Trends In Bpm Site

Trends in BPM

Consulting the way we see it

Eight state-of-the-art trends within the Business Process Management working field.

| the way we see it

Trends in BPM

Name author(s):

Hans Toebak

Frank van den Ende

Company name: Capgemini N.V.

Place: Utrecht

Date: August 2009

© 2009 Capgemini. No part of this document may be modified, deleted or expanded by any process or means without prior written approval from Capgemini

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Preface

Almost five years ago, some colleagues wrote the booklet „Business Process

Management: Introduction to the working field and supporting tools‟.1 The

demand and enthusiasm for this booklet slightly surprised us, but emphasized our

belief that Business Process Management (BPM) is a discipline that attracts a lot

of interest. Probably even more nowadays, because of the economic turmoil...

Encouraged by this success we decided to produce a sequel.

The focus of this new publication is on state-of-the-art trends we see in the BPM

discipline. Why this as the focus? In my opinion, by placing business processes

on centre stage, companies can gain the capabilities they need to innovate,

reenergize performance and deliver the value today‟s markets demand. An

enterprise where BPM is really implemented as a management discipline can

make agile course corrections, embeds continuous improvement methods and

reduces cumulative costs across the value chain. BPM supports the pursuit of

today‟s strategic initiatives, including mergers, consolidation, alliances,

acquisitions, outsourcing and global expansion. BPM discovers what you do and

then manages the lifecycle of improvement and optimisation, in a way that

translates directly to daily operation. Whether you wish to adopt industry best

practices for efficiency or pursue competitive differentiation, you will need BPM.

Although this is primarily a book for business people, we do not shy away from

technology topics, because the management of a company's business processes is

inseparably about both business and technology.

I hope that you will profit from the ideas and information we present, and your

company will profit from your new ideas and inspiration...

Finally, I gratefully acknowledge many colleagues who shaped, supported and

otherwise contributed to this book, particularly Hans Toebak and Frank van den

Ende, as the driving forces.

René Roest,

Head FS Consulting Europe & NL,

Global Head Business Analysis.

Utrecht, August 2009

1 ISBN 90-75498-72-1

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Table of Contents 1 Introduction 1

2 Trends 2

2.1 Process design for agility 2

2.2 Tooling 8

2.3 BeLean®, an approach to deliver results that last 15

2.4 BPM as key element in alignment of business and technology 20

2.5 BPM as crucial factor for outsourcing IT development 30

2.6 Process change on (big) wheels 41

2.7 Human Centric Processes – the next challenge for BPM 44

2.8 BPM and training 58

3 Point of View 63

3.1 Introduction 63

3.2 BPM as management discipline 63

3.3 BPM Maturity 64

3.4 BPM Infrastructure 65

3.5 Where is BPM heading to? 67

3.6 Recapitulation 70

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1 Introduction As the name of this publication indicates, in this booklet an overview is given of

trends we at Capgemini distinguish within the Business Process Management

(BPM)2 working field.

These trends have been deducted from several surveys, researches and daily

observations:

Results of Dutch BPM Survey performed by Capgemini & Hogeschool

Utrecht in 2008 (Business Process Management in the Netherlands).[1]

Indications by international research and advisory companies.

Developments we see daily at our customers.

We as editors realise that this list is never ending and never complete. However,

we think that the trends included represent a current market view and will be

recognisable for BPM professionals and managers. For all trends stated

underneath, a separate paragraph is provided within the next chapter:

Trend 1. Process design for agility

Processes cannot – as done in the past – be designed to last for ages. They have

to be agile in order to enable an organisation to adjust quickly (agile) to changing

circumstances, new products etc. In other words: agility needs to be one of the

key considerations in designing processes (including the supporting IT).

Trend 2. Tooling

One can roughly distinguish a limited number of directions the BPM tooling is

developing into. What are those directions, why is this development there? To

mention one example - Common BPM (drawing) tools versus BPM Suites.

Another distinction that can be made is between tools that offer one stop

shopping versus niche-tools. But do the clients need all these features and are

they willing to pay?

Trend 3. BeLean®, an approach to deliver results that last

Companies are under constant pressure to deliver exceptional customer

experiences alongside maximum efficiency. Customers rightly expect everything

to be cheaper, faster and better; organisations therefore need to use all the means

at their disposal to become more customer focused and at the same time leaner.

What we see is that organisations now have a strong interest in proven process

improvement methodologies like Lean.

2 BPM is a management discipline that requires and enables organizations to manage - plan,

change and act - the complete revision cycles of their business processes, from process design to monitoring (measurement) and continuous optimization.

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Trend 4. BPM as key element of a holistic approach to successful alignment

of business and technology

The continuous struggle for power between business and technology may be

compared to a dancing couple where both want to be in the lead. Consequently,

both dance partners are not in sync and often stumble or even fall. The solution

could be to evaluate per dance style who has more experience and thus should

guide their combined skills into the excellent performance both have in mind.

Now, if we translate dance style into process type, can Business Process

Management be the key element of a holistic approach to successfully align

business and technology for an excellent business performance?

Trend 5. BPM as crucial factor for outsourcing IT development

Terms like Voice of the Customer and Voice of the Business become more and

more important. These voices (requirements) will often be recorded at an early

stage when a new information system is built. But in fact these requirements are

already needed when (re)designing processes: the business process has to deliver

in conformity with the requirements. The supporting IT solutions for their part

have to be in line.

Trend 6. Process change on (big)wheels

Organisations have made the first steps in their BPM maturity. For instance, they

have their processes documented. One of the next steps can be Business Activity

Monitoring (BAM). Being (more) in control of your processes by measuring,

analysing and continuous improvement based on real-life, real-time experiences.

Trend 7. Human centric processes-the next challenge for BPM

Nowadays BPM seems to be focused on processes that are limited in

complexity/predictability as well as limited in number of parties involved. We

see the trend that there is an interest shift to more complex/unpredictable

processes where larger numbers of parties are involved. How are we going to

deal with those when the traditional BPM does not seem to offer an appropriate

solution?

Trend 8. BPM and training

BPM and education do not seem to be closely related. However, if you take a

close look you will see that BPM will not be successful without proper training

or education. Implementing the new designed business processes starts with

education about the change. On the other hand BPM products can be a learning

source in themselves.

Although it looks like the eight trends do have only one connecting subject,

BPM, the opposite is true. There are many cross relationships. For example BAM

and process improvement method like Lean & Six Sigma both require

measurement of operational performance data. Another obvious link is between

requirements management and business & IT alignment. Both subjects need an

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unequivocal documentation of business understandings. However, the most

important relationship is of course: Business Process Management. For a closer

look see figure 3, the BPM umbrella, in chapter 3.

All the authors are experienced and skilled professionals working as consultants

in different market sectors for Capgemini and Capgemini Consulting. Result of

the cross sector selection of authors is a broad view/vision on BPM.

We, as initiators and editors of this publication, hope that this publication

amongst others will help readers, guiding them in their road through the BPM

maturity stages as described in the concluding chapter.

Hans Toebak Frank van den Ende

Literature

[1] Business Process Management in the Netherlands – Capgemini &

Hogeschool Utrecht, 2008

Hans Toebak is Principal Consultant within the Operational Excellence practice

of Capgemini Consulting.

Frank van den Ende is Senior Consultant within the Financial Services

Consulting practice of Capgemini.

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2 Trends This chapter contains a paragraph for each trend named in the introducing

chapter. Different authors – all experts in their field – give their view on BPM

trends from completely different perspectives.

2.1 Process design for agility

2.1.1 Introduction

The world is moving fast. New market developments, mergers and acquisitions,

and international competition ensure that traditional companies are looking for

new ways to react fast on external developments. Corporations find that well-

known strategies are not enough to stay in the front lines. The traditional generic

strategies for success are being best at customer intimacy, being innovative or

being a cost leader. However, we must realise that these strategies were defined

in the 70s and 80s of the last century, in times when change was not as

predominant as it is today. Several business drivers, such as globalisation and

internet, are enforcing and still increasing the pace of change of the businesses.

Change as such is becoming a dominant factor and the consequence is that the

three generic strategies by themselves are not sufficient anymore.

Changeability, or the speed and efficiency in which a company is able to react on

external factors, is a determining factor for survival. The automotive industry is

scrambling to produce green, fuel-efficient cars; a development that was

unthinkable only a few years ago. Nowadays, agility is the keyword. An agile

corporation is able to change its services and products at the same rate, or even

faster, than is dictated by the market. Services and products are the outcome of

business processes and therefore an organisation‟s agility is also determined by

the agility of its business processes. A corporation that can „outchange‟ its

opponent has a competitive advantage. Change is a thing of all times, but the

pace of change in the world has increased to such a point that the change ability

itself provides benefits to businesses. Corporations can choose agility as a

strategic weapon against their competitors.

Yet, change is experienced as difficult, time-consuming and expensive. Millions

are spent already to change business and IT environments. Does agility mean that

we need to spend even more on change? Clearly, spending more is not the

answer in the current market circumstances where cost-effectiveness is one of the

key issues. Instead of spending more, we need to apply our limited resources

smarter. The basic idea is to spend resources not (only) to create change, but also

to improve the change ability of the organisation itself. An agile corporation has

incorporated change as a characteristic feature, and spends time and effort on

improving the changeability of the organisation. This allows these companies to

change fast and with less effort than their competitors. Considering the turmoil in

many markets, it is a safe bet to assert that agility and survival are two words that

go well together.

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2.1.2 Business process agility

Business processes are the cornerstone for providing services and products to

customers. No business change can be accomplished without changing the

processes that bring forth these products and activities. Traditionally, business

process design focuses almost exclusively on creating effective and efficient

processes. Agility is traditionally not a design goal for processes. Business

processes (and the supporting IT) are not designed for ease of change; the basic

focus was on „getting things running‟ and not on „getting things ready for the

future‟. This attitude is not sufficient anymore. Agility needs to be one of the key

considerations in designing processes (including the supporting IT). This means

that in the design of the business processes we should incorporate the necessary

measures that make future change easier instead of more difficult.

Theoretically, this sounds very good. Implementing change in such a way that

also facilitates easier change in the future, allows large corporations to react on

changing demands like small companies. But is this realistic? Is this possible?

Are we able to make business processes and the products that they deliver

flexible enough in a way that they support fast change?

The following paragraphs describe some new developments in process design,

and the supporting IT, which allows business management to implement

processes, which are easily changeable. This is based on new insights in the

strategic importance of change and also upon new technological developments,

which allow supportive IT systems to change as fast as the business. If the

processes and the supporting IT are not designed for change then an IT change

cycle may take up multiple years. Business processes change typically much

more frequently. As a consequence, the maximal change rate of a business

process is often restricted by the limited pace of change of the underlying IT

systems. How to break this bottleneck? How to make sure that, when changing

processes, IT is not on the critical path? How can you bring agility into your

organisation? In the following paragraphs, we discuss some new developments,

which make agility a practical reality.

2.1.3 Agility in practice

One of the most promising developments to implement agility is the use of

Business Rules technology combined with a Service Oriented Architecture.

2.1.4 Business rule technology

Business rules represent the business logic that underpins your business

operations. Rules are representing the business knowledge you find in policies,

regulations, and product definitions. For example, a bank can have a mortgage

policy for their customers. New customers applying for mortgage may not be on

a black list. For all customers there is a check on income if the requested amount

is higher the EUR 10,000. This can be translated into the rules:

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IF a customer is new and applying for mortgage THEN customer may not be on

a blacklist

IF the amount of requested mortgage is more than EUR 10,000 THEN check if

income is sufficient

A typical organisation uses several thousand business rules. Of course, not all the

rules are equally important. Traditionally, the business rules of companies are

implicitly embedded into the IT systems. The terms „implicitly embedded‟ are

essential. It means that the key-rules of your company are scattered throughout

hundreds of applications, containing millions of lines of program code. Any

change in your business process means that the corresponding program code and

data need to be identified, changed, tested, and taken into production. This costly

process repeats itself over and over again for every business process change. It is

not hard to understand that this process results in a maintenance nightmare – and

the corresponding long change cycle times that many companies experience.

Business rule technology changes all this. The objective of this technology is to

store the rules centrally in one place, which makes it much easier to update and

change them. Business process change is then limited (very often) to changing

some statements in a business rule repository. This change process is far easier to

conduct and test, compared to the complex application change-process.

If, for instance, in the example given above, the limit changes from EUR 10,000

to EUR 100,000, then the only change required is the change of the number in

the business rule. The process itself (including underlying IT) does not require

any change at all! This is a major change from the old days when such rules were

hard-coded in the software.

2.1.5 Defining and maintaining business rules

Business rules are mostly written in a formal but still natural language, close to

the business nature. They are maintained by one or more business subject matter

experts in a rule repository. Although changing business rules in a business rules

engine is far easier then changing them in a more traditional environment – think

about the example of the changing credit limit. Still the complexity of business

rules management is a factor, which should not be underestimated.

To achieve business agility with business rules you have to organise business

processes in terms of services and business goals. Instead of thinking in

sequential procedures (the classic approach), you apply a more goal–driven

approach to your business processes.

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In our example, applying for a mortgage product consists of two checks:

the blacklist check and the check on income. Business processes need to be

considered as an orchestration of business services instead of sequential

procedures. This is for many people an unusual way of considering their

business.

A set of business rules has to be complete and consistent. A small adjustment in a

rule may affect the interactions between rules resulting in a different behaviour of

a service. Starting with a small set and letting it grow incrementally is the best

strategy for not being overruled by your own business rules. Business rules are

acting like a steering wheel of your organisation. By turning it a little to the left

or to the right your organisation will go towards the desired direction.

2.1.6 Business Rules and Agility

Business rules are most effective for those business processes that are likely to

change often. It is useless to create flexibility when there is always a fixed

sequential dependency between two services. Take, for example, the business

rule that your customer has to pay before you ship a delivery. When this is

always the case, it makes sense to implement it hard-coded.

The strategy is to use business rules in that area of your business where flexibility

is needed the most, such as the front office of an organisation. This strategy

decreases the overall number of business rules and, therefore, makes setting-up

and maintaining the rule database easier.

Furthermore, a more powerful usage of business rules technology is when the

business rules engine uses inference techniques to achieve your goals. This

mechanism walks through all the IF..THEN .. statements and selects only the

relevant rules for execution. Therefore, if your business needs complex decision

making based on many rules, business rule technology is just the right thing for

your company. In the previous example, depending on whether the customer is

new, the blacklists check will be selected by the business rule engine.

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2.1.7 Service Oriented Architecture

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is a method of building and connecting

applications, which allows maximum agility. As such, it is a perfect companion

to business rules technology.

How does SOA accomplish agility and why is a SOA IT environment more

flexible than a traditional environment? The analogy of a supermarket versus

specialised stores may clarify this concept. In the past, applications were built

like supermarkets, where you were forced to buy every required item (bread,

meat, vegetables, etc) in this one supermarket. This is a good solution, as long as

there is little change in the provided services, because when the provided services

change (e.g., the supermarket is also to sell cars) then the whole supermarket

needs to be rebuilt. A Service Oriented Architecture can be compared to a

situation with separate, specialised stores, where each store provides its own

unique service. So you go to the greengrocer for your vegetables, to the butcher

for your meat and to the baker for your bread. If you want to buy also cars, you

go, in addition to this, to the car dealer.

In traditional application development, a single large application provides all the

required functionality. If this functionality changes, then the whole application

need to be rebuilt, which is expensive, risky, and takes a long time. Service

Orientation changes this. SOA splits up the totality of required functionality into

small, individual services and, consequently, it becomes easier to add or extend

services when required, without negative effects on the existing services.

2.1.8 Agility and SOA

Because of this easy changeability, SOA and business rule technology go very

well together. In our mortgage example, there are three SOA services; an Apply

for Mortgage service, a Check Blacklist service and a Check Income service.

Check Blacklist and Check Income function independently from each other. The

Blacklist service, for one, just provides generic blacklisting functionality and

does not „know‟ that it is part of an overall Apply for Mortgage service.

Business rules describe how these three services collaborate, to provide an

overall Mortgage service. This „isolation‟ of functionality in generic services is a

main characteristic of a service-oriented architecture.

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A SOA allows IT to build applications which are flexible and easily extensible.

Business rules manage the sequence and relationships between services (the

orchestration of the services) while individual services execute single business

process tasks. Change in business processes – for instance interchanging two

business process steps – affects only the business rules, not the underlying

services. In the previous paragraph we saw that changing business rules is

relatively easy, compared to application change. Adding new services is also

straightforward, because no existing services need to be rebuilt or adapted. This

increases the speed of change of business processes considerably. Experience

shows that – in an SOA environment –process changes are far re easier to

implement, because up to 80% of the underlying services can be reused.

Consequently, the reuse of services reduces the required effort for building new

applications considerably.

2.1.9 Summary and conclusions

Business rule management and service oriented architecture, bring together two

apparently contradictory business goals; the ability to innovate and change fast,

in combination with a low-cost operation. Being able to change your business

processes fast and without excessive costs, is nowadays a premium characteristic

for corporations. Agility as a strategic objective should be considered as a key

asset. Organisational changes (sourcing, shared service centers, centralisation or

decentralisation) may require major changes in processes and supportive systems,

but agile companies can absorb these changes without being overturned by them.

This chapter gave an overview of the state-of-the-art thinking and technological

possibilities to achieve organisational agility, which is both practical and feasible.

Using new insights into the nature of organisational agility and new technology,

companies are implementing agile business processes that will help them to grow

and survive in the dynamic business environment of the 21st century.

Raymond Slot is Principal Consultant and certified Enterprise Architect. He is

lead author of Capgemini´s security architecture method.

Yvette Hoekstra is Senior Consultant at Capgemini and certified business

architect in the area of business rules and business process modelling.

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2.2 Tooling

2.2.1 Introduction

One can roughly distinguish a limited number of directions the BPM tooling is

developing to. What are those directions, why is this development there, what is

the difference between a Case Management Tool versus BPM Suites? Tools that

offer one stop shopping versus niche-tools… In this paragraph the author will

discuss these developments.

2.2.2 A glance at history

The early 1980's can be seen as the start of the ICT revolution. The prices in ICT

dropped to a fairly low level which stimulated the development of new software.

Computer technology made its appearance in the administrative processes of the

trade and industry business. And was here to stay. One of the results of the

introduction of more and more automated processes was an increasing

complexity of these processes. In order to diminish this complexity a new

software program was developed by Capgemini in the Netherlands, named SDW-

AO. With this software it became possible to document all your business

processes. The success of this first Dutch BPM Tool was rather great, mainly

because of the fact that the ideas of the Dutch guru in the area of Internal Control

R.W. Starreveld [1] suited very well upon the method of designing the business

processes. Many internal controllers and accountants were very pleased.

At the same time there were limited possibilities to adjust the modelling method.

This brought many developers in desperation. A call for new tools became

louder. This was the start of the Dutch BPM hype.

At first the tools were mainly focused on documenting business processes and

organisational charts, whereas publishing was only possible on paper. The

features of the tools quickly increased with new ideas like: RACI matrices3,

generated formbooks and so on. New model techniques and methodologies were

introduced quickly.

2.2.3 Methodology / techniques

In the beginning the five-column-structure (also known as SIPOC: Supplier,

Input, Process, Output and Customer) was leading and widely used. Soon new

techniques and methodologies were introduced. Tool vendors quickly reacted on

these new developments and integrated them in their tools. Sometimes the

methodology followed the technique, sometimes the opposite was true.

3 RACI: Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed.

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Some examples of new features were:

introduction of Activity Based Costing [2] method in the eighties;

adding ISO certification standards (end of 1980's);

integration of risk management modules (begin 1990's);

combination of Work Flow Management and Document Information System

(end of 1990's).

It is obvious that most of these methodologies were successful in the market, but

mostly, only for a while. The comparison with the fashion industry is easy. At

one time you're hot, the next moment you're not. A few methods and techniques

will always be successful, but is it possible to answer the general question: do

methods and techniques make their promises true?

2.2.4 From Tool to Suite

The addition of new methods and techniques is not the only development tool

vendors made. Better and improved graphical user interfaces, supporting

databases or repositories can be mentioned, and of course extensive publication

methods like companywide intranet pages and personal webpages. These

developments are visible on the BPM Tooling side of the landscape. Examples of

such tools are: Aris, BWise or Casewise. But this is not the only shift in the BPM

landscape. See figure 1 for the expanding possibilities of BPM software tools. At

the other end of the BPM spectrum the execution of designed processes is getting

more and more attention. A BPM Tool shifts to a BPM Suite at the moment that

documented business processes can be made executable with the tool (or in

combination with another tool). Examples of BPM Suites are Cordys and

Pegasystems. In theory, in these cases there is an alignment between business and

IT. You can find more about business and IT alignment in chapter 2.4.

2.2.5 Added value of tool

The acquisition of a new BPM Tool or Suite is not a Friday afternoon decision.

Normally a well-considered choice is made, but the managers‟ personal favourite

is often the lucky one. But what can be said about the added value of a tool or

suite? Is the business case valid or isn't there a business case at all?

The added value of a tool is completely dependent in which way it is embedded

in an operational way. Sadly it is our experience that the acquisition of a tool is

serious business, but the road does not stop there. On the contrary: it is the

beginning of a long and compelling path. And it is exactly on this path that you

can win or lose the most. Unfortunately little time and resources are available in

this stage. Just by investing in time and money, for example in communication

and implementation of the new designed way of working, many people should be

involved. Otherwise the ROI will be low, and involved people will be

dissatisfied.

Luckily in more and more projects the significance of the communication and

implementing phase is gaining importance. Let's take an example of a

transformation from a Current State (Ist) to a Future State (Soll) situation. The

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new way of working (Future State) is documented in a BPM Tool and

communication and implementing has been successful. The added value can be

expressed in terms of:

- a clear sight on the 'End-to-End' processes, in line of the vision - mission of

the company;

- better alignment between business processes, resulting in a shorter time to

market;

- clearly defined and published responsibilities.

But even after a successful implementation it is hard to determine what the exact

amount of added value in Euros is. Is it possible to determine how much clearly

defined responsibilities are worth? At the end this is only possible when a clear

potential risk has been prevented.

Some tools are offering a Return On Investment calculation. For example IDS

Scheer (Aris) offers Business Maturity Assessment Services. With this

framework the business case of the BPM investment can be well founded.

2.2.6 Business Rules

Another positive development is the introduction of business rules management.

More and more organisations are asking for a combination of process

descriptions, and clearly distinguished business rules.

Unfortunately however, we also notice that business rule management and

business process management are increasingly being pitched as competing

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options, or one-size-fits-all solutions to business improvement. After all, BPM

systems (and the processes itself) are based on rules, and business rule engines

can execute actions without a BPM system.

In reality, BPM suites and business rule management systems serve

fundamentally different and complementary purposes. In many cases, you need

to use them together to fully achieve the goals of agility, alignment, compliance

and the rest. The trick is striking the proper balance: Which rules are the domain

of the BPMS and which are managed by the BRMS? What actions should be

taken by the business rule engine, and what should be left to the process engine?

Several new tools are emerging in the market and almost all of the established

tools are offering a business rule engine. Chapter 2.1 will go deeper in detail

concerning this subject.

2.2.7 Many different vendors

Although all the leading analyst firms publish on a frequent basis the 'best BPM

vendor reports', they do not seem to add very much value to the BPM landscape.

The BPM tool /suite market can be characterised as an enormous diversity of

tools/vendors, with lots of local players. A good comparison is almost

impossible.

Just in recent years a globalisation trend is visible. The large vendors are able to

concur the global market and their sizes are increasing. Nevertheless lots of

vendors have a strong home market. For example Casewise is leading in the UK,

Aris widely spread in Europe and in the Netherlands Mavim and BWise are

strong competitors.

Above all the comparison of tools is similar with the comparison of cars. Only

after determination of the main goal of the car (for instance a car can be used for

daily work traffic or just for doing the groceries) the best car can be selected.

Exactly the same is applicable for BPM comparison. The comparison is only

valid when the main goal of the tool is established and this should be fully

aligned with the organisation‟s strategy and objectives. So there is no such thing

as the best tool or car.

2.2.8 BPMS

As stated above the introduction of BPM Suites is a fact. A BPMS combines the

functional modules with possibilities to translate the process designs to an

executable infrastructure, of course with periodic synchronisations. The

introduction can be seen as a major change in the BPM landscape. Just some

years ago there was a strict distinction between modelling and execution.

Nowadays this can be a vague line. In combination with a Service Oriented

Architecture this offers a great opportunity for business and IT. Will there be the

long wished business and IT alignment? Technically this is possible, but are

organisations willing to transform?

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2.2.9 What do organisations want?

The answer on this question is two folded. At first organisations want to be in

front and show the world that they have implemented a 'State of the Art'

technology, way in front of competition and with a strong competitive advantage.

Examples of these advantages are a short time to market, meet all the compliance

regulations or scoring low on bad news. On the other hand organisations are

cautious in spending money on BPM (software). Unfortunately there are little

examples of a full utilisation of the BPM opportunities. In most cases a

progressive management (there is more than short term thinking) is the motive

behind a BPM project (read investment), not only in money but also in allocation

of resources from start till implementing the project. Also in less economical

periods advantages can be obtained, on the contrary: exactly in these periods a

stronger position can be achieved.

2.2.10 What do clients need?

Organisations nowadays seem to focus too much on a generic approach. 'One

size fits all' is not the way.

The transition path has to be in line with the professionalism of the employees. In

a production plant more effort goes to explanation or training of the new way of

working, combined with detailed process instructions, while for a knowledge

worker detailed instructions would block his creativity. Lawyers are used to read

massive text pages and architects like to look at a diagram. So not only the right

tool is important, selecting the suitable methods and techniques is a critical

success factor. Perhaps the newly introduced Human Centric Processes principles

described in paragraph 2.7 can be helpful for successful implementation a new

way of working.

2.2.11 Process-on-the-fly

According to TechnoVision 2012 [4] of Capgemini, 'Process-on-the-fly' will be

the next major improvement in the business processes management environment.

New technologies enable analysts to quickly simulate, describe, model, execute

and manage business processes [page 5 of TechnoVision]. This expanding

flexibility offers great competitive advantages for early adopters. Perhaps this

will be one of the differentiators in a competitive world. Process simulation, or

Process Scenario Analysis, will play a dominant role in 'Process-on-the-fly'. Only

a validated process can quickly replace the current state situation. Validation by

simulation can be fast and reliable. But, several conditions have to be fulfilled:

- Getting insight into complex environment/processes (with many

parameters).

- Process models must be enriched with correct statistical data and the right

facts and some assumptions are needed to be made (garbage in is garbage

out).

The most important effort is to build the model in a simulation environment.

After succeeding these conditions, decision making will be easy and profitable.

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2.2.12 Future

What will the future bring? At this moment one of the major trends is the

corporation between BPM Tools and BPM Suites. Examples of this combination

are: BWise - Cordys and Aris - Pegasystems. In these combinations 'The best of

both Worlds' will be combined. Probably this will be the power of the next

generation BPM: collaboration or/and complementing between 'old' and 'new'.

Not only the vendors will transform but also their clients‟ need a change of

mindset (from 'floor workers' to 'boardroom'). So they will be able to shift

quicker between the current state and the future state situation. Only then a BPM

investment will be profitable.

2.2.13 Summary and conclusion

The development of BPM tools or suites can be illustrated on the Capability

Maturity Model [5]. In the 1980's beginning in stage 1: the initial stage, followed

by level 2: Repeatable in the early 1990's. The Defined stage (level 3) is just

before and after the Millennium. On this very moment the BPM tool market is in

level 4, the managed stage. The last maturity level (Optimising) will follow, but

when and what will this brings? At this moment none of the vendors has a crystal

ball as functionality, so ... only the future can tell.

Note: the described experiences with the different vendors are based on the

personal opinion of the author.

Literature

[1] Bestuurlijke informatieverzorging Deel 1 Algemene Grondslagen Prof. R.W.

Starreveld R.A.

[2] Activity Based Costing by Robert Kaplan and Robin Cooper

[3] Picture from ‟The State of Business Process Management‟ February 2008, BP

Trends

[4] Capgemini TechnoVision 2012, Bringing Business Technology to Life, 2008

[5] CMM, Capability Maturity Model, published as Managing the Software

Process in 1989.

Frank van den Ende is Senior Consultant within the Financial Services

Consulting practice of Capgemini. He is responsible for the Special Interest

Group BPM Tools.

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14

By Eric Roovers, Business Development and Senior Consultant, IDS Scheer, The

Netherlands.

Not so long ago BPM was thought to equate the documentation of business

processes for quality management and internal control. Now we see that BPM

has become an active design instrument for the business operating model. BPM

tools have matured with that trend. To name a few developments of recent years:

The sometimes radical process reengineering of the previous century has

been superseded by process optimisation methods such as Lean Management

and Six Sigma.

In a time when transparency and compliance are ever more important,

business processes form the basis for the identification of risks and the

implementation and testing of controls.

Process mining techniques enable a thorough analysis of how business

results are achieved, by visually reconstructing the actual process narrative.

New SOA-related technologies make it possible to use the business process

as the blueprint for service orchestration. With this, previously unattainable

quality and flexibility levels can be achieved.

Finally, business processes are becoming a key element in the development

of enterprise architectures, which has become imperative to control the

complexity of modern business management.

These developments fit in a trend to not only measure business performance by

financial standards, but to seek out, in-depth, the opportunities to improve the

organisation. With today‟s BPM tools, organisations can establish the impact of

changes much better and plan their actions accordingly. With that, BPM tools

have acquired a key position in the strategic and tactical management of modern

organisations.

About IDS Scheer:

IDS Scheer is the global leader in independent business process and performance

management - software and solutions - and a globally renowned service provider

for process driven business transformation and implementation.

IDS Scheer experts combine methodology, industry and process management

know-how.

With its ARIS Software, IDS Scheer is the worldwide market leader in business

process analysis and optimisation. ARIS delivers measurable improvements of

customers' business performance on a vendor-independent platform.

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2.3 BeLean®4

, an approach to deliver results that last

2.3.1 Introduction

Especially nowadays, in the current economic turmoil, companies are under

constant pressure to deliver exceptional customer experiences alongside

maximum efficiency. Customers rightly expect everything to be cheaper, faster

and better; organisations therefore need to use all the means at their disposal to

become more customer focused and at the same time leaner. The methodology

named Lean offers to help companies achieve exactly that transformation. Lean

optimises workflow and eliminates waste through employee involvement and

continuous improvement, always with a focus on the customer‟s definition of

value.

Although Lean has its origins already in the 50s when Toyota first started the

Toyota Production System (TPS), organisations nowadays seem to have more

and more interest in proven process improvement methodologies like Lean in

order to achieve sustainable results. As budgets become tighter and cost

effectiveness can become a competitive advantage for companies, Lean‟s most

appealing aspect is the promise of improved efficiency without negative

customer impact. Even the most efficient companies still have room to eliminate

waste. Indeed, Toyota, founder of modern Lean thinking, accepts that over 70%

of its own activity can still be categorised as waste.

2.3.2 Tailoring Lean for success

At present, some justified scepticism surrounds Lean. Certain organisations have

attempted to transplant a Lean approach from manufacturing to the service sector

in a compartmentalised and minimised way, and disappointment has followed, as

in the infamous „black tape and active banana‟ stories that hit the UK press in

early 2007.5

In our vision there are three related principles regarding the use of Lean that can

help organisations to avoid these pitfalls:

1. Lean must bring about behavioural change. It follows that:

2. Lean must be tackled holistically, focusing on people and organisation as well

as processes and that:

3. Deployment must be progressive – it must happen level by level, according to

a coherent roadmap.

4 BeLean® is a registered trademark of Capgemini B.V. and describes Capgemini‘s

approach to Lean Delivery 5 See for example ―The £7 million guide to a tidy desk‖, The Times, January 5 2007

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article1289640.ece

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16

Adopting these three principles makes Lean a means to achieving sustainable

results – whether financial, operational, cultural or all of these. We call this

approach „BeLean®

‟.

2.3.3 Achieving behavioural change

Past attempts to implement Lean have often paid insufficient attention to the

human aspect. Especially for service organisations, the customer experience is

determined largely by customers‟ interaction with the staff, so that effectively the

people are the process. In our experience, 80% of Lean benefits result from

changes to people and only 20% from tools and techniques. It is behavioural

change that really makes a BeLean® implementation sustainable.

Certain behavioural aspects of Lean are somewhat counterintuitive. In particular,

BeLean® assumes that it is the worker who is best placed to improve the process;

the manager is a servant of the worker, improving the wider organisation to

facilitate what the workers would like to do. Because this idea appears to go

against Western-style organisational hierarchies, it is sometimes greeted with

scepticism.

In order to overcome any such resistance, one should work with people at all

levels of the organisation to explain BeLean® thinking and implement the

behavioural change it implies. Employees on the front line are given the

motivation, tools, and freedom to make sensible improvements to their daily

work. At last, they feel ownership and a sense of contribution.

Managers need to understand how to stop micro-measuring performance and

look instead at the bigger picture. Because they are now aiming to improve the

end-to-end process, the managers start to deal with the wider organisational

issues that currently prevent the worker from achieving continuous improvement.

For example, the team leaders and management of a customer contact centre

become less concerned with the number of calls processed by agents and instead

rightly focus on the root causes of the call volumes, and on how repeat calls can

be reduced.

2.3.4 Tackling Lean holistically

To achieve the necessary behavioural changes, it is necessary to consider

process, people and organisation together (figure 1). More common Lean

approaches focus on applying tools and techniques to processes, to the exclusion

of all else. By contrast, the BeLean® approach works across all three areas.

Process. The motto here is „do the right work‟: that is, only do what adds value

in the eyes of the customer. For example, customers would not want to pay for

transporting documents between buildings, or for handing off an application to

another department (with the delays that implies); that type of work can often be

eliminated first.

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17

People. „Do the work right‟: that is, ensure staff are fully trained, motivated, and

genuinely empowered to make appropriate changes. It is better to identify

missing skills and then ensure effective training than to give „must do better‟ pep

talks.

Organisation. „Manage the right way‟: that is, support the people who operate

the process with the right measurements, technology, recognition, and

organisational structure. Measurements should help teams to understand their

achievements in terms of what the customer needs. For example, in our customer

contact centre, does „average call time‟ really help us improve our customers'

experience? Surely „number of calls resolved on first contact‟ would be a more

effective measure of performance.

The holistic approach makes for sustainable results because the three strands

reinforce each other rather than conflicting, as can happen if process is changed

without sufficient attention to people and organisation. The aim is to make every

worker think: „I feel fully competent to do my job, I see that my manager

supports me, and I have the motivation to make it even better.‟

2.3.5 Deploying progressively

Sustainable results are a consequence of behavioural change, which does not

happen overnight. Therefore it is clear that a progressive approach to deployment

– taking one level at a time - will build a stronger result. A roadmap is required,

and so it is recommended to think about BeLean® in terms of the three levels

shown in about figure 2.

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18

I. Taking control: quick wins to create momentum and build a foundation of

basic capability from which to progress.

II. Creating excellence: delivering transformational results.

III. Sustaining leadership: embedding the Lean culture into the new business.

There are several reasons for visualising BeLean® as a pyramid. One is that

pyramids are built systematically from the bottom up: starting at the top is

certainly not practical. Similarly, with BeLean®, it is best to build the people,

process and organisation blocks within a single level before shifting one‟s

priorities to blocks in the next level.

A common mistake is to keep working on one aspect – typically process –

without addressing the related people and organisation issues. Changing the

process flow without an equal emphasis on staff buy in, or on metrics to support

the new process, is generally disastrous.

Like a pyramid, a BeLean® implementation should be built to last. Among other

things, this means that even when the top is reached, it is still necessary to keep

maintaining the foundations to prevent unseen erosion.

All successful BeLean® programmes create a culture of continuous improvement

– a legacy that enables the organisation to respond to subsequent changes in

market conditions.

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19

2.3.6 Implementing Lean

Having an approach is one thing, but actually implementing Lean can still be a

challenge… A BeLean® implementation is ideally organisation-wide, but can

also be undertaken on a smaller scale, for example within a chosen function, and

scaled-up thereafter.

A BeLean® engagement normally consists of two phases, diagnosis and

deployment. The diagnostic phase is valuable because it helps to ensure that

BeLean® is implemented in a way that makes sense for the specific organisation.

By taking a close look at the organisation and its market first, one can customise

the approach to address the most pressing needs of the marketplace, and to help

the organisation achieve its strategy.


Although some people think of it as new, Lean is a proven approach with its

origins at the start of the industrial age. In particular in the service sector

however, the results achieved not always were as expected. Successful adaptation

requires three related principles: achieving behavioural change, a holistic

approach and progressive deployment. In this way sustainable results can be

achieved, and delivery of lean productivity improvements as in excess of 20%

can become reality.



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2.4 BPM as key element in alignment of business and technology

2.4.1 Introduction

This book is about trends in BPM – a domain, no misunderstanding there, as

highly valued by the authors of this chapter as by the other authors let alone

readers of this book – along with countless supporters all over the globe. Still,

this chapter will clarify that BPM is one and only one – albeit essential – part

constituting a holistic approach to successful alignment of business and

technology. Rather than as all-embracing „centre of the universe‟, BPM is

positioned as part of a „constellation‟ of collaborating domains creating

maximum added value for enterprises, their partners and customers.

2.4.2 Alignment of business and technology is vital

Enterprises that effectively align business strategy and objectives with

technology solutions achieve competitive advantage. On the one hand alignment

enables agile business models permitting fast go-to-market of products and

services as well as rapid response to changing market demands thus increasing

effectiveness and revenue. On the other hand alignment facilitates better design,

development, implementation and maintenance of IT solutions through

standardisation, rationalisation and reusability thus allowing for a cost-effective

system landscape.

2.4.3 Misalignment of business and technology is common

Enterprises engaging in projects classically risk divergence of business modelling

and supporting technology solutions thus not achieving business objectives.

Business modelling typically concerns strategy, objectives and process flows.

Technology solutions characteristically involve package specific customising or

even custom development, mostly complemented by separate relevant

documentation. In view of disparate tools used, guarding consistency within a

project is a formidable challenge in itself. Given multiple business models and

numerous technology solutions in subsequent projects and continuous

improvement, ever-increasing misalignment is practically inevitable.

2.4.4 BPM facilitates structural realignment of business and technology

BPM considers enterprises in terms of cross functional end-to-end business

processes, allowing for a homogeneous, methodological integration from

functional design to technical execution in underlying application systems.

In conjunction with enterprise modelling of strategic objectives and

organisational aspects as prescribed by architectural principles, full realignment

from strategy to execution can be achieved.

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2.4.5 Introduction of a holistic approach and role of BPM

A holistic approach for (re)alignment of business and technology is based on a

close collaboration of three major domains:

business performance improvement (including BPM),

enterprise architecture (including business, information, information systems

and technical infrastructure) and

technology development.

This combination of concepts in architecture, business analysis, process

modelling, implementation and maintenance as well as performance management

is required to enable structural and integral alignment and flexibility in business

and technology. In turn, this is as enabler for excellent business performance

management and thus excellent business results. Vital contribution of BPM is

application of process-oriented thinking on all domains enabling business and

technology alignment and continuous business performance improvement. Such

a holistic approach – supported by proper tools – is ever more becoming reality.

For example, by applying process oriented thinking to business performance

management, process improvement methods like LEAN Six Sigma are nowadays

very often supported by BPM tools that also provide process performance data

necessary for continuous improvement. Also, BPM tools establish process-

oriented thinking in architecture, enforcing execution of business services by

consuming process models in execution platforms. Thus, business and

technology are synchronised: both refer to business objectives supported by

processes and measured by key performance indicators (KPIs).

Another example of emerging cross-domain alignment is business rule

management (BRM). BRM aims to define, deploy, execute, monitor and

maintain the variety and complexity of decision logic used within an enterprise.

These business rules include policies, requirements and conditional statements

used to determine tactical actions taking place in real-life business and

application systems alike. Extracted and explicit rules contribute to alignment of

business and technology terminology. When applied adequately, changes in

business rules have little or no effect on process design and execution resulting in

flexible business processes.

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A last example is synergy of process-oriented thinking and service oriented

architecture (SOA). SOA is a paradigm for organising and utilising distributed

capabilities that may be under control of different ownership domains, meaning

that business logic is encapsulated in several small and reusable services that can

be accessed and combined into processes by internal and external parties via

generic interfaces. In a SOA style architecture, process changes only have limited

and targeted impact on system implementation and execution reducing time to

market and total cost of ownership.

Above examples show how business and technology domains become

increasingly aligned and information technology becomes business technology6:

a true enabler of business performance management and continuous

improvement by reducing time and effort of adequate responses to dynamic

business contexts and increasing opportunities for alternative business models

(see figure 2).

2.4.6 Introduction of key domains and role of BPM

Business technology is supported by a new generation of tools enhancing

business results, flexibility and configurability and linking system functionality

directly to strategic objectives. From a BPM perspective the following features

are most relevant:

Direct traceability from business objectives and (process) models to

technology support;

6 The term ―business technology‖ was originally proposed by Forrester (see ―Business

Technology: Do Business Execs Get IT?‖ by Laurie M. Orlov, with Bobby Cameron, Bo Belanger, Forrester, September 13, 2006) and is also principal subject of Capgemini TechnoVision 2012 [0], predominantly aiming to better understand how emerging technologies are linked to business drivers to properly prioritise focused development of required capabilities and timely adoption of new technologies.

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Manage business tasks across applications: what (objectives, processes and

rules) are leading instead of how and where;

Manage by exception: involve business users in automated processes using

alerts in case of exceptions (both technical and business);

Integrate/ automate business processes: integrate business applications and

automate message flow between systems with an executable process model;

through various concepts:

Direct link between business model design and solution by integrating

business design tool and business execution tool based on open standards or

having both in one comprehensive tool;

Explicit, cross-component BPM layer handles processes where message flow

between different business applications is dependent on multiple parallel

events like several simultaneous messages, time trigger and business

(re)actions;

Universal work lists where users access their process “to-do” lists spanning a

range of business activities from administrative to more in-depth processes;

Intelligent routing based on flexible business rules and automated execution

of process steps;

BAM delivering KPI information for continuous process improvement and

real-time management dashboards for operational and tactical management.

Maturity of business technology and approach to alignment of business and

technology is dependent on process type involved and are discussed below.

Following process types are distinguished:

Management processes: processes that govern operation of an enterprise;

Primary processes: processes that constitute core business and main value

creation;

Supporting processes: both administrative and governance processes

supporting primary processes.

Figure 3 provides a concise overview on business coverage and technology

support by process type.

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2.4.7 Alignment of business and technology for management processes

In relation to management processes, technology support focuses mainly on

getting insight into business performance and having means to implement

continuous improvement and enforce and audit compliancy (“doing the right

things”). Due to the rise of balanced score card and process performance

management, business performance is not only measured based on financial

performance indicators but has been augmented by additional performance data,

in particular operational KPIs.

Ever-increasing speed and competitiveness of current business environments

demands near real-time insight in business performance to timely anticipate new

situations. Management dashboards provide such information based on data

gathered by business activity monitoring (BAM) without having to pass time-

consuming detour via data warehouses. BAM is gradually becoming a standard

functionality of BPM tools and industry packages that are being used to support

primary processes within an enterprise.

Support of management processes is highly dependent on data gathered during

execution of primary and supporting processes. In order to get the right

information, performance management requirements have to be incorporated in

business and technology design of these processes using BPM.

2.4.8 Alignment of business and technology for primary processes

Typical business drivers that apply to primary business processes are frequently

changing rules and regulations, mergers and acquisitions, continual process and

quality improvement. Therefore business and technology support is moving

towards process efficiency, agility and enabling continuous business performance

improvement.

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For example, to improve process efficiency, methods like LEAN Six Sigma are

being applied to remove inefficiencies in process design (“doing the things

right”) and execution of new processes is being enforced via BPM tools.

A steadily growing market trend is use of Straight Through Processing (STP) to

execute processes without any user interaction where applicable. STP is presently

supported by almost all BPM vendors. In combination with LEAN Six sigma,

STP drastically decreases process duration and execution costs.

The automation of primary processes follows a top-down approach that is also

supported in both custom development and package based solutions. Making

processes agile by introducing BRM and SOA7 as described earlier is also

applicable to primary processes.

In custom development, some good examples of approaches enabling a close

business and technology alignment based on processes and business rules are

Capgemini Model Driven Architecture (MDA, based on OMG), IBM

Information Framework and Pegasystems Solution Frameworks. All of them are

starting with modelling the to-be situation using open standards and deriving

requirements from this new business model.

In order to accelerate solution development, reference models are used

containing common practices of several industries. Each functionality within

these business models is linked to business processes, business rules or business

objectives. This approach offers direct traceability from business objectives and

business (process) models to technology support and optimal alignment of

business and technology in the to-be situation.

In package based solutions, process orientation also becomes ever more explicit.

Using BPM, enterprises can effectively combine sector know-how documented

in reference models for architecture and processes on the one hand and packaged

industry solutions and business rules in application suites on the other hand.

Starting point is enterprise modelling including process design in conjunction

with related architectural principles, strategic objectives, organisational aspects,

information objects, application systems including transactions and/ or services

and technical infrastructure in third-party tools like IDS Scheer ARIS platform or

IBM Telelogic and WebSphere Business Modeler. More limited process design

is also possible in embedded modelling environments supporting open standards,

like SAP NetWeaver Composition Environment.

7 Despite rising SOA paradigm, hybrid environments involving both service oriented and

‗classical‘ transaction based implementations of application systems will be predominant for many years to come.

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All vendors provide common practice business content that accelerates

development and links each application functionality to its corresponding

business process component.

For custom development and package based solutions alike, following an open

standards based transfer to a run-time environment functional process design is

enhanced with further technical details such as exception handling to prepare

processes for execution. Based on monitoring, processes can finally be

optimised, possibly after root cause analysis and simulation, closing the loop of

continuous adaptation to consistently meet changing business requirements.

From the viewpoint of primary processes, ever-increasing support of process

orientation, rules and service oriented architecture within both custom

development and packages based solutions enables a top down business

improvement approach using BPM providing real process flexibility and a close

alignment of business and technology.

2.4.9 Alignment of business and technology for supporting processes

Much of current BPM focus is on (mostly top-down) alignment of business and

technology in support of particularly primary as well as gradually management

processes as described above. Yet there is another, quite similar process

orientation emerging from a different, perhaps somewhat unexpected

perspective: technology underlying supporting processes, in particular IT

governance. All major vendors in latter field are increasingly enabling and

promoting business service management8 and IT process management, aligning

ever more closely to widespread standards and best practices9.

8 Business Service Management is a comprehensive approach to unifying and standardising

IT work. It creates a common, enterprise-wide view of each business service and enables automation of change and compliance across all devices that make up a business service. It connects IT processes, coordinates siloed teams via common workflows and integrates with monitoring and ticketing tools to form a complete, integrated business service management solution best supporting business. 9 Three specific IT governance practices and standards that have become widely adopted

across the globe are: ITIL V3—Published by the UK government to provide a best practice framework for IT service management. The chief benefit of ITIL is standardisation of processes and concepts ensuring a shared understanding and offering proven solution models. In turn, this enables additional benefits in the form of cost savings, enhanced quality and greater customer satisfaction. CobiT 4.1—Published by ITGI and positioned as a high-level governance and control framework. Due to its high level and broad coverage and because it is based on many existing practices, CobiT is often referred to as the ‗integrator‘, bringing disparate practices under one umbrella and, just as important, helping to link these various IT practices to business requirements. ISO/IEC 27002:2005—Published by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) and derived from the UK government‘s BS 7799, renamed ISO/IEC 17799:2005, to provide a framework of a standard for information security management.

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The growing maturity and consequent adoption of these IT frameworks is being

driven by two main factors. One is growing demand for improved quality,

reliability and transparency as well as better control over IT activities in response

to ever-increasing security, availability, performance, regulatory and contractual

requirements. Another is ongoing concern over generally increasing IT

(administration and management – not as much hardware) expenditures.

Implementation of standards and best practices should be tailored, prioritised,

planned and managed to match specific requirements given business context and

other methods in use in the enterprise to ensure cost-effective and well-controlled

IT delivery.

One could even argue that process orientation is more advanced than in

technology underlying management and primary processes. There, process logic

was historically enclosed in quasi-intelligent data marts and back-end application

systems and is only fairly recently being partly abstracted from technology in

view of rising service oriented architecture paradigm. Still, resulting management

and primary process implementations largely are vendor proprietary, package-

based solution vendors‟ approach to hybrid environments is yet ambiguous, and

both are bound to specific application system run-time environments.

All that glitters is not gold in IT governance either. Vendors have moved bottom-

up from backward-looking performance and availability monitoring of single and

separate application services and infrastructure components to proactive

performance and availability control of multiple and integrated IT services and

processes. However, they have developed proprietary instantiations of

aforementioned IT frameworks using bespoke workflow and technical process

descriptions that at best can be imported one-directionally from a functional

process model.

On the other hand, more business-oriented tools have moved top-down from

modelling and analysis mostly for primary processes to process performance

management for various process categories. However, they may have

implemented existing IT frameworks concepts for use by business but are still

expanding functionalities to provide necessary links into execution that service

management vendors have been developing and integrating for years already.

More often than not, technology function is still fragmented both organisationally

and process-wise as it is based on support of disparate IT capabilities rather than

delivery of integrated services and processes. Hence, a clear and consistent

definition and implementation of roles and responsibilities is essential in business

aspect of IT governance processes. Existing well-regarded IT frameworks may

help to define roles and responsibilities for effective IT governance of all process

types. BPM offers suitable instruments for successful implementation and

management. By adopting such a business focus, IT governance can achieve

desired control over complexity, compliance, and costs.

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There is an apparent need to abstract process logic from technology and enable

business to drive IT governance processes using BPM as in other process types.

Another requirement is that top-down business practices are used in conjunction

with bottom-up IT framework implementations using BPM for a proper

application of technology in support of IT governance (“best of both worlds”).


A holistic process-oriented approach that allows for a homogeneous,

methodological integration from strategy to execution and enables structural and

comprehensive business and technology alignment –supported by process-

oriented tools – is ever more becoming a reality. There is a clear analogy to both

business and technology in support of various process types: all require closer

alignment to maximise added value for enterprises. However, this chapter found

that history, status, and approach in relation to BPM differ per process type and

needs realignment in itself to prevent “silos of business and technology

alignment”.

In brief, BPM is at the pivoting point of further developments – both horizontally

(top-down and bottom-up in each process type) and vertically (integration of

various process types) – towards better alignment of business and technology.

Realigning BPM by broadening scope to different process types, combining

business and technology focus and mutually applying key learning and best

practices, enterprise maturity level required for true business performance

management and continuous improvement can be achieved more efficiently and

effectively.

To do so properly, combination of concepts in architecture, business analysis,

process modelling and implementation and maintenance is required, offering

structural and integral alignment and flexibility in business and technology as

enabler for business performance excellence. As business and technology

domains progressively merge into business technology, time and effort of

adequate responses to dynamic business contexts decrease and opportunities for

alternative business models increase.

This takes us back to where this chapter started: rather than as all-embracing

„centre of the universe‟, BPM needs to be positioned as part of a „constellation‟

of collaborating domains creating maximum added value for enterprises, their

partners and customers:

“Together. Free your energies”!

Literature

[1] TechnoVision 2012 - Bringing Business Technology to Life, Capgemini ,

2008

[2] The Strategy-focused Organisation, Kaplan, R.S. and Norton, D.P., 2001

[3] Aligning CobiT® 4.1, ITIL

® V3 and ISO/IEC 27002 for Business Benefit - A

Management Briefing, ITGI and OGC, 2008

[4] Worldwide Distributed Performance and Availability Management Software

2007-2011 Forecast Summary and 2006 Vendor Shares, IDC, 2007

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[5] The five automation imperatives: a comprehensive look at Business Service

Automation, HP, 2008

[6] www.Wikipedia.org

[7] www.OASIS-org.com

[8] several presentations on ARIS Value Engineering, IDS Scheer, 2008

[9] sdn.sap.com - several blogs on SAP NetWeaver BPM, SAP, 2008

Günther Drabbels is certified architect and Managing Consultant at Capgemini.

Gernot Tomsits is Managing Consultant at Capgemini.

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2.5 BPM as crucial factor for outsourcing IT development

2.5.1 Introduction

Outsourcing the development of IT systems has shown a huge growth over the

past decade. Large companies, in many cases quoted on local and international

stock exchanges, who were formerly developing their own IT systems, have

chosen to outsource this discipline. Above all other arguments this choice has

mostly been made because of cost savings. The business case for these

companies was difficult to be negative as the costs of labour in e.g. India are a

fraction of the costs compared to the wages in the western countries.

After a significant number of years of experiencing IT being outsourced, it is a

known fact that this change within the organisations also has an underestimated

downside. This downside is the collaboration between the business parties on one

side requesting certain IT support, and IT parties on the other side delivering the

systems and changes that have been requested. Unfortunately delivered solutions

in many cases are not recognised by the business and thus not to the client‟s

satisfaction.

In this article, this phenomenon is further elaborated. Solutions to highly improve

this negative side of outsourcing IT will be investigated and given. The crucial

value of BPM in this matter will be explained as also the trend of capturing high

level business requirements in process models and the use of a reliable method

for business analysis (BA).

In the described situation, it is ironical that in most cases both business and IT

parties have done the right thing to demand or deliver what is needed or has been

requested. What is lacking in the communications between demand and supply in

this environment is for both to have working knowledge of the same language:

Business professionals do not speak „tech‟, they are not familiar with UML or

use cases. They express their needs in words that describe the way the work

needs to be done in the To-Be (Future State) situation. IT specialists then

translate this business „language‟ into „tech‟ in a way that complies with the

interest of their company. This translation by definition comes with

interpretation, which gives room for misunderstandings resulting in a deviant

solution compared to the expectation.

The addition of business analysis to the development process has reduced many

of the difficulties. Main task of the business analyst is to bridge the gap between

business and IT by translating the business‟ demand into an understandable and

workable package for IT developers. With their knowledge of information

analysis, business process management and their expertise on specific subject

matters, they form the ideal conversation partner for both business and IT parties.

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Business parties benefit from business analysts as they can provide knowledge on

the latest trends and developments in their markets. They understand their

business processes and know how to improve them. IT parties also benefit

because business analysts speak „tech‟ and are able to understand technological

impact and even impossibilities of business requests and demands. On top of that,

they are able to translate this into business language. Figure 1 shows the

competencies of a business analyst.

Although business analysts are very welcome professionals to the set, it has not

completely solved the downside of IT outsourcing. So one could say that the

problem is not „just‟ speaking different languages, there are also other aspects to

it, such as

The relationship between business and IT has become distant;

The relationship has become formal instead of fraternal;

Former IT experts have become business analysts;

The relationship has changed due to cultural differences, which are

compelling enough to be described in an article on its own and therefore not

further addressed in this article.

2.5.2 Distant relationship

When IT was still an in house operation, contacts between business and IT

departments were intense and frequent, not to mention informal and pragmatic in

order to realise the goals both parties were aiming for, being a team of

colleagues. One would walk one floor down to discuss unclear topics or even

organise a quick workshop to clarify potential misunderstandings. With IT being

moved to, for example India, face to face contacts have been replaced by contacts

via telephone or videoconferencing facilities, which take more time and effort to

organise and which limit the visibility of non-verbal communications. Although

this aspect of communications seems to be surmountable and low on impact,

practice proves that the number of misinterpretations is off the charts. Thinking

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about the well known fact that more than 90% of communications is non-verbal,

this aspect deserves serious attention. Interesting conclusion from this aspect of

the problem is that it indicates that the problem of difficult communications

between business and IT is not new at all. Before IT was outsourced the problem

was exactly the same, the difference however is that it now has become visible

due to the new way of working. Parties nowadays are spread over the world and

have lost the informal and pragmatic contacts they used to have, which were very

important to keep the process rolling, making the inefficiencies which were

already there, unnoticeable.

So in order to improve the collaboration between business and IT, improving

distant communications is another aspect that deserves particular attention.

2.5.3 Formal Relationship

As both parties are no longer within the same company, interests have

diversified. Even when both parties are within the same company but within

different strategic business units, divisions or other entities, interests are usually

in conflict with each other. Where the business “(just) wants things to work the

way it supports their business process in the best possible way”, IT aims to reach

highest efficiency at the lowest costs, by organising their assets, processes and

services conformable to (e.g.) CMMi guidelines. And although CMMi is a very

good standard to comply to, the challenge for IT developers is to ensure

handovers from their clients (business parties) are smooth, meaning that they

need to be able to fully and unambiguously understand the clients request before

processing it.

In the current situation, IT developers build solutions that meet the specified

business requirements as defined by the client and almost nothing more.

Although it sounds negative, this is actually correct considering the new

relationship. As a result of a change in the process of realising business change,

namely the outsourcing of IT development, the internal handover has evolved

into a formal purchase order, which has a significantly different value. There is

no room anymore for designing 20% of the solution on-the-fly like there was

before, when the business kind of expected this from IT, to solve the loose ends

that were not described. Today the delivery of a solution that does not comply

with the demand, is to be adjusted at the developer‟s cost. This means that every

initiative or interpretation from the developer that potentially contributes to a

better solution, is a risk for the supplier if it was not formally agreed upon. This

explains the developers‟ formal attitude.

However, with the previous frequent informal contacts and activities missing,

things are determined to go wrong. Hence additional information is needed to

realise a common working language, enabling the provision of an unambiguous

request to the IT developer.

2.5.4 From IT expert to business analyst

In the process of outsourcing IT, many IT professionals lost their jobs. Some

went to other companies while others were saved in order to avoid losing the

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knowledge about the systems in use. For the IT professionals who stayed within

the companies, in many occasions a place was found within the business analysis

department. As business analysis is truly a different profession, this move can

only be successful if these IT experts are trained in business analysis skills and

more importantly, if these experts are able to adapt to the different mentality

which is crucial to their new role and responsibility. Especially the latter is of

great influence to the quality of the business analysis performance. The biggest

difference between the IT professional and a business analyst is that the former

gets an assignment and starts building the solution conforming to the received

design. There may of course be some dialogue with the client, but basically IT

professionals build to conform to the received design. A good business analyst

however, receives a change request from a business owner, starts investigating

the real business problem and determines whether the requested solution is the

right and useful answer to the request. He does so by analysing and moreover

understanding the As-Is situation and comparing the facts gathered from this

analysis with the change drivers, client objectives and the change request.

Based upon that analysis and agreement on that analysis with the client, he will

design a To-Be solution that meets the change driver. A method that enables

business analysts to perform their profession in an excellent way is the Structured

Expert Method for Business Analysis (SEMBA)10

, which is shown in Figure 2.

This method will be addressed in more detail later in this article.

10 SEMBA is the Business Analysis Method developed by Capgemini

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Quite a difference in approach one might say! So if former IT experts with their

knowledge of the existing systems treat business requests using an IT driven

approach, a greater risk will arise of requirements being written reasoned from

the problem towards the IT solution, instead of reasoning from the desired

process. This way of working will not, by definition, express the true needs of the

business, but will be aimed at a solution which is known beforehand. Looking at

this aspect in combination with the challenges created by the formalisation of the

relationship with IT, one could say that it is tempting for a business analyst to

write the requirements towards a known solution as it would save a lot of

potential misunderstandings in the development process.

2.5.5 Virtual Workshops

Summarising the three defined aspects that lead to inefficient collaboration of

business and IT, the following list of desired improvements can be made:

improvement of distant communications;

extend the classical information package with additional information, to

realise a common working language, enabling the provision of an

unambiguous request to the IT developer;

make sure that in the process of business analysis a complete analysis is

performed to avoid shortcuts to insufficient solutions.

Currently Capgemini is experimenting with virtual workshops. This is a most

promising way to improve distant communications. Virtual workshops are

workshops where participants are not physically in one room, they can be spread

over many locations around the globe. Through the use of web based tools an

environment is created in which all participants can communicate through voice

and writing. This way a collaborative working is realised leading to a much

higher involvement and stronger commitment of distant resources. Besides

currently available web-tools which enable conference audio, video and file

sharing, much more sophisticated solutions are also being developed. For

example SUN [1] has developed an environment in which a virtual office is

created, where employees can walk around and interact with others in many

ways; one can have both formal and informal meetings. Walking around in the

virtual office, you can actually see others standing and talking at the coffee

machine, you can build presentations, documents, drawings etc. together by

sharing applications or you can demonstrate the results of your offline work,

inviting others to provide instant feedback. You can even have a video

conference where people in the virtual space are gathered in a conference room

looking at a screen displaying people in the actual space. This kind of tooling

enables distant IT developers be more immanent as they become actual part of

the team in the same office, reinstating the short lines which were there before IT

was outsourced and increasing the chances for a “right at the first time”

deliverable.

It is not only this new way of collaborating that will improve distant

collaboration, but also the possibility to have IT development parties involved

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earlier in the process. They will be able to perform the complete business

analysis, instead of developing the solution alone based on the received

requirements.

2.5.6 Business Processes are leading

In case the IT developer is involved earlier in the project, it will be to be involved

in writing requirements in a smart and unambiguous way, which is not easy at all.

The Integrated Requirements Management Approach (IRMA)11

aims to

standardise the capturing and management of requirements in IT projects. Using

this approach will lead to clear and complete requirements and ensures faster

start up of the development project against lower costs. Also, the use of IRMA

will provide additional information to the IT developer and will improve the

requirements management discipline in the project, leading to better solutions.

Perfecting requirements management is not enough. In order to reach

unambiguousness, the developer needs to understand the arching context, the To-

Be situation of which the requirements have been subtracted, in a more concrete

and consistent way than described in the average vision document. Changes are

based on problem statements, change drivers and client objectives. The arching

context for the IT developer is provided by the business analyst by means of

interdependent models, such as (a.o.) the business context model, business

process model, governance model, information model, data model and high level

application landscape design of both the current state and the future state. Parallel

to developing these models, the business analyst elicits, documents, organises

and tracks changing business requirements12

in order to create a complete,

coherent and consistent package. Naturally during this process of eliciting

business requirements the encountered information and system requirements will

also be captured.

From all mentioned models especially the process model provides the concrete

information fundamentally needed to interpret the business requirements the way

they are intended by the business, namely the way they support the business

process in the best possible way. This is because the process model pre-

eminently describes the way of working once the change has been implemented.

Consequently, it is the process model that is the common language for business

and IT to speak in, in order to understand and to be understood. Therefore,

business process modelling is crucial to successful IT development projects.

The biggest added value of a business process model in this context is that it

provides the business a language to explain what they really want. That is why

business processes need to be leading in development projects as they are the

11 IRMA is the requirements management approach developed by Capgemini

12 Requirements Engineering within SEMBA is restricted to business and information

requirements. SEMBA does not focus on the system requirements.

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spine of the internal organisation that carries all activities and supportive

resources.

It goes without saying that it will work only when provided business processes

models are uncomplicated and understandable by all involved parties and

stakeholders. Simplifying process models can be achieved by using building

blocks, which for instance have been defined together with IT developers

beforehand. By reducing the number of building blocks or services and their

complexity, understandable process models will arise. Subsequently when the

building blocks are 100% clear to the IT developers, a correct interpretation of

the request is a fact.

To secure the connection between the business requirements and the business

processes, some companies have decided to capture the high level business

requirements within the business process model. This has great advantage as it

shows clearly and specifically per activity in the process the high level

requirement which the supporting software has to meet. Also it provides for

every change, the traceability to why the change needs to be built.

Unfortunately the functionality of modelling tools regarding requirements

management (RM) is limited and generally insufficient for a software

development process. Therefore having the requirement at the operational level

within the activity in the RM tooling is still needed.

2.5.7 Reuse instead of re-work

The challenge is to keep the connection between the requirements and the

business process in the requirements management systems. The worst thing to do

is to translate the process model into something the RM systems can work with.

This downgrades the process model from a guiding document into a working

paper. The model in that scenario that will be guiding the rest of the process from

this point on is the capturing of an interpretation of the original process model as

defined by the business, adjusted to the functionality of the RM tool. Even

though this seems to save a lot of effort in synchronising both systems during the

development process, it decreases the accuracy of the description of the requested

solution, especially when the process model is forced to be translated once more

in case IT development parties again use other systems as part of their efficient

CMMi processes.

Within the development process the aim should be to reuse existing materials,

instead of translating and reworking the received input into new models that may

lose crucial information in relation to the original request of the business. Even

though synchronising the requirements between the RM tool and the modelling

tool takes time, keeping the business process model as a target solution from

which all business, information and system requirements are derived, will

definitely contribute to a first time right solution at lower cost.

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Enabling the re-use of existing materials will be boosted by integrating business

process management and requirements management functionality into one single

tool. This will enable companies to govern and control processes and secure that

all change requests contribute to better realisation of the company‟s objectives.

Change requests becoming a purpose in themselves will then be avoided.

Moreover companies can initiate changes in the course of which a thorough

impact analysis is possible on all relevant factors including other processes when

changes occur in the development process.

2.5.8 SEMBA

Listing appropriate methods for business analysis (BA) leads to a handful of

methods which claim to be supportive to the business analysis profession. It is

remarkable that none of the methods contain a current state analysis combined

with a future state design and the making of a migration design in combination

with requirements engineering. For this reason SEMBA was developed: the

Structured Expert Method for Business Analysis.

As shown in Figure 2, the SEMBA method for business analysis covers the

complete BA process. With this method experienced business analysts are well

equipped to perform a thorough and complete analysis triggered by the client

initiative, resulting in an unambiguous Migration Design that is to be delivered to

the IT development team.

The graphic representation of SEMBA (Figure 2) is a matrix of vertical phases

and horizontal streams. Together, these form an orderly representation of almost

any BA project. SEMBA is not flat nor is it waterfall. The structure allows

batches of activities to be viewed from any desired angle and supports an

iterative way of working. Phases help the business analyst to navigate freely

through the range of activities applicable at a given point of time. The streams in

turn order the range of activities by topic and by analysis and design models; this

allows for focus. A standard solution approach will start with the Focus and

Direction phase, and ends with a Migration Design. The Focus and Direction

phase basically supports the business analyst to prepare the BA engagement: the

scope of the solution is agreed upon, if applicable then reference models are

chosen, the most suitable roadmap13

is selected and the approach is defined. The

business analyst then comes to an understanding of the As-Is situation for each of

the streams, and envisions a To-Be Design. Finally, and this is a key strength of

the method, the business analyst builds a Migration Design, which charts the

transition that the organisation will have to make from the As-Is Understanding

to the To-Be Design.

13 The Roadmap connects SEMBA‘s results to the subsequent solution environment. For

instance the SEMBA-RUP roadmap leads to deliverables which are specifically tuned to a RUP development process and therefore enable re-use of materials in the best possible way.

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Compared to an IT driven approach for software development, where

requirements are gathered from meetings, workshops, notes and other sources

SEMBA not only provides a more structured way of working, it also provides

crucial additional information to the development teams in order to send an

unambiguous request for change to an IT development party. Featuring five

distinct streams, SEMBA covers the entire scope possible for any BA

engagement.

Business Context

This is a collage of the organisation itself, put in the context of the organisation‟s

ecosystem. It provides the rationale for the organisational business model and all

that flows from this rationale.

Business Processes

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This layer is the collection of the business processes that make up the

organisation, possibly limited to the agreed solution scope. The Application

Landscape and the channels of Information within the organisation all serve to

support these business processes.

Information

Information travels through the organisation by way of IT, but also by way of

informal and formal channels that are not part of the IT infrastructure or

Application Landscape. The Information stream contains all activities and tasks

that pertain to these channels, existing and envisioned. SEMBA is one of the few

models currently in BA that pays serious attention to the Information stream of

the organisation.

Application Landscape

The Application Landscape contains all the IT in scope (existing and envisioned),

as well as the expressions of this IT to the user in the form of concrete

applications.

Requirements Engineering

Rather than being a regular Analysis and Design-type stream per se,

Requirements Engineering features recurrently during each of the phases but as a

separate stream, bringing coherence between the Analysis & Design-type phases

and the organisation‟s requirements. This fifth stream resurfaces in each of the

subsequent phases in the framework, as a continuous inventory of the

organisation‟s internal makeup, and a repeated check of the evolving design

against that makeup.

SEMBA‟s advantages are that it is exhaustive; it features a holographic makeup;

it allows for maximum granularity and scalability; it gives unprecedented profile

to the Migration Design phase and uses roadmaps to aid the subsequent solution

handover.


Over the past decade, the outsourcing of IT has shown a huge growth. Although

the outsourcing of IT development is still beneficial given the major cost savings,

it also has an unpleasant downside which reveals itself in delivery of solutions

which are not recognised by the business and thus not to the client‟s satisfaction.

This drawback is caused by inefficient collaboration between the business parties

and IT parties and can be divided in four aspects apart from a cultural aspect not

elaborated in this article. Bottom line is that the collaboration needs profound

improvement in efficiency and effectiveness to save the success of outsourcing

IT development.

Most crucial is to mutually come to working knowledge of a common language.

For the business the business process model is the language in which they can

express their needs and demands; for IT the business process model provides the

information fundamentally needed to interpret the business requirements

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correctly. It is therefore that business process models are crucial to successful IT

development projects. They are the common language for business and IT to

speak in, in order to understand and to be understood.

Building on the process model as common language, capturing requirements in

the business process model secures the direct link between both and further

improves the cohesion between the business process and requirements. It shows

clearly and specifically per activity in the process the high level requirement

which the supporting software has to meet. Also it provides for every change, the

traceability to why the change needs to be built. Although currently there are not

any tools in which sufficient functionality is offered for integration of both

business process management and requirements management, both RM and BPM

tool suppliers are developing such functionality. From then on all requirements

will directly be linked to process models as low level requirements will be

traceable to the activity in a process they need to enable. This merger under the

auspices of business analysts will bring the collaboration between business and

IT parties to perfection.

Another contribution to improving the collaboration is to start organising virtual

distributed workshops. Virtual workshops will improve the collaborative way of

working and significantly increase the involvement and strengthen the

commitment of distant resources. Another advantage is that IT development

parties can be involved earlier in the process taking care of not only the IT

development, but also perform the business analysis. In particular the

development of SUN‟s virtual office is a very good example.

Finally the use of a thorough method for business analysis is a condition to

improve the bridging of business and IT. SEMBA ensures business analysts

perform a complete analysis on all aspects of the change request. With specific

attention for the involved processes in relation to the Business Context, the

Information and the Application Landscape combined with Requirements

Engineering, SEMBA covers the complete business analysis process diminishing

chances for misunderstandings.

Literature

[1] http://research.sun.com/projects/mc/mpk20.htm

Patrick Teters is Managing Consultant at Capgemini. He acts as Expert Group

Leader in Business Process Management and is co-author of the SEMBA method.

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2.6 Process change on (big) wheels

Business Activity Monitoring as a drive to change processes.

2.6.1 Introduction

Any manager can tell you that monitoring is a necessity to be in control and to be

accountable. “Common sense” just isn‟t enough. The complexity of modern

processes in practically every industry demands instant monitoring anytime,

anyplace, anywhere, anyhow. Measuring practically every (sub) process in an

organisation is called Business Activity Monitoring (BAM). The basic idea is

easy: give the management (or operations) much more information about the

status of the running business processes in almost real-time. The importance of

always being “in control” is easy to understand: how about a nuclear power

station being controlled on the basis of gut feeling? In fact BAM is not a new

concept at all. It has its origin in the beginning of the previous century, the time

of the industrial revolution. Since, developments in the monitoring of business

processes have been numerous. Especially the „recent‟ ICT developments make

real-time monitoring a reality. The advantages are obvious: organisation becomes

able to quickly accommodate necessary changes (to speak in buzz-words: they

become agile) and businesses can avoid risk and take advantage of opportunities

in an ever-changing environment, rather than be restricted by a hard to change IT

infrastructure. The next paragraphs describe where BAM comes from, where it is

at the current moment and how it can support businesses as a drive to optimise

their processes.

Where it started: mass production processes Monitoring helps being in control,

but also helps in inventing new processes. Henry Ford obviously is a pioneer in

using monitoring to change the entire process of manufacturing automobiles. The

results of his way of designing, executing and measuring processes still are

impressive.

The “Fordism”, low cost mass production processes using an assembly line and

strict measurement of the process performance was copied by many others.

Fordism also stands for high wages for the workers on the assembly line,

therefore denying Karl Marx‟s “historical truth” of exploitation of the masses.

That the right design of one‟s processes - supported by the outcomes of the

monitoring - can lead to a competitive advantage became very clear: Ford‟s mass

production processes created a military advantage for the United States which

enabled them to win World War II and destroyed almost all Japanese industries.

2.6.2 Second change: Plan, Do, Check, Act

A void creates room for new and better ideas. In Japan Dr. William Edwards

Deming (1900-1993) introduced statistics for the improvement of industrial

quality. His ideas contributed significantly to the high quality of manufacturing

processes in Japanese industries. The best illustration of the quantum leap in

quality improvement is this quotation from Wikipedia:

“Dr. Deming's teachings and philosophy can be seen through the results they

produced when they were adopted by the Japanese, as the following example

shows: Ford Motor Company was simultaneously manufacturing a car model

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with transmissions made in Japan and the United States. Soon after the car

model was on the market, Ford customers were requesting the model with

Japanese transmission over the USA-made transmission, and they were willing to

wait for the Japanese model. As both transmissions were made to the same

specifications, Ford engineers could not understand the customer preference for

the model with Japanese transmission. It delivered smoother performance with a

lower defect rate. Finally, Ford engineers decided to take apart the two different

transmissions. The American-made car parts were all within specified tolerance

levels. On the other hand, the Japanese car parts had much closer tolerances

than the USA-made parts - i.e. if a part was supposed to be one foot long, plus or

minus 1/8 of an inch - then the Japanese parts were within 1/16 of an inch. This

made the Japanese cars run more smoothly and customers experienced fewer

problems.”

Deming‟s PDCA ("Plan-Do-Check-Act") iterative four-step problem-solving

process is still widely used in business process improvement programs today.

The link to BAM is most obvious in the check step (also known as study step):

measure the new process and compare the results against the expected results to

ascertain any differences. The fundamental principle of PDCA, is iteration:

executing the cycle again will extend the knowledge further. Repeating the

PDCA cycle can bring organisations closer to a perfect operation and output.

2.6.3 Third change: Against all odds

Finance in the Netherlands used to be the domain of gentlemen serving other

gentlemen. In the 1990‟s it became clear that banking processes must be made

extremely efficient in order to create higher profits. Segmentation of customers

on the basis of their profitability became widespread. Most valuable effect of

segmentation is that it is predictable how these customers will act in the (near)

future. Monitoring a segment of customers in virtually every activity they do

creates valuable knowledge. This knowledge has lead to (semi-) automated

processes for loans and credits. Soon, it became clear that fully automated

processes create more low risk loans than humans ever could.

Unfortunately not every credit process was crystal clear. Managerial greed

became stronger than common sense and statistics, thus creating the credit

crunch. The credit crunch will create new changes. One of them definitely will be

new processes for clear and valid monitoring, any time, any place and in every

country. Latest change: BAM changes public inspections and enforcement Last

decade‟s industry, logistics and finance have turned into “accurately monitored”

institutes: an awful lot of process and performance information is delivered that

supports managers to be “in control”. Managers in the non profit sector however

still have different ideas about being “in control”.

Their responsibilities are simply different than creating profit and shareholder

value. Healthcare is the fastest changing not for profit “industry”: efficiency and

effectiveness of processes become more important. Inside and outside hospitals

and other health centres, work processes are being changed continuously. Even

the enforcers are changing the way they work. Writing as many fines as possible

used to be the credo. Nowadays these thoughts are changing. Risk-based studies

help to create new insights. To quote Dr Deming: “You can expect what you

inspect”. Little by little enforcers understand that being a police agent creates

fines but being a smart investigator creates compliance and safety.

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There are a lot of examples where BAM supports or even steers the (re)design of

processes; a typical Dutch example is the inspection seeking overloaded trucks.

2.6.4 Big wheels cause damage and change enforcement

Transport and logistics are very important for the Dutch economy. Many trucks

drive from the harbour of Rotterdam to virtually every city in Europe. These

trucks do not only bring prosperity, they also cause a lot of damage. If the

pressure of one axis is too high the asphalt wears off too fast. As a result roads

must be repaired too often. In a crowded country this leads to congestion and

many traffic jams. Lately it became clear that overloaded trucks cause a lot of

damage to the many bridges in the Netherlands. One of them, the “Hollandse

Brug” near Almere is closed for all trucks for over one year. To reach the city of

Almere, trucks must drive an extra 60 km (one way…). There are a lot of bridges

similar to the “Hollandse brug”, so it is time to change enforcement…

How could BAM play a role in this problem? On a number of places the Dutch

roads are provided with “Weigh in Motion”, a system that can measure the

pressure of axes while the truck is driving by. A complex ICT system gathers the

data from the system and leads it to a central data warehouse. In this central data

warehouse the data of all Dutch trucks can be observed and company compliance

can be calculated. The calculations are being used to sent a letter to this company

and warn them that it‟s not compliant. If this company persists in overloading

trucks, it can expect a visit from the inspectors. Visiting a company is very time

consuming. The monitoring system Weigh in motion helps to define which

companies “deserve” a visit, thus making the entire process of the inspectors far

more efficient, but also directly providing input for the transporters as well and

thus having impact on their core processes as well. Is there more to come?

Business Activity Monitoring can change the way we look at processes and the

way we work. Mr Henry Ford and Dr Deming demonstrated perfect examples.

The finance industry recently showed us that if (credit) processes are not crystal

clear, greed becomes more effective than monitoring. The state-of-the-art BAM

solutions make it possible for operations managers and upper management to

have instant and constant access to critical business performance indicators,

which gives them a powerful advantage in today‟s marketplace: BAM‟s output is

input for decision making when (re)designing processes Even in the public sector

managers are discovering the potentials of BAM. In case of overloaded trucks

BAM can help to avoid traffic jams and reducing the cost for maintenance of

roads and bridges.

To quote Mr. Kees Herschbach, manager of the IVW (The Transport and Water

Management Inspectorate): We‟re doing whatever we can to avoid road damage.

New processes help us to improve our work. So, next time you‟re in a traffic jam

as a result of road works: there are enforcers working and thinking for you!

John Waser is Principal Consultant at Capgemini.

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2.7 Human Centric Processes – the next challenge for BPM

2.7.1 Introduction

Our lives are filled with stories. Especially kids understand this concept of a story

quite well. Often a (make-believe) story provides the context for activities that

they do. Stories help us to understand various concepts:

A story usually has goals and when met, the story ends (or the story is

abandoned earlier).

People play certain roles (and kids are not surprised when asked to play

multiple roles) and in their roles they interact in various ways and perform

activities to develop the story (and reach the goals).

There are rules (and if people don‟t play by the rules kids will react

quickly!).

There is power - who controls the roles-assignments and the evolution of the

story.

And communication within the story has a specific context, a specific

language, where specific terms are used for specific concepts. A context that

can be harshly broken by a mother calling the kids to come home, breaking

all the rules and communication patterns of the story!

When we grow up and start working in companies, strangely enough, nobody

talks about stories. When talking about context for activities, we speak of

projects, processes, cases, issues. And suddenly stronger and sometimes new

demands are put upon us – productivity, deadlines, visibility, accountability,

compliance.

The Business Process Management (BPM) movement and earlier process-schools

have delivered great approaches for structuring and improving certain types of

stories that we are involved in when doing business. Concepts such as protocols,

procedures and business processes enable us to create repeatable, transferable

and improvable stories. But we find that there are types of stories that we can‟t

seem to handle well with the concepts and technologies of BPM. Let‟s dive into

the next challenge for BPM: Human Centric Processes.

2.7.2 A classification for processes

When working with various clients, one can see that their processes can often be

classified using two dimensions:

1. Process design-time predictability

2. Collaborative intensity

With process design-time predictability, we mean the ability to model a process

(all triggers, activities, possible paths and business rules) at design-time (e.g.

before process execution commences). For certain processes this ability is quite

high – for example the process to borrow a book from a library can be modelled

as a finite number of possible events/situations, activities and corresponding

paths in the process. Other processes might be less predictable, either because of

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an explosion in complexity in the amount of possible events, timing of events and

activities/responses, or because certain events or activities are simply not known

yet. With collaborative intensity we mean the number of concurrent collaborating

people required to perform activities in the process. With concurrent we mean

literal: are people needed at the same time, to perform together an activity for a

specific process instance (because they are needed together because of

knowledge or decision power that they provide). For certain types of processes

this is not needed – think of a production line for a certain widget, where an

employee takes a work-in-progress item, performs a specific transformation

activity and puts the transformed widget on a stack for the next employee. But

think of a process where a complex decision needs to be made, too complex to be

handled by one person. If we map out the two dimensions graphically, we can

depict various categories of processes.

In figure 1 the two dimensions are displayed and used to show segments with

typical approaches to implement and control the corresponding type of process.

Predict-

Ability

Collaborative

intensity

Approach and Description

High No people Straight Through Processing (or “STP”)[1] :

Straight Through Processing is an approach in which we

strive to execute and steer all activities within a process

with full automation (or in a factory setting:

mechanisation). It‟s a completely “hands-off” delivery.

Example: requesting a car insurance policy through the

internet, where the full delivery process (profiling,

calculations, updates to backend systems and output

generation) is fully automated.

High 1 person E-Forms and Workflow management [2]:

Workflow management is characterized by pushing (or

pulling) work through a serial chain of employee/

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workstations, each focusing on performing a specific

transformation. The approach has proven its value in large

factories and data/paper-bureaucracies.

Example: requesting a loan in a traditional bank, where a

front-desk employee registers the request, a loan officer

reviews and proposes the loan conditions, a loan manager

decides and a back-office employee transfers the loan

amount.

These types of processes can be supported with E-forms

(for simple workflows) and workflow management

technology (for more complex flows, regarding possible

routes, work assignments and business rules)

Medium 1 person Case management [3]:

In this approach, which originates from the medical and

social security field, a central role is assigned to a “Case

manager”. While parts of the process might still be

predictable, certain parts are not – and require human

intervention. In this approach, the case manager assesses

the state of the case, and based on this assessment, decides

which activities are currently required. These activities are

then assigned to various other workers (including the case

manager). Results of finished activities or new signals will

result in a reassessment of the case, leading to new

activities or termination.

Example: processing an insurance claim, in which certain

unpredictable events and unknowns will require a claim

manager to respond based on the insights at that stage.

High Multiple Collaborative BPM or CEBP – Communication

Enabled Business Processes [4]:

In this approach, the key concepts of workflow are still

applied, but the key difference is that certain activities

within the process require people to collaborate – together

research, plan, discuss, negotiate, solve and/or decide, as

part of creating value in the process.

This means that in the process, while it is still predictable,

at some stage multiple persons need to be brought together

and facilitated to collaboratively deliver on a

known/defined activity.

Example: an employee-hiring process, in which various

interviewing people meet to discuss a candidate and decide

on hiring or not.

Note: “collaborative BPM” is also used to describe BPM

tooling that supports people working together in parallel

modelling processes.

Medium

to Un-

predic-

table

Multiple Human Interaction Management:

Processes of this type cannot be predicted at model/design

time – the amount and possible timing of events/signals,

possible shifts in goals and possible activities are too much

or to unknown to allow modelling the process before

actual execution.

This area and the possible approaches (roughly named

“Human Interaction Management”) are the focus of the

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remainder of this chapter.

A number or remarks:

In certain situations process stakeholders might have implicit biases or

political reasons to position “their” process as less predictable, than reality

requires (“we are special”). A clear focus on the 80-20 rule, the most

frequent events and happy path could help in this case.

Often it will be the case that a process can be placed in more than one area.

For instance: a simple order process, that can be handled most of the time

through straight through processing, certain products however require

workflow and certain exceptions are quite complex and require case

management and sometimes even human interaction management. Typically,

various fragments of a process may fall in different process areas

A key lesson is that each sector in the diagram requires its own approach and

best practices and that these approaches are not optimal for other types of

processes. Approaches that are suited for instance for workflow management

(detailed design of all activities and business rules of a process in a process

model) are not suited for case management (where the amount of possible

events and timing would lead to an explosion of complexity in the process

model) [5].

2.7.3 Human Centric Processes

In the diagram we roughly identified an area of processes we call “Human

Centric Processes” (sometimes also called dynamic BPM, collaborative

processes, fluid or ad hoc unstructured processes). Human Centric Processes

share the following characteristics:

Collaborative Activities are frequently performed by multiple persons working

together, in various ways (meetings, phones, emails, chats,

concurrent working on documents), consisting of many human

interactions (inform, ask/answer, challenge, discuss, negotiate,

decide together)

Knowledge

intensive

Activities require various persons with specific knowledge, that

needs to be combined to perform the activity successfully

Dynamic, adaptive Based on status, signals, knowledge and decisions, the

remaining part of the process is frequently refined (leading to

new, altered or deleted activities, flows/procedures and possibly

even the people involved with their roles/responsibilities)

Examples of Human Centric Processes include:

Police or legal investigations

Complex (B2B) sales and negotiations

Market research and strategy setting

Product development

Complex medical cases

Iterative software development

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Complex exception handling

Mergers and acquisitions

2.7.4 Human Centric Processes – growing role, growing challenges

What role do human centric processes play in organisations? How important are

they? From an intuitive perspective, one can probably say that these types of

processes exist in many organisations and that they have significant impact on

the performance of organisations. Many people, if asked, see only a limited

amount of their workday in the more “mechanistic” processes, where process

flow is known and prescribed (for example submitting expense reports) and see a

lot of time being spent in more collaborative, ad hoc processes.

However, it is rather difficult to support this perspective with objective data. It is

surprising that in this post-industrial society, we measure so little on knowledge

intensive work (based on a check with the CBS – the Dutch National Statistics

Agency). Fortunately, some research has been done, in this case by McKinsey

(2005) [6]. They approached their study into new types of work and processes,

by dividing economic activity in three categories. (table 3).

Category Description Examples

Transformational Extracting raw materials and converting

them to finished goods

Mining, Production

line

Transactional

interactions

Simple interactions and transactions that

unfold in a generally rule-based manner

and can thus be scripted or automated

Clerical and

accounting work

Tacit interactions More complex interactions requiring a

higher level of judgment, involving

ambiguity and drawing on tacit, or

experiential, knowledge

The searching, coordinating and

monitoring required exchanging goods

and services.

Remark: In our perspective McKinsey‟s

concept of “Tacit interactions” is very

close to what we have defined as

“Human Centric Processes”.

Running workshops,

managing supply

chains

The key results of their research (based on job-market data in the US – 1998,

2004):

The number of jobs in Transformational activity is dropping. Transactional

jobs are growing somewhat, but the tacit interaction jobs are growing the

most. 70% of new jobs created in the period 1998 – 2004 were jobs in the

field of tacit interactions.

Cost of labour for tacit interaction workers is the highest (55 – 75% higher

than for transformational and transactional), and is, as a part of total labour

cost, the largest part (47%).

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McKinsey explained these trends as a result of the optimisation and elimination

(through mechanisation, automation and off-shoring) of transformational and

transactional work, and on the other hand the greater need for collaboration

between different companies. Cost of labour is growing due to the fact that tacit

interaction roles are often filled with people with skilled and high-educated

people, and that companies value these types of roles higher.

Peter Drucker predicted these changes, with the rise of the “Knowledge worker”.

Based on the growth in importance and cost, McKinsey asks a key question: what

can we do to improve the productivity of people working in tacit interactions?

Peter Drucker, a well known management guru stated a similar challenge: “The

most important, and indeed the truly unique contribution of management in the

20th century was the 50-fold increase in the productivity of the manual worker in

manufacturing. The most important contribution management needs to make in

the 21st century is similarly to increase the productivity of knowledge work and

the knowledge worker.” [7]

McKinsey points to a number of paths to better performance:

New thinking in organisational structures that facilitate tacit interactions

(such as loosely structured teams, as opposed to the silo‟s and hierarchies

that worked great to steer and optimize transformational/transactional work,

but that often seem to work against tacit interaction work).

A new look (and investments) on supporting technology. The required

technology is very different than the technology used to improve

transformational and transactional work.

It is McKinsey‟s belief that if properly done, organisations can create sustainable

competitive advantage when implementing effective and efficient tacit

interactions.

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A number of additional observations:

In addition to these paths, we also believe that the management of tacit

interaction work will be different from the other work types. There is

growing research in the field of management (for instance based on the

complexity approach), that indicates that other types of interventions can

lead to better performance in human centric processes.

Today‟s IT solutions are not supporting tacit interactions effectively. On one

hand current ERP and bespoke systems are focused on transactions and

fairly rigid processes. On the other hand, and as a result, people tend to use

general office automation (e-Mail, word processing, spreadsheets) to

coordinate and execute human centric processes. These tools help somewhat,

but come with a large risk: since these tools lack process support and

context, tacit interaction people tend to “drown” in information overload,

with full inboxes and many (versions of) documents, tasks lists, etc. [8], [9],

[10].

Our conclusion: Human Centric processes are growing in importance. This fact is

also recognized in Capgemini‟s TechnoVision that defines (among others) two

major trends: from transaction to interaction and process-on-the-fly.

And just like the other work types, organisations will have demands on human

centric processes and the process participants: output needs to be on time, costs

need to be controlled, delivery needs to be efficient and execution needs to be

compliant and visible. We have key challenges for this growing field of human

centric processes! How do we solve this?

2.7.5 BPM and BPM technology and Human Centric Processes

Can BPM and BPM technology solve these challenges? If we look at current

BPM thinking, most BPM concepts have their roots in traditional process

thinking, dating back from the era of Taylor, Gilbreth and Sloan:

Division of labour, creating roles with specialisation on certain activities

(including management as activity) and fitting people in the role.

Work patterns for groups of people based upon a careful design of triggers,

activities, sequential flow/paths, business rules and controls – in which each

person has a clear, limited role.

Process models and work distribution schemas as ways to intervene, direct

and evaluate people‟s behaviour.

A systems perspective in which output, quality and people as process

participants can be steered by a control-loop (Plan-Do-Check-Act), using

process measurements, norms and motivational instruments (reward/punish).

These concepts have provided great value for improving productivity in typical

(serial) production environments. But they have also proven to be limited. Key

issues with these concepts:

- What if certain organisational challenges require effort beyond predictable

processes– because there are too many unknown events, ambiguity or too

many possible work patterns?

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- What if people need to work in a process and change it “on-the-fly”, based

on new insights or new events?

- What if certain activities require people to work together, creatively, each

delivering unique knowledge? What if before hand, the right people can only

be identified when certain information is clear?

- What if reality of organisations in essence is too complex, too ad hoc to

approach with a process- and systems focus?

These types of questions are currently difficult to answer with BPM concepts.

BPMN-based process models fall short. KPI‟s and control loops are difficult to

define. Terms as “compliance”, “risk management” are difficult to apply.

Current BPM technology is also not able to adequately support Human Centric

Processes:

- Many tools only allow design-time process modelling, which makes it

impossible for process-participants to alter the process “on-the-fly” when a

specific condition requires this (dynamically adding/changing activities and

decisions).

- Most tools are using the BPMN (1.1) standard for process notation, which

does not have constructs for collaboration (for instance a meeting between

multiple “pool” participants).

- Most tools focus mainly on System to System (S2S) interactions (Forrester

calls this the “Integration Centric” BPM suites) or Human to System

interactions (Forrester calls this the “Human Centric” BPM suites – but we

question the “Human Centric” term used here). Most tools have no concept

for “Person to Person interaction” and lack support for human interactions.

Various key people in the BPM industry have realized this (see [11], [12], [13],

[14]).

We have to conclude that current BPM (as an approach) and BPM technology do

not provide sufficient answers to solve the challenges for human centric

processes.

2.7.6 New horizons – Human Interaction Management

What could support human centric processes, from a conceptual and

technological perspective? What could improve productivity?

To find answers for this, we believe we need to return to the concept in the

introduction of this chapter: stories. We need to acknowledge that in human

centric processes stories evolve, in which people collaborate, together

determining the story and delivering on the activities in the story. And that

Taylorian concepts, “old-school process interventions” and “workflow” do not

work!

Instead we will need to focus on what happens really when people are working

together and interacting with each other. What types of interactions occur? What

determines productivity in these interactions? And we will need to study this

from a multi-disciplinary perspective – ranging from social-psychology,

anthropology to information-processing and IT support [15].

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A number of persons have identified this need [16], [17]

A promising development in this area is that of “Human Interaction

Management” (Keith Harrison-Broninski [18]).

Human Interaction Management is defined as a set of management principles,

patterns and techniques complementary to Business process management. HIM

provides process-based support for innovative, adaptive, collaborative human

work and allows it to be integrated in a structured way with more routine work

processes that are often largely automated. [19].

In summary, Human Interaction Management assets include [12], [18]:

- Concepts for people and interactions stories, teams, roles, time, planning.

- A different way of modelling processes, that allows for explicit definition of

collaborative patterns.

- An agent based approach in which process execution is handled through

interacting agents (choreography) instead of central process models.

- A methodology - Goal Oriented Organisation design.

2.7.7 Future IT Support for Human Centric Processes

We described earlier that most human centric processes are coordinated and

supported currently by general office automation (email, documents, and

spreadsheets). Although this type of IT provides flexibility, it lacks certain

features (visibility, audit ability) and poses the dangers of information overload.

In addition, current BPM technology does not support these types of processes

either – Human Centric Processes cannot be addressed with simple task

inboxes/forms metaphor and rigid design-time process models!

What would be key features of IT solutions that can support Human Centric

Processes (or in other terms – what are the key features of “Human Interaction

Management Systems”, or social software with a process twist)? A possible list is

presented in table 4 (sources: [16], [17], [20], [22])

A number of IT vendors is working on solutions that support (some of) these

features [21]. We also have the impression that more mainstream BPM vendors

are researching and developing features in this area as well[22].

2.7.8 Human Interaction Management –a trend?

Based on what we have found so far, can we state that human centric processes

and human interaction management (and supporting IT) are trends?

There are definitely some positive “trend” signs in The Netherlands: First there

was the well attended keynote speech of Keith Harrison-Broninski at a large

BPM conference [23]. Secondly the Dutch BPM Forum organized a special

session on this subject [24]. Third Capgemini organized a well attended BPM

Community of Practice session on Human Interaction Management (December

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2008). Last we see more and more organisations showing interest in this area (for

instance at Capgemini‟s last BPM seminar, October 2008).

These signs have resulted in Capgemini Netherlands and the University of

Utrecht starting a research program in this area.

So Human Interaction Management may not be a trend yet, but our current

thinking is that there definitely is a need, although this need is not yet far “on the

hype curve”. Our impression is that BPM and supporting BPM technology

provide good value for predictable serial processes, but that reality is that there

are types of processes that cannot be handled with the current concepts in BPM:

Human Centric Processes. As the adoption of BPM and supporting technology

grows, we expect that more and more organisations will discover this fact as well

and will start looking at additional approaches and technology to support these

types of processes. This may pose a risk for adoption of BPM as organisations

can become disappointed with today‟s limited support for human centric

processes and projects might fail.

If Human Interaction Management (HIM) will be the answer is not clear yet. In

our opinion, currently HIM lacks scientific foundations (mainly around the

behavioural aspects of collaborating knowledge workers and impact on

productivity) and still has little proven successes (but HIM is a quite new area,

launched in 2005).

Process focused A process engine that takes care of assignment of activities to

individuals and groups. The ability to freely define, add, alter and

remove activities, while also being able to select existing process

fragments from best-practice templates of earlier comparable

stories. The ability to plan these activities in certain flows,

supported by business rules. The ability to include complete

automated sets of activities, linked to certain automated services.

Ability to assign tasks to story participants with due dates and

ability to commit, delegate or reject these responsibilities, linking

to calendars (planning) and task lists.

Story focused The ability to start a story, join a story, manage all relevant

activities and information within the context of a story

Information context

repository

Allow a story to hold and manage all related information, from

whatever channel/in whatever form: emails, notes, documents,

chats.

Note that this area is typically covered by tools as Microsoft

SharePoint, but that these tools lack process context features.

Social networking Ability to quickly identify people that are needed for a story or an

activity in a story, based on certain criteria. Ability to identify

people that were / are involved in comparable stories.

Ability to inform and invite them to a story. Ability to assign

them to certain roles that define authority, responsibility and will

drive filtering of information. Ability to access their contact data

and profiles.

Personal Presence

Management

Ability for the story participants to manage the way they will

interact (and can be contacted) with the other story participants

and story engine – by phone, real life, chat/instant messaging,

email – and ability to define preferences related to

importance/priority of events and activities.

Personal and group Ability to view all stories one is involved in, and all

commitments. Ability to estimate required effort and planning,

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time management based on due dates. Ability to plan own work. Ability to do this

for groups, including synchronisation of agenda‟s and priorities,

planning meetings, etc.

Context driven

communication

Ability to send and receive information through various channels,

that are linked to the story and certain story contexts such as

goals, issues, activities, etc. Ability to receive information and

quickly get access to this context information.

Integration with

typical tools

Integration with typical information production environments

(Email, Document processor). Ability to find information, based

on activity context, role, tags, etc.

Location & channel

independent

Ability to interact with the story engine through various channels

(browser, mobile device)

Support for human

interactions in

collaborative

workspaces

Ability to work together concurrently in a context part of a story

– together defining goals, issues, activities/plans, roles/people or

deliver on a certain activity.

These workspaces should support various human (tacit)

interaction- patterns, such as:

- Identify people, get to know each other/profile

- Inform

- Investigate/collect

- Question – answer

- Discuss, share and confront different viewpoints

- Raise as issue/unknown

- Identify required activity or decision

- Constrain

- Negotiate

- Prioritize

- Plan

- Agree, commit

- Decide (authority or democratic/voting)

- Evaluate, identify lessons learned

Results of these interactions can easily be stored and tracked and

will lead to updates to relevant story participants.

Visibility / tracking Ability to quickly view key essence of story and its status.

Ability to get alerts based on certain process aspects, such as

checkpoints, dates or events such as delays to plan and

identification of major issues.

Audit log/time line in which all major events are tracked and can

be accessed for audit reasons.

We expect that multiple approaches for Human Centric Processes will be

developed, from a myriad of related areas such as knowledge management,

project management, psychology and social sciences as well as information

technology developments such as Web2.0, social software, ECM and BPM

technology. The focus: how to improve the productivity, manageability and

compliance of knowledge workers in dynamic processes and collaboration. In

our research we hope to find more answers in this interesting area!

Literature

[1] See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straight_Through_Processing

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[2] See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workflow_management

[3] See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Case_management

[4] See http://www.it-director.com/content.php?cid=9548

[5] Lesson learned from a case management project for a Dutch insurance

company

[6] “The next revolution in interactions”, McKinsey quarterly, No 4, 2005,

Johnson et al.

[7] “Management challenges for the 21st century”, Peter Drucker, 2001

[8] Information Overload! - Making a case for Dynamic BPM, Ian Louw,

September 16, 2008

http://bpmfundamentals.wordpress.com/2008/09/16/information-

overloadmaking-a-case-for-dynamic-bpm/

[9] “Human Process Management”, Jacob Ukkelson, November 10, 2008,

http://exeedtechnology.com/human-processmanagement-is-the-key-to-driving-

higherbpm-business-value

[10] “Lost in E-Mail, Tech Firms Face Self-Made Beast”, New York Times, June

14th 2008

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/14/technology/14email.html?_r=1&hp

[11] “Workflow sucks”, John Pyke,

http://www.ebizq.net/topics/bpm/features/7462.html

[12] “Human Processes” – Keith Harrison-Broninski, BP Trends, Dec. 2008

[13] “BPM in the Real World: How Person-to-Person Interactions Support

Knowledge Workers“, Bill Welty, Align Journal

[14] “The Process of Working with People: Person-to-Person Business Process

Management”, Howard Smith and Peter Fingar, BP Trends sep 2004

[15] “Human Interaction”, Prof. Juan Quemada, June 23, 2008,

http://www.slideshare.net/jquemada/socialprotocolbaseddesign

[16] “Work 2.0‟, Peter Fingar

[17] “Human Process Management”, Jacob Ukkelson, November 10, 2008,

http://exeedtechnology.com/human-processmanagement-is-the-key-to-driving-

higherbpm-business-value

[18] Keith Harrison Broninski - http://www.human-interaction-management.info/

[19] See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_interaction_management

[20] “Democracy – aka Dynamic BPM”,Jim Sinur,

http://www.global360.com/blog/index.php/2007/11/28/democracy-

akacollaborative-bpm/

[21] A number of vendors working on process technology for human centric

processes:

- Rolemodeller‟s HumanEdj – www.humanedj.com

- ActionBase - www.actionbase.com

- ResultMaker - www.resultmaker.com

- Thingamy - www.thingamy.com

- Handysoft – www.handysoft.com

- Singularity - www.singularity.co.uk

- SAP(Eventus) - www.sdn.sap.com/irj/scn/weblogs?blog=/pub/wlg/6977

- Interneer - www.interneer.com

[22] The Power of Collaboration: Collaborative BPM, Whitepaper BEA

[23] “BPM meets SOA”, Heliview seminar October 30th 2008

[24] “Human Interaction”, BPM-Forum meeting, October 29th 2008,

www.bpmforum.org

Roeland Loggen is BPM consultant/trainer at Capgemini. In addition, he is an

active blogger on BPM at http://process-transformation.blogspot.com/.

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Human Interaction Management: Hype or New Paradigm?

By Pascal Ravesteijn from the Utrecht University

One of the groups doing research in the domain of Human Interaction

Management (HIM) in the Netherlands is the Utrecht University in collaboration

with Capgemini and the Utrecht University of Applied Sciences. Pascal

Ravesteijn, researcher at the Research Centre for Process Innovation, which is a

part of the Utrecht University of Applied Sciences comments: „There is a lot of

research being done in Business Process Management, especially in the

Netherlands. The Eindhoven University of Technology is world famous for its

research on workflow management and process modeling, Cordys is a well

known BPMS supplier and YAWL (process modeling language) and Archimate

(architecture modeling language) are Dutch initiatives. However the amount of

research on human centric business processes is still very limited both in

academia as by more commercial organizations. This is remarkable if we look at

current events in the western world. For more than 20 years there is a trend of

outsourcing manufacturing / development work while at the same time more

knowledge intensive jobs are being created. Also the tremendously fast adoption

of the Internet has lead to new types of collaboration and services. Organizations

are working together in so called business value networks (or virtual

organizations) in which partnerships and alliances change a lot quicker if the

market demands so. All this means that both organizations and their employees

have to be a lot more flexible and agile, this in turn means that modeling

initiatives are becoming more complex due to the ever changing environment.

For the western world McKinsey estimates that over 70 % of the work is

knowledge intensive and can therefore no longer be managed and controlled by

standard processes. Based on these developments the Universities in Utrecht

have decided to dedicate capacity for research projects‟.

To start with it is important to know which initiatives are already being taken in

the domain of HIM and related topics. Although Keith Harrison-Broninski hyped

the term Human Interaction Management in 2005 with his book „Human

Interaction: The Heart and Soul of Business Process Management‟ there have

been many related activities dating back to the sixties. The Speech Act Theory

(Searle, 1969) is one of the theories that is used to model communication

between people in an effort to control that what is being communicated is also

actually being done. Other related domains are Human Performance Technology

(Pershing et al., 2006), Socio-technical research (De Sitter, 1994), Role Activity

Diagrams (Ould, 2005) and the Design & Engineering Methodology for

Organizations (Dietz, 1999). Also there is an extensive field of scientific research

in the area of collaboration, whether it is between people, organizations or

societies from which there are many lessons to be learned.

Finally a new and very interesting field of research is that on gaming and more

particularly the principles behind gaming. Already large companies like IBM and

Microsoft are involved in game research. In relation to human centric business

processes and human interaction management research on the ways gaming

influences social behaviour, characterization of player populations, gaming

principles for active learning and goal oriented behaviour by gaming participants

are promising. Online communities in games like World of Warcraft (a massively

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multiplayer online role playing game) mainly consist of smart young people

(ages 18 – 35) that are determined to accomplish goals that can only be reached

by cooperation with other game participants. If principles that are behind games

as these could be incorporated into the work and (IT) support of knowledge

workers and organizations then a large increase in performance, flexibility and

agility is to be expected!

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2.8 BPM and training

“Stagnant water loses its purity”

(Leonardo Da Vinci)

2.8.1 Introduction

BPM is a management discipline that requires and enables organisations to

manage - plan, change and act - the complete revision cycles of their business

processes, from process design to monitoring (measurement) and continuous

optimisation (based on Gartner, 2006 [1]). When training people, the focus is on

performance improvement of management and employees, in order to increase

the performance and intellectual capital of the organisation.

At first glance, BPM and the training of employees do not seem to have much in

common. But if you look a bit further, you will notice that both BPM and

employee training have the same goal. Both are ultimately aimed at performance

improvement of the organisation. Because of the effects of ageing of society,

organisations are witnessing a run off of knowledge. A means of dealing with

this run off is to record the knowledge in BPM products, in which process

modelling is an obvious medium. In this manner, BPM products in their own

right become a training source for new employees. Training is as old as Roman

hills. In „BPM land‟, many BPM related training offerings from consultancy

firms, training institutes and tool suppliers can be found. The quality of these

training offerings will undoubtedly vary from moderate to extremely good. But

what exactly is bad or good?

How exactly do you determine and measure the quality of training and who is

responsible for doing this?

2.8.1 Market research

Market research has shown that a key success factor in the successful

implementation of BPM is the presence of a sufficient level of knowledge among

employees. An international market study on BPM carried out by AIIM Market

Intelligence [2], has shown that 41% of participating organisations experienced

troubles due to the lack of knowledge and/or training of internal employees, in

the process of implementing BPM.

The study “BPM in Nederland 2008” [3] which was recently carried out in

cooperation with the Hogeschool Utrecht and Capgemini paints a similar picture.

Three quarters of respondents participating in the abovementioned study

indicated they use external support in the realisation of BPM activities.

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And in this regard, support by means of BPM training was rated as number one

with thirty-eight percent. This fits with the barrier “Insufficient resources with

sufficient knowledge”, which a quarter of the respondents indicated to be the

primary obstacle in carrying out BPM activities.

It should be more than obvious that well trained employees are crucial in the

successful implementation of BPM. This immediately prompts the question: How

can we successfully train employees in BPM?

2.8.2 The art of training

There are many ways to learn. However, not every training goal is the same. The

content of a training course is derived from the learning goals, which on their

turn can be divided into five learning dimensions:

Knowledge

Understand: theories, facts, tips and tricks and background information.

Insight

Understand: understanding the context, understanding the necessity and

significance of knowledge, understanding mechanisms, connections and

logic.

Skills

Ability: be able to exhibit desirable behaviour in familiar and new situations;

be able to perform demanded physical and mental tasks.

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Attitude

Attitude: the attitude with regards to what has been learned, the attitude with

regards to colleagues, clients or new developments.

Impact

Effect: The acquired knowledge, skills and attitudes influence the

environment and the learning effect is not constrained to the individual. The

true impact is achieved when the individual can act from his own unique

personality (authenticity).

With this classification of five dimensions, the quality of training can be

measured by determining in advance, which learning dimensions are relevant and

determining the criteria against which objectives and eventually results can be

compared. For that purpose, one will have to unequivocally define what the goal

of the training is beforehand. One should note however, that descending from the

knowledge dimension to the impact dimension, measurement (and especially the

determination of the measurement units) becomes ever more difficult.

2.8.3 Measuring training success

There are several ways to look at the success of a training course. Figure 2

captures these differing modes.

Satisfaction

The first way to determine whether training was successful or not, is to measure

the satisfaction of the participants. Did the training meet ones expectations? Was

the instructor an expert in the particular field? Were the facilities satisfactory?

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This is often measured by means of a questionnaire or evaluation form at the

completion of the course. This is the most common method.

Drawing a bridge to BPM, one can compare it to the capturing of process

descriptions. Are people satisfied with the way in which the processes were

captured by the BPM employee? Did the BPM employee have a pleasant way of

eliciting information? A manner that says little about the actual quality of the

BPM product.

Content

The second gradation relates to the content. Did the participant understand the

content? This is often measured by having participants take an exam. If the

participant passes the exam, then one can conclude that he has sufficiently

understood the content. A lot of suppliers of BPM training courses employ their

own exams, due to a lack of a generally accepted standards, like the standards

that are available for service management (ITIL) and project management

(PrinceII or IPMA). A new development in this regard is the so-called OMG

Certified Expert in Business Process Management (OCEB) certification of the

Object Management Group (OMG)14

[3]. This could possibly develop into the

generally accepted standard.

If one draws a parallel to the delivery of process descriptions in BPM, then this

gradation is where the correctness of the process descriptions is determined. This

is usually done by having one or more process experts validate the descriptions.

Transfer

The third manner involves the Transfer, which can be understood as whether or

not people use it in a practical setting. A common problem in the training world:

the offered training program just fails to match the practical setting in which the

participant operates. Examples are merely vaguely recognisable and processes

remain abstract. A better way would be to practice in one‟s own work

environment. However, this normally is not workable due to unacceptable risks.

So-called learning work labs may be a solution, as they enable free training in a

controlled, yet recognisable practical environment, with coaching.

New and innovative concepts in which the participants are handed exactly the

knowledge, skills and tools that fit their personal project situation and style of

learning also pertain. In such instances, the personal learning key map supports

the participant in obtaining and applying the competencies in a practical setting,

which are needed to e.g. function and work as a BPM employee.

14 OMG™ is an international, open membership, not-for-profit computer industry

consortium. The OCEB™ program will consist of five examinations, granting five Certifications. Above the single Fundamental level, the program splits into two tracks - one Business oriented, the other Technically oriented.

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Participants in similar flexible learning routes present their personal practical

situations to one another and to experts in the field.

In the analogy to BPM, the process description corresponds to the process as it is

actually carried out in practice. A technique like process mining deduces the

followed processed from event logs and audit trails of systems and databases[5].

Organisations

The final gradation is that of the Organisation. In this context, a link is made

between the training and the performance of the organisation. For example: has

the sales training led to more sales? In other words, does one actually see a

measurable improvement in the performance of the organisation?

This is ultimately the reason why organisations train employees.

If once again a parallel is drawn to BPM, one sees that in BPM methods such as

Six Sigma and Lean aim at similar goals. The training of employees can then be

seen as a possible solution and possibly a precondition for improving product

quality or customer satisfaction.


At first glance, BPM and training look like two things which have nothing in

common. The opposite however is true. BPM and the training of employees are

both ultimately aimed at bringing the organisation to the next – and higher level.

Trained employees are a precondition for the successful implementation of BPM.

BPM in its own right can be a valuable source from which to provide training.

There are several ways in which the success of BPM training courses can be

measured. We are witnessing that in the training world, ever more innovative

training concepts are being employed, in order to provide a direct and measurable

contribution to the performance improvement of the organisation. BPM training

courses and BPM implementations are commonly considered to be two separate

subjects. BPM and the training of employees in BPM have a strengthening

function in reaching the ultimate goal of organisational performance

improvement. It is therefore advised to jointly use these two means.

Acknowledgement of sources

[1] Gartner Research Report, Business Process Management: Preparing for the

Process-Managed Organisation, 2005

[2] aiim MarketIQ, Business Process Management, 2008

[3] Hogeschool van Utrecht en Capgemini, Business Process Management in

Nederland, 2008

[4] The Object Management Group, OCEB certification,

www.omg.org\oceb\index.htm

[5] Process Mining, www.processmining.org

[6] academy.capgemini.com

Guido de Vrught is Managing Consultant at Capgemini. Currently he is manager

of the Technology cluster within Capgemini Academy.

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3 Point of View

3.1 Introduction

This concluding chapter will go into detail with Capgemini‟s point of view on

BPM. It starts with the way we see the development of BPM as a management

discipline and the BPM maturity of organisations in relation to that development.

One could even say that the notion of BPM as management discipline is a trend

in itself. It also stresses the prerequisite of having a BPM infrastructure in place

in order to be able to realise desired growth in BPM maturity.

A further drill down of the BPM discipline leads to the “BPM umbrella”. Our

experience is that there are only a few organisations that ask for BPM in itself.

Organisations have business issues to be dealt with and there might be one or

more BPM related solutions. How BPM and these solutions are related is

explained by means of the BPM umbrella.

Finally some future developments in the BPM working field are described: what

will the future trends look like?

3.2 BPM as management discipline

Nowadays there seems to be a general consensus that Business Process

Management – as the word “management” implies – is a management discipline

rather than a technology or an updated version of BPR (Business Process

Redesign) that was hot during the early nineties. Although the term "BPM" is

still widely used to mention BPM technologies, researchers like Gartner now use

the term as management discipline [1] and in the BPM survey conducted in the

Netherlands in 2008 [2] more than half of the respondents supported this

definition.

In our point of view organisations that implement BPM as a management

discipline have attention for the whole life-cycle of business processes:

continuously designing processes, monitoring & analysing processes and

improving/ optimising processes.

All these three components of BPM are necessary to meet the challenges of

today‟s world, summarised in three trends that we see dominating the

marketplace:

cost-effectiveness: narrowing market windows with shorter opportunities for

optimising profits (“In 2007 56% of the respondents indicated that their

companies were involved in BPM to save money or improve productivity”

[2]); flexibility: constant change driven by customers and competition in the

marketplace, and transparency: regulations and laws requiring precise execution against cost

and schedule.

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Organisations must find ways to better manage their business processes - that is,

the ways in which they operate - to deal with these trends. For example,

designing processes for agility needed to respond to changing conditions.

Monitoring in order to provide information about business operations, enabling

business managers to make better and more-timely business decisions. And

related to transparency: demonstrate compliance with regulations.

Bottom line: by treating BPM as a management discipline, processes become a

means to achieve competitive advantages.

3.3 BPM Maturity

Although we acknowledge the need to see BPM as a management discipline, in

our opinion you cannot separate this from the BPM (or process) maturity level of

an organisation. These two aspects seem to be closely interrelated. When

investigating the existing literature, there are several BPM maturity models

around, mainly based on the CMMi model. Another well known model is

Gartner‟s BPM Maturity Model [3] and BPR guru Michael Hammer has his

Process and Enterprise Maturity Model [4].

Although the maturity models vary in the number of levels and the complexity of

each, in the end all models boil down to the same: with respect to the way

organisations deal with BPM there is a growth path, starting at the point where

organisations hardly have any notice how their processes work, but are/become

aware that there may be some business improvement opportunities that cannot be

addressed by conventional approaches. Then organisations become more process

aware, up to the level that they have end-to-end, agile business processes in

place. By the way, striking result of an international survey [5] is that almost 80

percent of the respondents indicate that their organisation has still not started

with BPM or is still in the very early stages...

However, somewhere on the maturity path the notice of treating BPM as a

management discipline will come along. As one can imagine, it doesn‟t make

sense to talk about BPM as management discipline for organisations that are in

the very early process maturity stages. So, you cannot reach a certain level of

BPM maturity without considering BPM as management discipline as well as the

other way around: considering BPM as management discipline indicates that you

have reached a certain level of maturity. In other words both developments go

hand in hand.

In our point of view there are different ways in which organisations can move to

- and subsequently move through – the BPM maturity stages. Although reaching

the highest levels of maturity must not be an aim in itself, more mature

organisations seem to be able to better deal with changing conditions within their

ecosystem. The "right" choice – both in the road through, as well as the desired

level to reach - will depend on a large number of aspects, amongst which are the

company's unique business challenges, the BPM awareness at management level,

and the commitment to Business Transformation™. The bottom line is that,

without any map, the journey to BPM maturity will be difficult and frustrating.

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3.4 BPM Infrastructure

What we would like to stress for organisations that aim to grow in their BPM

maturity is the importance of having a BPM infrastructure in place.

In our opinion, having such an infrastructure in place and dealing with BPM as a

management discipline are tightly connected: we see the BPM infrastructure as a

necessary precondition to reach the higher stages in the maturity model. It makes

it possible for an organisation to treat BPM as a management discipline. Starting

point for defining the way the BPM infrastructure should look like, always

should be the question: “what is it that I want to achieve with BPM?” This in turn

should be a consequence of the organisation‟s strategy and objectives. In other

words, alignment between strategy and operations. The next question then should

be: “who am I doing it for?” Only when these two questions are clearly

answered, the next step can be made.

Putting the BPM infrastructure in place then has to do with activities like

installing a BPM governance, defining and implementing the BPM (meta)

processes – e.g. how to deal with changes in required BPM functionality or

process contents - , designing and applying BPM standards and conventions,

5. Optimised

4. Managed

3. Repeatable

2. Defined

1. Initial state

Low Maturity-Un-coordinated BPM activities- Low BPM skills- (Department) Internally focused-Ad hoc, reactive- ….

High Maturity- Co-ordinated BPM activities- High BPM Expertise- End-to-end process view- Continuously, proactive- ….

Strategy, business

objectives

AchievedBy processes

Supported byBPM

Impact onbusiness success

Impact onprocess success

BPM success

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selecting a BPM tool, etc. At this stage you should not be dealing with any

process-contents at all.

As mentioned before there should be a close relationship between an

organisation‟s strategy and business objectives and the way they approach BPM.

For an organisation where everything is going smoothly - targets are reached

without any problems, market shares are constantly increasing, and so on - there

will hardly be any reason to be interested in the field of BPM. However, in real

life this type of organisations hardly exists and almost any organisation, in time,

will be faced with a gap between strategy/ objectives and the actual operational

outcomes. In order to solve the issues that cause this gap, BPM solutions can be

considered. So again: the organisation has to define what it is that they want to

achieve and then look whether BPM solutions may be applicable.

As a consequence, our experience is that there are only a few organisations that

ask for BPM in itself. An exception might be the request for the implementation

of a BPM infrastructure, but overall almost no business manager asks for „two

ounces of BPM‟. Instead, he or she has a business issue or requirement that has

to be dealt with and there might be one or more BPM related solutions. The BPM

professional has the challenge to link solution and issue (with the possible

appurtenant benefit that there is a process oriented solution that does not require

a million Euros investment in IT solutions).

To illustrate this, we use the metaphor of the umbrella. We see BPM as a

management discipline, as the all-covering umbrella, under which there is a

palette of possible BPM solutions for business issues and requirements. It is the

specific business issue or requirement that determines which solution(s) are

applicable.

As stated before, in the ideal situation this notion is already dealt with when

setting up the BPM infrastructure. E.g., when the business wants to make use of

process simulation to evaluate alternative future scenarios, this should be a

requirement when selecting a supporting BPM tool. This is in order to prevent

that a lot of energy is put in modelling processes in tool X and then come to the

conclusion that your BPM tool does not support simulation at all.

By means of this figure we want to create some clearness in the discussion

around the definition of BPM as well. The way BPM manifests itself will often

be as one of the BPM solutions in figure 3. When asking BPM professionals

about their definition of BPM one will get a great diversity in opinions of what

BPM is and is not. Often the answer will be in line with the particular

manifestation of BPM for this person.

In our opinion though, there is a distinction between BPM as discipline and the

BPM solutions. Although the latter one is part of the first, this does not mean that

that manifestation is equal to BPM.

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At the highest definition-level we concur with Gartner [6], stating that BPM is a

management discipline that requires and enables organisations to manage - plan,

change and act - the complete revision cycles of their business processes, from

process design to monitoring (measurement) and continuous optimisation. In our

opinion this definition implies:

Continuous improvement in terms of (cost) effectiveness, agility and

transparency, alignment, and being in control of processes;

A shift to process-centric thinking: processes being treated as distinct assets

to be valued, designed and exploited in their own right;

A structured approach for monitoring, managing and iteratively optimizing

an organization's operational business processes (the way the business

operates);

The implementation of automation suites (BPMS or workflow systems) may

play a role as enabler.

3.5 Where is BPM heading to?

The list of trends we pay attention to in this publication is by no means

exhaustive. We made the selection based on the developments

we see at our customers, what international research and advisory companies

indicate, and results of our Dutch BPM survey. For some „trends‟ you can

discuss whether it is already a trend – where in our opinion a trend is something

that is already going on – or an expected future development – something one

expects to happen, a prediction. The dividing line between these two is

sometimes difficult. For example, a trend like Human Interaction Management is

disputable: do we already see this happening or do we expect this (eventually

being in development at this moment)? Another future development is process

BPM as management discipline

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simulation or process scenario analysis. Is this something new, is this a trend?

No, not at all: in the ninety eighties we already used process simulation to

support decision making, so nothing new there. On the other hand, nowadays we

hardly see companies actually using process simulation on a large scale in order

to improve their processes. Nevertheless, we believe that process scenario

analysis will become a valuable tool in the near future. In this paragraph we want

to highlight some of the future developments that, in our point of view, are the

direction the BPM world is moving to.

3.5.1 Human Interaction Management: processes don‟t do work, people do

When we look at the current state of BPM, we see that a lot of companies are at

the stage that they have documented their processes (often because of compliance

regulations) in a certain form of flow charts. For relatively structured processes

with a limited number of participants this works out pretty well. In some

literature these processes are referred to as task-driven processes.

Companies that are somewhat higher in the maturity path are now struggling with

the next challenge: what to do with complex, unpredictable processes where we

also have a lot of participants (human interaction): human-driven processes?

Here the traditional BPM solutions seem to have their limitations: current

mainstream techniques and tools for work support, whether categorised as

Workflow or as Business Process Management, deal only with "mechanistic"

business processes [9]. The need for something more structured than email and

less prescriptive than workflow can be understood by considering that in real life,

the resource negotiation phase of work is only the start of the person-to-person

process. After work is agreed, it has to be performed. This sounds easy, but is not

as simple as checking off tasks on a list. Numerous other people – probably from

a number of departments - are likely to be involved, and each participant is a

potential source for disrupting the process. For example, by failing to meet

timescales or the process may be delayed by factors outside of their own control.

When performing agreed work by executing processes, one often sees that this

process execution in itself requires the creation and execution of new processes

among team members, each of which represent additional loops in the end-to-end

process. At each stage, those requesting work and those performing work need to

agree that work items have been satisfactorily completed. This sign off may also

be subject to further interactions and negotiations since the work results may

involve compromises.

We see Human Interaction Management (HIM) as a likely solution for the “shift

from Transaction to Interaction” [10]. HIM not only deals with tasks, but also

with those aspects of work visible from inside - information, interaction and

innovation. It is the interaction among workers as they process diverse work

items, cases and documents that is the focus of attention. Paragraph 2.7 will be

addressing details about this subject.

3.5.2 Process-on-the-Fly™

Closely related to the trend of designing for agility (paragraph 2.1), is the

Process-on-the-Fly™ concept. “Organisations will need to change their processes

in near real-time to quickly reflect and accommodate changes in the business

ecosystem.” [10] State of the art (service-oriented) solutions will enable to

quickly simulate, describe, model, execute and manage business processes,

responding to business-critical events the moment they occur. Especially the

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front office (client facing) functions of organisations will have to deal with this,

because there the dynamics of change are the biggest. In our point of view BPM

is pre-eminently the working field that can give an answer to this Process-on-the-

Fly concept: the future BPM professional has to design flexible processes, to

provide organisations with differentiating capabilities to deal with a volatile

business context. Comparable with the SaaS (Software as a Service) concept, we

see the development to a kind of Process as a Service. One can already see that

BPM vendors have picked up this trend as well: „plain‟ business process

modelling tools have evolved to „orchestration engines‟ and „choreography

platforms‟ that provide ways to construct dynamic processes. Cordys (vendor of

next generation BPM solutions) is a good illustration for this: they use the term

“on-demand BPM” in their Cordys Process Factory™.

This way of process design also requires more need for process management in

the means of having process performance indicators in place to measure to what

extent the processes perform as expected and possibly require redesign.

Continual process improvement methods like Lean (refer to paragraph 2.3),

applied to end-to-end business processes thus finally can become a reality.

Furthermore, business rules engines enable organisations to isolate their critical

business policies and logic from monolithic systems, defining and changing the

rules externally, often with a „language‟ that is much closer to business speak.

Extracting business process logic and business rules from existing legacy systems

is a proven approach to achieve more flexibility and simplified, more manageable

core solutions at the same time. Business Rule Management (BRM) by the way is

a major trend in its own. The recognition that processes (in their functionality –

what they achieve) rarely change, but the rules that „steer‟ the process change

constantly result in initiatives to separate both. That the use (and management) of

business rules is hot is endorsed by the fact that it is a recurring subject in several

of the chapters.

3.5.3 Process scenario analysis

A generic definition of business process simulation is "an experimentation with a

simplified imitation (on a computer) of a business process as it progresses

through time, for the purpose of better understanding and/or improving that

business process" [14].

Although simulation tools are around since the eighties, it never really boomed.

In more recent history a lot of customers put process simulation on the

requirements list for their BPM tooling. In the end however, a lot of processes

were modelled, but hardly ever were the processes simulated. To illustrate this:

less than 5 percent of the customers that IDS Scheer (vendor of business process

and performance management software and solutions) has, have bought the

process simulation module of the BPM-Tool ARIS [15].

The reason why process simulation is rarely used seems to be twofold: on the one

hand there is the complexity to setup process simulation and the time it takes to

collect the often detailed information required for the simulation model. On the

other hand process simulation requires a certain level of process maturity that has

not been reached by many organisations nowadays.

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A prerequisite for business process simulation is an explicit business process

model that requires a lot of information about the process parameters (numbers,

cycle times, distribution, etc). In our opinion however, the combination of having

real-time process information available (refer to chapter 2.6 Process change on

(big) wheels) and state-of-the-art simulation tooling that is able to quickly make

scenario analyses, will become of great value in making (strategic) business

decisions. The coming years we expect process scenario analysis, to become a

more accepted aid for managing change and Business Transformation™. Process

scenario analysis will be used in the „traditional‟ way as an aid for quantitative

issues. But it cannot only help analyse the current state situation (and identify

bottlenecks in inefficient processes), evaluate future state scenarios and perform

„what-if ‟ calculations. It also founds management decisions in a way that

prevents uncertain investments and without actually interrupting the operations.

And in addition to this, all the advantages of process scenario analysis have one

very welcome side-effect: the reduction of risk.

3.6 Recapitulation

BPM is a living and developing discipline. Companies are more and more aware

about the benefits that can be achieved by treating BPM as a management

discipline. In our opinion however, organisations cannot make the desired steps

in BPM maturity – and thereby frustrating the growth to dealing with BPM as

management discipline - without paying attention to the BPM infrastructure.

Starting point before putting any efforts in BPM should always be the question

“what is it that I want to achieve with BPM?”. Otherwise it will be a long road to

nowhere.

In this book a number of trends in the BPM working field are described. In

addition to these trends we think that there are a couple of future developments

that we see as having large potential:

Human Interaction Management as a way of dealing with complex,

unpredictable processes where we also have a lot of participants (human

interaction);

Process-on-the-Fly™ as concept for designing processes that are able to

respond to business-critical events the moment they occur and

Process scenario analysis as a commonly used aid for managing change and

Business Transformation™.

Literature

[1] BPM as a Management Discipline, Gartner Business Process Management

Summit, 2006

[2] Business Process Management in the Netherlands – Capgemini &

Hogeschool Utrecht, 2008

[3] BPM Maturity Model Identifies Six Phases for Successful BPM Adoption –

Gartner, 2007

[4] The Process Audit – Michael Hammer, April 2007 issue of the Harvard

BusinessReview

[5] Business Process Management, Market-IQ research - AIIM, 2008

[6] Gartner's Position on Business Process Management – Gartner, 2006

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[7] Evaluating an Organization's Business Process Maturity – Paul Harmon,

Business Process Trends March 2004.

[8] Hype Cycle for Business Process management, 2008 – Gartner, 2008

[9] Human Interactions: The heart And Soul of Business Process Management –

Keith Harrison Broninski, 2004

[10] Technovision 2012, Capgemini, 2008

[11] Drive BPM Initiatives To Higher Business Value – Forrester (Connie

Moore), 2008

[12] Demand for Business Process Management Suites will accelerate trough

2009 – Forrester (Ken Vollmer, Connie Moore), 2007

[13] The state of Business process Management - Paul Harmon, Celia Wolf, 2008

[14] Simulation: The Practice of Model Development and Use - Stewart

Robinson, 2004.

[15] An insight in the world of process simulation - Guyon van de Giessen, 2007

[16] Predicts 2008: Business Process management Alters Business and IT

Collaboration – Gartner, 2007



72

About Capgemini and the Collaborative Business Experience

Capgemini, one of the world‟s foremost providers of Consulting, Technology and Outsourcing

services, has a unique way of working with its clients, called the Collaborative Business

Experience.

Backed by over three decades of industry and service experience, the Collaborative Business

Experience is designed to help our clients achieve better, faster, more sustainable results

through seamless access to our network of world-leading technology partners and

collaboration-focused methods and tools. Through commitment to mutual success and the

achievement of tangible value, we help businesses implement growth strategies, leverage

technology and thrive through the power of collaboration. Capgemini employs

approximately 68,000 people worldwide and reported 2006 global revenues of 7,7 billion Euros.

The Capgemini Group is headquartered in Paris.

www.capgemini.com

Colophon

Editors: Frank van den Ende and Hans Toebak

Capgemini Nederland BV

P.O. Box 2575 - 3500 GN Utrecht

The Netherlands

Telephone: +31 30 689 00 00

Fax: +31 30 689 99 99

E-mail: [email protected]

Copyright © 2009 Capgemini. All rights reserved.

http://www.capgemini.com/

mailto:[email protected]

www.nl.capgemini.com

Capgemini Nederland B.V.Papendorpseweg 100Postbus 2575 - 3500 GN UtrechtTel. 030 689 00 00Fax 030 689 99 99

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