First, I hope everyone enjoyed the holidays! After a long and successful 2008, we all deserved some time away to spend with family and friends. As I participated (mostly watched as I am a "danger" in the kitchen) in the preparation of holiday meals by all members of my family, I came back to the idea of what would be the ideal way to develop a robust, fully automated business process in Ultimus Adaptive BPM Suite. I am a terrible cook, but other members of my family are incredible cooks. I am a great preparation chef, where prep work for a meal is something other members of my family dislike to do. The idea of necessary tasks designated to the people who can best perform them parallels the necessity of roles and tasks when deciding to automate a business process. The following is what I would consider an ideal "recipe" for building a business process. Note the following definitions for "Roles":
- Business Analyst: Those who have a background in understand and defining business processes
- Business Process Champions: Those who are have lead positions in the execution of a company's business process
- Process Executors: Persons who perform the day-to-day work of executing the business processes for a company
- IT: The person or persons most knowledgeable of a company's hardware and software technologies
- BPM Administrators: The person or persons who are the designated leads in managing a company's BPMS application
- Executives: The team of people who are responsible for understanding the bottom line KPIS for a company
Task |
Description |
Roles |
Discovery |
Defining a definition of the business process itself |
|
Conceptualization |
Drawing the process map |
|
Modeling |
Defining metrics (cost/time) for each step and "testing" the business process |
|
Building |
Building the forms, defining the KPIs and business process elements |
|
Integration |
Defining and building the integrations with external systems and applications |
|
Management |
Overseeing the efficiency and efficacy of the business processes |
|
Reporting |
Creating and executing reports detailing the executions of the automated processes |
|
Optimization |
Refining the automated business processes to resolve bottle-neck situations and update the business process when the business itself changes |
|
It is important to note here that the role of building processes in Ultimus Adaptive BPM Suite is spread equally among IT and the business process owners (Analysts and Champions). While IT plays a critical role in the building and integration of the business processes, the actual inception and livelihood of the processes are most defined with relationships with the people who are part of the day-to-day business processes themselves. Having said that, without IT's involvement in the integration and desired visibility of business processes with external systems and application, the collection of sensitive and vital business level data in web forms and application UIs will not be shared across your entire systems applications landscape.
Chris Adams
VP Product Marketing and Management
Ultimus