Articles

Business Architecture & the Role of the CIO

Author(s):

William Ulrich

President, TSG, Inc.

I get a chance to work with CIOs in various capacities that usually involve major business challenges their organizations are facing and how IT can collaborate with business to address those challenges. These discussions are generally a precursor or follow-up to a strategic assessment, which tends to surface the expected technological challenges along with a few surprises. The surprise is not that IT has layer upon layer of fragmented, heavily redundant application and data architectures built on aging technology. This is unfortunately the norm. The surprise lies in why these problems keep multiplying and attempts to address them often turn into the next failed project. The fact is that issue analysis, problem definition, planning and funding all begin with the business and more often than not, these concerns lie behind a shroud of organizational siloes, fragmented customer perspectives and myriad business dialects.

Driving Improvement With Management Reporting

Author(s):

Karen Tricomi

Consultant, The Process Geek

Introduction

Companies spend a lot of time and resources reporting on their businesses. There are balanced scorecards, KPIs, executive, management and status reports done daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly and annually. Executives and managers have so many reports they have trouble reading them all and employees complain that reporting takes up more time than the jobs for which they’ve been hired. After all that, the sad fact is that many reports are read and deleted, read by the wrong people, or not read at all.

Here we’ll talk about how to streamline the number of reports produced, and how to tell the right story to the right people.

Simplifying Complex Processes

Author(s):

James Taylor

Faculty Member, BPMInstitute.org and CEO and Principal Consultant, Decision Management Solutions

There are lots of good reasons for adopting business process management as an approach, and a Business Process Management System as a technology. The benefits that can be gained are real but they can be undermined by over complex process designs. If the process you end up designing is the BPMN or BPEL equivalent of spaghetti code, then your process won’t be agile and it won’t be cost-effective. It’s also unlikely to deliver a positive customer experience or to be easy to continuously improve. The benefits of BPM are dependent on you developing processes that are reasonable, that are not over-complex.

Five Steps to a Data Driven Organization

Author(s):

Shelley Sweet

Faculty Member, BPMInstitute.org and President, i4 Process

Big Data is all the rage, but how should we use it, and how does it relate to process improvement and BPM?

Big Data is really just a new category of data, but one that has gotten a lot of buzz because it

is a catchy term
casts a wider net – out to external customers, potential buyers, suppliers, other networks in the general market place
requires more sophisticated methods of gathering, modeling, and analyzing the data

So add Big Data to your organizational tools, but make it an integral part of a data-driven organization.

Foundational Principles
The two critical underlying questions before any organization starts gathering Big Data or data of any kind is:

To Deliver Business Value, Avoid Paving over Cow Paths

Author(s):

Ken Mullins

Senior Principal, MITRE Corporation

“Yesterday’s adaptations are today’s routines”–Ronald A. Heifetz, The Practice of Adaptive Leadership

I opened an earlier article[1] published in this forum some time ago by setting up the following scenario, which concludes with a simple question:

Imagine yourself as the owner of a business domain within a government agency. Let’s say you’re the Deputy Administrator of entitlement programs in an organization that processes claims for benefits. No matter the type of benefit(s) or entitlement(s) your agency administers, whether loan guarantees, educational benefits, [or] disaster-recovery relief . . ., your business model – at some level of abstraction – is as simple as receiving applications (or claims) for benefits, qualifying them, and dispensing an appropriate response to each . . . of your applicants (or claimants).

Pivoting Through Capability Maps

Author(s):

Frank Fabian

Owner, Frank Fabian Group

Most entrepreneurs understand the meaning of a “Pivot”. A Pivot is a change of direction for the entire organization in order to take advantage (or find) an opportunity that expands the company’s business. A pivot can create an atmosphere of what appears to be total chaos and without proper management, can leave a business slogging along instead of soaring higher. However, by understanding the capabilities of your company, capability maps can make pivots more manageable. A pivot is one of the few times where capabilities may become fluid in order to adapt to the new direction. Business architecture usually assumes that capabilities are relatively stable – not so with a pivot.

The Virtual BPM Facilitator – Part 1

Author(s):

Shelley Sweet

Faculty Member, BPMInstitute.org and President, i4 Process

A Facilitator helps participants in a group work together toward the meeting objective by providing a meeting structure, engaging the participants, keeping them focused on the content, and remaining neutral himself. A BPM Facilitator is a person who guides a business process improvement (BPI) project, using the same group process skills and behaviors of a generic facilitator but in the context of BPM. So the BPM facilitator needs to know the BPM Methodology, have a structured method of working with BPI teams, be able to coach a Process Owner, and be able to work with the BPI Project Leader toward the improvement targets of the Process Owner. And the Virtual BPM Facilitator needs to do it virtually – not face to face but using telecommunications by phone, by video conference, by Web Ex, or similar tools. That makes the medium a bit more challenging but it’s the reality of today’s global world.

Smarter Systems: Applying Decision Management

Author(s):

Gagan Saxena

VP Consulting & Principal Consultant, Decisions Management Solutions

All systems are active participants in business decision making to some degree.

The logic coded into business systems allows a level of ‘smartness’, and this is then amplified by the decision logic used by users – resulting in smart business operations. So, if we want to make the entire business operations smarter, we need to focus on decision making across systems and their users. Business Decision Management seeks to explicitly define and improve operational decisions; and to automate them through targeted deployment of sophisticated decision management technologies like Business Rules Management, Advanced Analytics and Optimization.

Business Architect, Enterprise Architect and Business Transformation

Author(s):

Ganesh Balasubramaniam

Director - Business Architecture, OptumHealth

Businesses are under constant challenge to deliver growth and profitability. Business process improvements and other enterprise quality initiatives are vital for the enterprise to do more with less, but they are not sufficient. When businesses feel there is opportunity for transformation, they may engage a business architect. Many organizations do not have the benefit of established architecture processes and architecture governance for the enterprise, which makes the task of the business architect even more difficult. It becomes incumbent on the business architect to educate and navigate stakeholders through architectural aspects of business transformation.

Building a Process Catalog: Final Steps

Author(s):

Karen Tricomi

Consultant, The Process Geek

This is the final article in my series on building a process catalog for the organization in which I work. For reference and context, you can find the first three articles at these links: Building a Process Catalog: The Journey Begins; Building a Process Catalog, The Ongoing Journey; and Building a Process Catalog: Moving Ahead.

As we have wrapped up the calendar year, the Process Catalog that we began last October finally can be completed. Below is a brief recap of the stages we’ve gone through to get the catalog to the current state.

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