All parents know the feeling. There's a litany of certain commands repeated over and over: "make your bed” or "put your clothes away”.
These are the exact occasions when there's a desire for some business process modelling so that children are injected with the requisite process to get them to do these tasks. Parents the world over dream of such an eventuality, as it would save a considerable amount of time, energy and vocal cords.
There's not a wide divergence between the desires of companies and parents. Companies are pursuing their own business processes and can often experience similar difficulties in their attempts to design, model and execute them. But, unlike harassed parents, they now have the option of using cloud computing or SaaS to alleviate some of the issues they might face in trying to improve their business processes. This is particularly true when it comes to prototyping and modelling.
There are built-in characteristics of the cloud and SaaS platforms that are very well-suited to this type of work, as Simon Shorthose, managing director at Readsoft, explains: “If you're working on prototyping, then that's the kind of work where you want to roll quickly onto a project, do the prototyping and roll off again - which means quick to use, easy to access and 'elastic' resources, ones that you can scale up if you need the processing power, but roll back at weekends or to leave dormant before you get started on another project.”
He is pretty unequivocal about the best way to do this. “Cloud is really the only way to achieve results such as this. It allows you to focus on your business, not on your IT infrastructure. You're not having to make capital investments around 'peak capacity' and wasting that capacity while experiencing depreciation in the kit you've invested in.”
Cloud is really the only way... it allows you to focus on your business, not on your IT infrastructure.
The speed with which businesses can get started using cloud-based tools is the biggest single benefit they bring, according to Matt Davies, director at cloud platform provider Cordys.
He claims they also remove the need to evaluate BPM tools and reduce the amount of investment required, because there are many free tools or tools that charge a relatively small monthly subscription fee. Cloud-based tools can also provide “more innovative technologies” to users, such as rich, social collaboration. “It can be as simple as 'open your browser, register, start modelling',” Davies says.
Cloud-based tools also give companies a simple, risk-free, pragmatic way to evaluate how BPM will work for them, he adds. And when it comes to bringing the work back in-house, the model can be exported in standard modelling notation, such as business process modelling and notation (BPMN), or the business could move from the cloud modelling tool to a full BPM product in the cloud or on premise.
But Davies admits companies might suffer from “a lack of awareness of what to do with the model when it is created”. The other difficulties start with getting the cloud-based approach accepted internally and then executing it if required.
Share
Editorial contacts