Johannesburg, 09 Sep 2004
A successful business process management (BPM) initiative is dependent on implementing best practices for human-centric workflow, as this involves substantial changes to existing business processes, modifications in individuals` work practices and new approaches for application development and integration.
This is according to Mark Ehmke, Managing Director of TIBCO South Africa.
"The traditional approach to the role of information technology (IT) in the workflow and BPM context, would be to commence with a joint analysis and design (JAD) session, where business and IT together trashed out a business, functional and IT specification for the system," Ehmke comments.
"IT would then go off and develop applications and systems using what I term the `ivory tower` approach - in other words, they would do so in isolation of what was relevant to the business," he explains.
"Ultimately, a first attempt at producing what IT thought business wanted would therefore be unsuccessful. Now, over time and over budget, IT would have to return to the drawing board," he continues.
"Nowadays, while IT development has improved, in terms of prototyping, user testing and troubleshooting, this process is still a frustrating and somewhat unproductive one, to say the least," Ehmke remarks.
Clearly, Ehmke maintains, there had to be a re-think in the way in which business processes are delivered.
"The modern organisation, implementing a best practice workflow and BPM solution, must see the importance of separating the business process layer from that of the operational and enterprise application integration (EAI) layer of the business," predicts Mark Ehmke, Managing Director of TIBCO South Africa.
"To this end, the organisation should appoint a dedicated chief process officer (CPO) who will effectively be the custodian of this process layer, ensuring that the correct, relevant business processes are delivered as services to the business at an operational level," Ehmke points out.
"However, in terms of workflow and BPM, successful workflow underpins a successful BPM solution and growing a workflow implementation into a BPM platform requires some scrutiny," he adds.
According to Ehmke, three key areas for scrutiny include the following:
* Obtaining or developing sufficient skills in analysing, improving and automating business processes.
* Creating cross-functional teams with representation from business and IT at the outset of the project.
* Implementing workflow projects in phases, with short implementation cycles that provide incremental improvement to business processes.
"After all, to succeed in this arena, companies must treat BPM as a strategic business initiative," Ehmke emphasises.
Possible pitfalls when implementing workflow and BPM include the following, Ehmke says:
* Staffing the project with insufficient business process analysis and technical skills.
* Tackling very large business process re-engineering projects.
* `Analysis paralysis` - that is, analysing the business process for too long prior to design and implementation.
* Automating too many activities.
* Underestimating the number of exceptions and failing to plan for exception processing.
* Designing poor approaches for work assignments.
* Overlooking workflow and infrastructure performance issues - what is being designed must have room to grow, that is, be scalable and also feature high availability if mission-critical.
By contrast, according to Ehmke, the best practices for workflow and BPM analysis, design, planning and implementation should include:
* Determine what makes up an instance of work.
* Plan for exceptions within the business process.
* Anticipate performance issues when allocating work assignments.
* Focus on reusable components.
* Be selective in what to monitor.
* Engage the workflow vendor in constant consultation, drawing on their world-class best practice experience.
* Examine performance issues or the underlying infrastructure.
* Determine if the organisation needs human-centric workflow, application-centric workflow or a combination of the two.
* Use evaluation criteria to determine which processes to automate first.
* Look for quick hits and incremental improvements.
* Plan for continuous improvement.
* Take organisational and user culture into account.
* Stay focused on the total economic impact of the project, and its expected return on investment.
* Agree on terminology.
* Staff the project with sufficient business analysis skills.
* Staff the project with sufficient workflow skills.
* Plan to use a systems integrator.
* Consider developing a competency centre.
Share