The buzz about business processes, how they should be designed and how employees should use them, is getting louder and more varied. Some vendors are striving to make business process design, implementation and improvement much easier. BEA, IBM WebSphere, Sun SeeBeyond, webMethods, and others are packaging comprehensive infrastructure solutions empowering business analysts as the designers and owners of business process. These solutions’ capabilities include modeling, testing, application integration, and performance monitoring and reporting, all aiming to help process owners optimize business processes in a top-down manner.
On the other hand, Microsoft has launched a “power to the people” campaign, positioning Office 2007 as the interface to business processes and content. The goal is to transition enterprise thinking away from Office as a suite of productivity tools and toward Office as a platform for collaboration and executing business process tasks. For example, the collaboration between Microsoft and SAP produced Duet, a solution that allows employees to use Outlook to manage timekeeping, budgeting, scheduling, purchasing, recruiting, sales management, and travel information that is stored in mySAP ERP 2004 or mySAP ERP 2005. The recent partnership between Microsoft and EMC integrates Office’s content creation capabilities with Documentum’s long-term archival, policy, and compliance management capabilities.
These integration efforts are only the beginning. In addition, Microsoft is dedicated to making it easier for casual Office users to personalize their interfaces and access dynamic enterprise data. Thus employees (not business analysts) can potentially create individualized business and collaborative processes over time. In essence, enterprises can take an evolutionary, populist approach to creating business processes.
Are these different approaches to business processes a conflict in the making? Should enterprises have to choose between design or evolution?
There are several reasons why it should not be. First, it is actually the potential for continuous process improvement that drives both the design and evolution approaches to business processes. When enterprises can continuously improve their processes they become more efficient and profitable over time, and they can adapt more easily to changes in market demand. This is why continuous improvement is part virtually every business process maturity model. The designer approach allows businesses to quickly implement a process design, monitor its effectiveness against key performance indicators, test design improvements, and then quickly implement changes. This is a means to achieve continuous improvement process maturity for repetitive, automated processes. Similarly the evolutionary approach allows users to create individualized workflows, information dashboards, and process interfaces over time, achieving continuous improvement process maturity for non-repetitive processes.
Second, the approaches are tackling fundamentally different types of processes. There will always be repetitive processes and transactions that are best handled in an automated way, without any human intervention – these processes are best designed by a business analyst. There will always be creative and decision-making processes that tend to differ somewhat every time they are performed, making them impossible to automate – these processes are best evolved by the teams involved. Hence it should be apparent that these technological approaches can be complement and help improve the overall maturity of different types of business processes.
Finally, both approaches are fueled by SOA strategies and Web Services standards. These are the linchpins of the flexibility and adaptability delivered by both the process designer and populist evolutionary approaches to business processes. Microsoft is using SOA principles to “componentize” the Office suite to allow users to customize their interfaces. Microsoft’s .Net implementation of Web Services eases the Office suite’s integration with its partners. IBM and BEA position SOA and Web Services as fundamental underpinnings of business process management that will drive the next evolution of new enterprise applications. Without this common bond of standards adoption, enterprises would be doomed to the recreation siloed process technology, the resumption of integration nightmares, and the still-birth of end-to-end process performance management.
Enterprises should not be forced into choosing between process design or evolution technologies because: 1) it is the mix of both approaches that will make enterprises ultimately more agile and more competitive and 2) a standards-based implementation of both approaches should provide the answer before the debate begins. Thus enterprises must never let up the pressure on vendors to deliver on their promises of SOA and Web Services standards adoption and implementation.
