Organizations are represented by their processes that engage
customers, employees, partners, stakeholders and the community they operate in
on a regular basis. These processes represent the organizations face to each of
these constituents. Processes have proven to help organizations operate
efficiently at a lower cost, raise revenue in competitive markets and deliver
innovation with the collaboration business visionaries. Needless to say
processes and the cases they operate on have a great contribution to desirable
organizational outcomes. It is important to understand your current processes,
at a minimum, to make sure they optimize results. At a maximum, target
processes plus transitional plans to get to the target processes for
differentiating organizations should be mapped with along with incremental
improvements along the way. This is why business process discovery is so important. The confusing part about process discovery is that, today there are two kinds of process discovery. Like the Roman God Janus, there are two faces to it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janus
Process Discovery; Modeling a New Design:
When trying to create better operations and better flows to
support those operations, much vision must be exchanged. Process flows have to
created and updated. Some organizations like to start with a blank sheet of
paper and throw business visionaries at the task to create innovative operations.
Others take a core process and expand and tweak it to create an incremental
improvement for better operations. In either case the sharing of the core
innovation or core process far and wide helps deliver a better result overall.
Process discovery through modeling and analysis helps here as many individuals can be economically added
to the collaboration pool in creating the new flows. This discipline of sharing
the core idea or flow and all the additions over time help the acceptance of
the new and changed processes. BPA technologies add significant value to the
definitional efforts.
Process Discovery; Mapping Reality:
Quite often organizations think they understand their
existing flows because everybody knows their own job well and feels that others
should as well. In reality, when a combined process flow is created from real life measurements, acquired by instrumentation probes, across job
roles, organizational boundaries and even outside the base organization, the
process map tends to point out problems that only appear when you put the big
picture together. There ends up being significant benefit to creating a current
flow usually revolving around removing unnecessary or old task steps. Quite
often, role and goal conflicts can be discussed and resolved to the
satisfaction of all parties. These benefits usually come from removing
unnecessary work and the benefits can be quite large in large scoped end to end
processes such as supply chains and value chains. Over short period of time process discovery proves that you must inspect better to manage better.
Net; Net:
Over time these distinct approaches will be used together in process efforts thereby driving the need for process vendors to bring the separate technologies together. Right now they are different technology stove pipes for the most part. Process modeling by hand leveraging business process modeling tools and automated business process discovery tools.
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