Articles

If you don't have the time to listen to this issue's Featured Archive, this article serves as an Executive Summary of the presentation, "Business Value of Process Standards" by Jeanne Baker, Director and Chair of BPMI.org and Sterling Commerce. Baker discusses the emerging PBM standards, which will help companies of all sizes benefit from BPM by identifying new opportunities for growth and competitive advantage.

Thomas L. Friedman’s book, The World is Flat, provides several helpful insights into current business and technology environments. Some of these insights bear directly on the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) world, particularly with regard to how services can be accessed and used regardless of geography or technological origin.

In the non-SOA world, applications and architectures are designed with a single or limited use.

When organizations become fragmented, it requires more work to deliver value to the customer and the ability of the organization to adapt to environmental changes is diminished.  In extreme cases, the loss of value is deadly and businesses go extinct.

What causes businesses to become fragmented?

Business fragmentation occurs when critical processes aren’t managed as an integrated system.  Workflows become a complex series of handoffs between functions, jobs and information systems.  Each handoff represents an opportunity to introduce error, delay and added cost.

When organizations become fragmented, it requires more work to deliver value to the customer and the ability of the organization to adapt to environmental changes is diminished.  In extreme cases, the loss of value is deadly and businesses go extinct.

What causes businesses to become fragmented?

When launching a process improvement effort, your foundational step is understanding how your business currently works and how it needs to change. I call this “process baselining”. It gives you the baseline or starting point upon which your process improvement efforts can be built.  Baselining involves:

documenting the process steps along with their supporting information (i.e., roles, timing, volumes, metrics, etc.), understanding the places where the process breaks down (breakpoints), identifying areas of waste (i.e., redundancies, delays, etc.).