Leveraging Process Modeling for Business Value

Ken Orr founded the Ken Orr Institute, a business technology research organization. He is an internationally recognized expert on business process management, technology transfer, enterprise architecture, software engineering, information architecture, and data warehousing.

Orr said that how we look at business processes determines how we see them. That is why using the business process diagramming techniques created by Rummler-Brache, Benson and Parker (Square Wheel), Porter (Business Value Chain), and Nolan (S-curves), can help show an organization its actual business processes.

Enterprise Architecture is at the center of all this and determines to a great degree how far we can automate the business processes. Enterprise Architecture consists of hundreds of applications serving thousands of databases. This means that things can only become more complex in the future and explains the great interest in Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and the need for a simpler way to make the enterprise architecture work.

Orr used the Kansas Department of Transportation's Enterprise Architecture Project as an example. Phase 1 was to capture the Enterprise Architecture. Phase 2 would integrate EA with Business and IT management. Phase 3 would integrate EA with the Enterprise Business Processes.

According to Orr, we are beyond the paperless office, document management, and first-generation workflow. Now it is necessary to provide technology everywhere to everyone. Collaboration is the key to what Orr calls "Liberation Technology."

Business Process thinking runs against the normal organizational bias. It is not intuitive, but it is ultimately the key to everything, according to Orr. He quoted a statement by Rummler and Brache, that said managers don't really understand, at a sufficient level of detail, how their business gets products developed, made, sold and distributed. Rummler and Brache believe the reason for this lack of understanding is that most managers have a fundamentally flawed view of their organizations. A flawed view of the organization guarantees a flawed view of its processes.

The trick to making BPM work is to find the mainline process. This means seeing how the business does work as it actually does the work. When this is charted the mainline process can be seen. When it is seen, it can be cleaned up and improved. According to Orr, this is not a top-down approach. It is more a longitudinal left-to-right approach through the diagram. Orr calls this the "Search for the 'East Pole'." Every step of every process should add value to that process. If it doesn't, it can be eliminated.

You do not want to automate the "as-is" process. It can always be improved. Other things to avoid are nano-management and chaos.

There is a new generation of process model-driven architecture applications that are collaborative and data-centric rather than document-centric. They are flexible and can be changed to fit the process.

Orr predicts that Business Process will drive more and more initiatives and businesses will be acquiring processes rather than software suites. The trick to making "Liberation Technology" work is tying the workflow to the data.

Ken Orr recently spoke on this topic at a recent BrainStorm’s Business Process Management Conference. For more information, visit www.BPMConference.com

To hear the archived audio file of this presentation, visit:

www.bpminstitute.org/presentations.html

Jon Huntress

Special Events Correspondent

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