BPM As A Foundation For Business Transformation

Last week, I had the opportunity to spend some time with one of our customers who presented a very interesting story on how they completely transformed their business.  As a strategic move in their market place, they decided to reinvent themselves and the value they could bring to their existing and new customers.  This business transformation included new management, front-line workers, and the back office technologies they use in their day-to-day operations.  As you may guess, intensive strategy and planning must be executed to ensure the business itself does not fail in the midst of this transformation.  Our customer was excited to describe how, with careful planning and Ultimus BPM, their business transformation went smoothly.

Business Transformation is more chaotic than just optimizing the operations and processes in your business today.  Many BPM Suite (BPMS) vendors describe how their suites provide optimization functionalities, but BPM Suite functionality also provides inherent value to business transformations.  While business optimization functionality caters well to situations such as new employee inclusion in processes or the necessity of upgrading business rules on existing processes, business transformation can often lead to massive process changes (if not significant rewrites to current business processes).  Moreover, business transformations can often include retiring / turning off antiquated applications and introducing entirely new applications.

BPM Suites provide inherent value to business transformations by providing an abstraction layer from the day-to-day operations, the underlying applications and user directories.  Well constructed BPM environments and processes can mitigate the disruptions of changed back office applications to the front line workers.  Qualities of a well constructed BPM environment and business process are:

• Process participants are not embedded into the process definitions themselves. Rather, roles cited in the steps in the process have direct definition relations to job functions include in the company's underlying directory store (Active Directory, LDAP, etc)
• Integrations from the BPM environment and business processes are constructed using SOA technologies. By using a SOA architecture, back office systems can be replaced without the need to reconstruct and/or recompile call outs to those systems from the BPM environment.
• BPM environment integrations to other application servers, such as web servers and database servers, can be made using alias names. By using alias names, rather than specific DNS names or IP Addresses, new application servers can easily be introduced into a company's IT landscape with no additional reconfigurations required in the BPM environment.

The graphic below shows how BPM can fit in your company's IT landscape.  See that through a BPM architecture, your existing core BI technology can be replaced with a new BI application without directly impacting the day-to-day operations of your work force.

Is your company's IT infrastructure constructed to support a business transformation?  Are you using BPM for all the advantages it can provide?

 

Relevant Links:

Mitigate Risk by Modeling Your Business Processes

BPM is a Methodology First

Chris Adams Responds to "BPM VIEWPOINT: The Opportunity in Unstructured Business Process Management"

 

Chris Adams
VP Product Marketing and Management
Ultimus