Business Process Management (BPM) and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) initiatives can either be easy or difficult depending on your approach.
At first glance BPM and SOA offer a very good value proposition. However, the more you learn, the more you discover that everything is not exactly as expected.
BPM and SOA initiatives are made up of process and data. Too often, a lack of focus in one area or the other occurs and has pervasive effects on business results. The marriage of process and data becomes the healthy foundation for successful BPM and SOA initiatives.
The story between our data and process begins at the point of entry -- at the lowest level of details within a process or during the execution of specific tasks or steps. Data can be coming from or be used by more than one process. They can also be stored in one or multiple systems. A lack of understanding of these relationships often leads to poor business intelligence and communication barriers that ultimately may result in bad business decisions. To illustrate this, have you ever participated in a meeting where two very credible people were presenting the same metric, but with different results?
One of the root causes of this problem is that each process uses the same point of data, but may be carrying a different context for the capture and analysis of this specific point of data. In this scenario, the more data reuse without proper governance, the greater the chance of misinterpretation. Without a clear understanding of the context in which data are captured, and their meaning, a multitude of data quality problems can be encountered. Examples of issue possibilities include poor accuracy, completeness, accessibility, availability, timeliness, volatility, complexity, redundancy, integrity, consistency, cohesiveness, precision, breadth, depth, certification, privacy, etc. BPM and SOA, which necessitate complex data and process integration, could further contribute to our data and process abuse if not approached with proper governance.
The scope of Data Governance includes:
• Enterprise-wide data naming convention and standards• Data planning • Data quality: availability, timeliness/latency definition, etc.• Data attribute/metric management • Data delivery vehicle/performance management• Data user/access management• Data storage• Data standards, ownership and compliance
The concepts of Data Governance and Process Governance have been around in various forms for several years. However, new tools and industry maturity are pushing the concept to a new level of awareness and adoption across the enterprise.
Master Data Management tools, for example, can help build your governance structure by providing a platform to document and publish the meta data dictionaries that carry the meaning, freshness, availability, source, attributes, etc. of your data, as well as your data ownership structure.
Business Process Management Suite (BPMS) and Business Process Analytic tools can help document your process architecture, ownership structure and inventory your data and process relationship.
The real solution to prevent the abuse across the enterprise is to ensure good collaboration between Data Governance and Process Governance. The meaning of Process and Data Governance has not changed with the proliferation of new solutions. It still starts and ends with individual accountability and responsibility. Process owners will provide the subject matter expertise required to understand the meaning of the data within the context of their processes, while your Data Owners will bring the understanding of the processes and metrics using their data sets.
Within this structure, any change to a process, data meaning or metric usage can be properly assessed and planned appropriately. Good synergy between Process Governance and Data Governance helps drive business intelligence.
If this seems like a lot of work, think about how much additional work occurs when you need to clarify these things every time you begin a project. A report published by the Gartner Group in the late 90’s stated that “on average, 20 percent of an organization’s processes were in review at any given time.” For each process under review, on average 10 percent of an organization’s personnel were actively involved in analyzing/improving that process, and over the course of a year, on average 70 percent of an organization’s personnel actively participated in a process improvement project. It takes between 100 and 120 hours to document a process, and 20 to 40 hours to modify an existing one.
Change is now the only constant you can expect, and the pace of change will continue to increase as corporations are forced to adapt to new market conditions. With this increased level of disruption, taking the time to document your processes and data, as well as establish proper governance, will help you increase the agility of your organization, improve your learning capability, avoid repeating the mistakes of the past and improve your business intelligence.
Success is often the result of good communication and compromise, and an organization that combines its Data and Process Governance practices is in a better position to quickly engage in ‘give and take’ for the benefit of the corporation, instead of driving decisions from a single position.
Nancy Bilodeau is a Principal Consultant with SAIC and she cumulates 14 years of experience focused on Business Transformation, Business Process Management (BPM), Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Change and Program Management across industries. Nancy is recognized for her visionary skills, execution track record and strong ability to help organizations dealing with complex situations.
Lak Singh has 17 years of data warehousing and data management experience and has provided solutions for Oil & Gas and Utilities veriticals. He can be reached at singhl@saic.com
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