blind consultants and bpm businessprocesses
- From: "Peter op 't Hof" <opthofp@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: <programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 24 Nov 2007 14:46:22 +0100
Dear listers,
I would like to introduce a new topic.
In my job as a procesmanager/businessconsultant i have a hard time to keep track
of all the different systems and procedures.
It is not a lag of knowledge, but of accessibility and (most of all) strategies
to translate my work to the seeing world.
I would like to have contact with other blind listers who are working in the
field of processdesign.
I am using UML pseudocode to analyse the proces but cannot draw it out.
Tdub software isn't any more so i have to ask teammates to help me.
It is hard to retain my job, so now i manage the interviews, write
documentation, monitor the progress of the projects and mediate between the ICT
and the requesting party.
This helps but it is hard work.
Nevertheless, i am on the move and try to find other people who would like to
trade information on procesmanagement.
Text about BPM from Wikipedia:
(sorry for the bad layout)
The activities which constitute business process management can be grouped into
five categories:
Design;
Modeling;
Execution;
Monitoring;
Optimization;
Process Design encompasses the following:
1. (optionally) The capture of existing processes and documenting their design
in terms of Process Map / Flow,
Actors, Alerts & Notifications, Escalations, Standard Operating Procedures,
Service Level Agreements and task hand-over mechanisms
2. Design the "to-be"
process covering all the above process and ensure that a correct and efficient
design is theoretically prepared.
A real world analogy can be an "Architect Design" of a house.
Good design reduces the number of problems over the lifetime of the process.
Changes to business processes, resulting from changes in the context that a
business operates in are a current research area. A Business Process Management
Software, ideally, is used to design, model, implement, monitor and optimize
human to human, human to system, and system to system workflows which makes
evolution of business processes more smooth and close to the regulatory, market,
competitive and conformance challenges faced by businesses.
Process Modeling
Process Modeling encompasses taking the process design and introducing different
cost, resource, and other constraint scenarios to determine how the process
will operate under different circumstances.
It also involves running "what-if analysis" on the processes like what if I have
75% of resources to do the same task? or what if I want to optimize my
process so I can do the same job in 80% of the original cost?
A real world analogy can be "wind-tunnel" test of an aeroplane or test flights
to determine how much fuel it will consume and how many passengers it can
carry.
Process Execution
The traditional way to automate processes is to develop or purchase an
application that executes the required steps of the process. However, in
practice, these applications rarely execute all the steps of the process
accurately or completely.
Another approach is to use a federation of software and human intervention. Due
to the complexity of the federated approach, documenting a process is difficult.
This makes changing or improving the process difficult.
As a response to these problems, software has been developed that enables the
full business process (as developed in the process design activity) to be
defined in a computer language which can be directly executed by the computer.
The system will either use services in connected applications to perform
business operations (e.g. calculating a repayment plan for a loan) or, when a
step is too complex to automate, will message a human requesting input. Compared
to either of the previous approaches, directly executing a process definition is
much more straightforward and therefore easier to improve. However, automating a
process definition requires flexible and comprehensive infrastructure which
typically rules out implementing these systems in a legacy IT environment.
The commercial BPM software market has focused on graphical process model
development, rather than text-language based process models, as a means to
reduce
the complexity of model development. Visual programming using graphical
metaphors has increased productivity in a number of areas of computing and is
well
accepted by users.
Business rules have been used by systems to provide definitions for governing
behavior, and a business rule engine can be used to drive process execution
and resolution.
Process Monitoring
This monitoring encompasses the tracking of individual processes so that
information on their state can be easily seen and the provision of statistics on
the performance of one or more processes. An example of the tracking is being
able to determine the state of a customer order (e.g. ordered arrived, awaiting
delivery, invoice paid) so that problems in its operation can be identified and
corrected. In addition, this information can be used to work with customers
and suppliers to improve their connected processes. Examples of the statistics
are the generation of measures on how quickly a customer order is processed,
how many orders were processed in the last month etc.. These measures tend to
fit into three categories: cycle time, defect rate and productivity.
The degree of monitoring depends on what information the business wants to
evaluate and analyze and how business wants it to be monitored, in real-time
or ad-hoc. Here, business activity monitoring
(BAM) extend and expand the monitoring tools in BPMS.
Process mining is a collection of methods and tools related to process
monitoring. The aim of process mining is to analyze event logs extracted through
process monitoring and to compare them with an 'a priori' process model. Process
mining allows process analysts to detect discrepancies between the actual
process execution and the a priori model as well as to analyze bottlenecks.
Process Optimization
Process optimization includes retrieving process performance information from
modeling or monitoring phase and identifying the potential or actual bottlenecks
and potential rooms for cost savings or other improvements and then applying
those enhancements in the design of the process thus continuing the value
cycle of business process management.
Future developments
Although the initial focus of BPM was on the automation of mechanistic business
processes, this has since been extended to integrate human-driven processes
in which human interaction takes place in series or parallel with the
mechanistic processes. A common form is where individual steps in the business
process
which require human intuition or judgment to be performed are assigned to the
appropriate members of an organization (as with workflow
systems). More advanced forms are in supporting the complex interaction between
human workers in performing a workgroup task. In this case many people
and system interact in structured, ad-hoc, and sometimes completely dynamic ways
to complete one to many transactions. The BPM software supports and monitors
these processes as well as permits their ongoing redefinition at runtime.
BPMS can be used to understand organizations through expanded views that would
not otherwise be available to organize and present. These views include the
relationships of processes to each other which, when included in the process
model, provide for advanced reporting and analysis that would not otherwise
be available. BPM is regarded to be the crucial backbone of enterprise content
management.
Not all activities can be effectively modeled and some processes are best left
alone. The value in BPMS is not in automating very simple or very complex
tasks, it is in modeling processes where there is the most opportunity.
Business process management in practice
In practice, organizations often start a BPM project or program with the
objective to optimize an area which has been identified as an area for
improvement.
The current practice is to start by undertaking a
business process mapping
(or Business process modeling
) phase using a technique/notation such as
IDEF, BPWIN, Event-driven Process Chains
or BPMN.
A new trend is BISL in combination with ASL and ITIL.
I hope to hear from you.
It is hard to find fellow blind listers with the same profile.
Greetings,
Peter op 't Hof.
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