have anything to do with your raison d’être …are customers.
There’s more.
Business processes are abstract. You can’t see them. Which makes managing them a little difficult. So you have to describe them in two ways…
- how they are implemented – the people involved, the technology used; and
- independently of organisation or technology.
Now some answers…
What is Business Process Management?
You need to look at how business processes are implemented to answer this because you can’t manage an abstraction. You’ll have to describe your processes in terms of your people and the technology they use to satisfy customer requirements. Then you can manage them.
But that’s just normal management. Or is it?
The second area, independent of organisation and technology, is where you do your re-engineering. But that’s the subject of another article…
Overall, though, to answer the quesiton, “what is business process management”, you’ll need to consider…
- making some distinctions between business processes and IT processes,
- sketching a larger picture of the organisation so that business processes can find their right place
