Application development has been historically focused on departments or functions within an enterprise. Enterprise-wide business process architectures were non-existent resulting in application silos and Partner\Vendor\Customer interfaces were manual or integrated minimally. This approach resulted in systems being developed to cater to a specific functionality, foregoing business process optimization and resulting in technology - business misalignment. The function\department-specific view proved a hindrance in identifying bottlenecks and determining key performance indicators in the process. Business process management initiatives introduced a different perspective to look at enterprise processes. The scope of processes was increased to include multiple functions, departments and Vendors\Partners\Customers. Architects realized that a more evolved architecture was required to leverage the existing software assets in the enterprise wide context.

Business Process Management

Success of a business can be defined simplistically as consisting of the following 2 things:

• Unique business processes it owns and executes
• Value it gets from those business processes

Unique Business Processes

An enterprise has several business processes which have evolved over time to provide its competitive edge. These processes have stakeholders like customers, partners, employees or management interacting among each other to produce business value. The uniqueness in business processes are not usually very apparent but require very diligent evaluation to retain and improve it. Business processes such as New Account Creation (Banking), Claims Processing (Insurance), Order Placement & Delivery (Retail), Employee Appraisal (HR) define the enterprise. Every company has business processes in some form or the other; what makes a business successful?

Business Process Value

What differentiates a successful business from the rest of the pack is the value they are able to extract from their existing business processes. Additionally the capability to define and deploy new processes fast is a differentiating factor. Business process value is a summation of multiple factors like automation, optimization, exception handling, activity monitoring and event handling.

Businesses can extract value from their existing as well as new business processes using several industry leading BPM platforms. BPM platforms provide the following features:

• process modeling enabling business analysts (who know the processes best rather than IT personnel) to define/map business processes
• application integration platform to bring together multiple applications to define a business process
• data transformation to ensure that data is presented to the individual business process components as it expects
• intelligent routing to enable the platform to make the decision regarding the next step in the business process based on the data
• monitoring to ensure that businesses are notified of any exceptional events
• master data management to ensure that data is managed and presented consistently to all individual components of a business process without loss of semantics
• system integration to enable buy versus build decisions for COTS/Solutions to fulfill gaps in the business processes.

SOA

Service Oriented Architecture is a substrate which ensures accelerated deployment of business processes. SOA guides enterprise components to exposes functionality as a service which eases business process deployment across the enterprise. Composite processes can be assembled from individual service oriented components. SOA is not a pre-requisite for BPM but ensures that the cost and time required for deploying business processes are reduced. SOA consists of several aspects like Service Definition, Service Registries, Service QoS, Service Governance. Contact us to to learn more about how to develop or implement a service oriented strategy in your enterprise.

Learn more about SOA@Ishi

What are you facing?

What are the symptoms which indicate that you have to take BPM seriously in your enterprise to remain competitive? The following are some indicators that we have identified:

• proliferation of business processes
• lost business opportunity because of inflexible business processes
• inconsistency of one process instance from another
• increasing complexity, reduced visibility for decision makers
• lack of standardized framework for controls and compliance
• inability to optimize and reduce the operating cost of business transactions

What can we do?

If you are pondering about getting into BPM we can help you ease yourself into it based on real return on investments. The following is an overview of our methodology

• identify a candidate process area for e.g. HR (hints: small processes, measurable, minimum external interfaces, multiple systems)
• map the end-to-end “as-is” process model
• identify measurable parameters of the business process
• define the process data model which encompasses data that flows across process sub-systems
• define process end points where it interfaces with other process areas
• identify business process optimization possibilities and develop the to-be process model
• define business events
• define application integration end points (service contracts or adapters)
• perform a sizing exercise and use a BPM platform to launch the initiative
• monitor performance and roll out into production
• measure parameters for ROI evaluation
• manage and administer
• go/no go decision for other process areas

Contact us to learn more on how to take SOA to the next step. Learn more about our System Integration expertise.