BPM comes first

By Alex Kayle, Senior portals journalist

Johannesburg, 27 Aug 2009

When aligned with an enterprise architecture (EA) strategy, business process management (BPM) enables business agility, according to Andre Jordaan, manager of business performance improvement at Santam.

Jordaan explained at the ITWeb BPM Summit in Montecasino, yesterday, how companies can build business architecture to deliver performance improvements and added value. He argued that BPM needs to be placed as a business philosophy first to drive the requirement for EA.

According to global research firm Gartner, 40% of EA programmes fail because companies don't properly define what value they're looking for.

Jordaan said: “EA improves the business change life cycle. BPM as a management practice comes first, and then EA. EA creates the language for the longer-term business vision and roadmap. The solution needs to fit the complexity of the company. Start entrenchment of BPM early to deliver performance improvement and quantifiable demonstration of value.”

Combined approach

Tina Manyapelo, business architect from the Pebble Bed Modular Reactor (PBMR) and Octavia Khumalo, EA consultant from Real IRM, provided a demonstration at the summit. Manyapelo said: “We contracted Real IRM to implement an EA strategy for PBMR. The problems that we found when we started the project after the initial assessment is that there were many non-standardised processes and there was a lack of IT governance. There was a disconnect between business and IT. There was a lot of role duplication as well.”

According to Manyapelo, the PBMR EA team was tasked to document and standardise processes, manage process change, enable organisational design, enable adherence to compliance, mitigate risks and align IT with business.

“The solution that Real IRM came up with was a BPM approach,” said Manyapelo. “We did some change management as well, everything was put into a repository and we used the Aris tool to document the processes and monitor them.”

Integrating processes

Khumalo pointed out that EA is about understanding all of the different elements that go into the enterprise and how those elements interrelate.

Real IRM developed a model and conceptual framework that identified the risks involved in the 24-month EA initiative and what controls needed to be implemented. Khumalo said: “Some of the obstacles that we had was the lack of executive sponsorship and support, lack of commitment from resources, we didn't get a clear mandate from the committee and there was budget constraints.

“We are now doing the architecture work in the information, data application and technology space. We are going through a process where we capture all the models and views identified in the stakeholder analysis. However, this is still an ongoing journey with PBMR and it's by no means completed.”