Gaining visibility of a corporation’s Business Processes stands to be one of the greatest industrial and commercial breakthroughs of this century for the corporations that step up to the challenge…and the probable demise of those who don’t. Here’s why….
Increased Speed and Risk in Operations – many organizations are still in the Business Process – “horse and buggy” era…these businesses still rely on big binders full of written procedures covering how their business “does” its business and its procedures. Some but far from all of their processes are documented but they are still buried in text and still largely ‘invisible” or “transparent” in the minds of the people that manage them and more importantly to the workers who are supposed to use them on a daily basis.
And whether the company has accessorized their buggies by making high tech upgrades that have converted paper to digital computer accessible ones or gone the extra mile and now operate their own intranet sites the problem is they are still relying on text based material to convey concepts and ideas about their processes.
And regardless of how fast you present the text to the user – it’s still limited to how fast and how much time the user spends trying to read, digest and understand it.
While many organizations are working very hard to meet the needs of their staffs AND comply with the growing number of regulatory groups most are loosing ground with the growing number of regulatory requirements and the increasing speed at which changes and updates are communicated.
We have reached a point where businesses can no longer afford the luxury of wasted resources once associated with reliance on textual formatted process documentation.
The reason is very simple…Time. People have less time to do more than ever before. They simply don’t have time to read and digest all of this written material fast enough to get up on it before more changes come out on things they’ve already read. And the change rate is increasing.
The less time people have to read the information the greater the probability that employees will be making compliance or quality errors.
The Problem – What corporations are being faced with here is a growing disparity between what workers actually know about their Business Processes and what they really need or should know, referred to as the “BP Knowledge Gap”. This gap is further aggravated when Managers who often know even less about the processes than workers, and often feel that they have even less time to devote to training and understanding them.
The Risk – This growing gap in process knowledge by the employees translates to increased risk for the company from two directions; regulatory compliance and product quality. While most companies’ products or services frequently unrelated to regulated markets – like Health Services or Food Products for instance – are governed by the FDA, and USDA, they often have several other supporting processes that are covered by other regulations that directly impact their costs and ultimately their bottom line.
The path to the Solution –There is new hope for this problem. It’s called Business Process Depiction Language (BPDL). It provides a way of depicting Business Processes so that they can be “seen”, quickly reviewed and understood, at all levels across the organization. This provides an advantage unparalleled, in modern history. Now people in the organization can understand how the processes and systems are supposed to run. This one item affords businesses the opportunity – to move out of their Horse and buggy operations into the automobile era…and increase their internal productivity ten fold.
This is a quantum leap forward that no business that is serious about remaining in business AND remaining competitive over the next 10-15 years can afford to bypass or ignore.
Other companies are already preparing for the next leap beyond. This is another reason to move in this direction sooner is that many larger companies are already into the automobile era on this and stepping on the gas…they are working toward their next quantum leap into the Airplane Era equivalent of this systems technology….where their mapped processes are optimized, linked and integrated into the supporting metrics and the corporate insight process.
This leap provides managers with critical decision support tools in order to take advantage of gaps in the Market and stay inside the decision cycle of their competitors.
The real question is… where is your organization with this BP Knowledge Gap, and how are they handling it…or not…and more importantly what are you going to do about it…because the reality …it’s your future also.
