Launch of business process management Special Interest Group

Thousands of organisations (large and small) in every business sector around the world are achieving remarkable gains from well-managed re-engineering and process change projects. Their secret? They have distilled the real "wisdom" of re-engineering and applied it to their key business processes. This is business process management (BPM) in action.

BPM has attracted considerable attention over the past couple of years, especially among larger organisations that are starting to lose control of their hundreds or thousands of processes.

It is a process-centric approach to managing the organisation, and it has evolved from workflow and process-driven business systems.

A common view adopted by the implementers of BPM is the separation of the business process from the individual software applications, so that business processes can become an area of management in their own right, and can exist across the board, effectively integrating disparate applications systems by creating a new process layer above them.

Whereas the vendors of BPM systems promise exceptional benefits of usage, the practical realities may mean that such benefits may take considerable time to accrue, and BPM is sufficiently young that good case studies are only emerging now. We still have a lot to learn about best practice, and to develop effective training for BPM practitioners.

In the spirit of this, the CSSA Gauteng Chapter has decided to create a new Special Interest Group, as a community of like-minded professionals involved in BPM, which will hopefully become the focus of industry-wide activity in order to promote the science and art of BPM and to help this area grow within the region and the country as whole.

If you are involved in BPM as a user, manager, vendor, or simply with an interest on what promise this holds for the future of your business, then come along and join us. If you are of a like mind to us and want to get involved, then please join our committee and play an active role.

NOTE: If you are interested in being involved on the committee, please contact Roger Layton by e-mail at roger@rl.co.za.

Title: The process-driven organisation - myth or reality?
Speaker: Sam Greenblatt, Discovery Health
Date: 16 November 2005
Time: 4pm for 4.30pm
Venue: Constantia Hotel, Midrand
Contact: cathy@cssa.org.za

The notion of a process-driven organisation raises several questions. Given the multi-dimensional nature of processes (ownership, intensity, type, longevity), can it be supposed that any organisation could ever gain enough insight into its processes to enable that understanding to drive its strategy and operations? But if processes cannot be completely grasped, then to what other dynamic is the quest for better understanding being subordinated? Is there a path that an organisation could embark upon that would with time result in a more process-driven result, or is radical surgery required?

BPM has for several years been touted as a transformative discipline that is capable of catapulting enterprises into the 21st century. However, there remains great confusion among management as to what constitutes BPM and also a lack of consensus among BPM practitioners themselves, if such creatures can be said to meaningfully exist. And if they do exist, with what organisational entities should they co-exist? Clearly there are more questions than answers in the BPM space, not least of which is the role of technology in effecting (or at least catalysing) "pure" BPM. From a technological perspective, which organisations would benefit from a BPMS, and which would not? Is BPM significantly different from workflow management, or are they conceptually intertwined in some way?

While these questions cannot be definitively answered to everyone`s satisfaction, there is a need to dissect the issues surrounding the quest for process-drivenness and BPM in a way that does not promote any particular agenda (software sales, organisational restructuring, advancement of some methodology). Some semblance of theoretical order serves as a departure point for interested and semi-experienced professionals to move towards a set of solutions that speaks directly to their own set of BPM questions.