Business Process Management
"Business Efficiency; People Productivity; Mobile Workforce." Each
of these concepts are watchwords in today's business world, but
they have in common something much more important: they all hang
on a critical part of doing business: process. Processes run a
business; they are everywhere in a business: front office, back
office, development/manufacturing and delivery of products and
service, staff management, client service, and much more.
Business processes have been in the limelight in the past decade
through Business Process Reengineering (BPR). Today, the lights
are shining on Business Process Management. Whether reengineered
or not, business processes need care and oversite, control and
concern: basic elements of any "management" effort. And
with today's technological advances in BPR, business process management
(BPM) can cover a spectrum of IT intervention from near total human
activity to absolute minimum human activity to complete a task.
For us, BPM is about lowering the costs of doing business, but
more importantly it is about excelling at that activities required
to do business. To paraphrase the advertisement of a major bank,
BPM isn't about doing a process perfectly one million times, it
is doing a process perfectly once and duplicating that one million
times.
We at KM Equity define three areas of approach:
- Process mapping
and simulation - This is the critical task of knowing
your business activities and tasks, and viewing them
in a graphical
representation that demonstrates inputs, outputs, decision
points, and paths of workflow. Certain software tools allow
for basic mapping,
but others allow simulation so that you can test your
processes. Simulations will highlight flaws, bottlenecks, and
potential
areas of automation. And, they may lead to simple redesign
or large-scale
process reengineering. In any case, process mapping is
an invaluable exercise in helping you understand your business
processes
better, and to improve your business processes where possible.
This
is where you start to apply principals that will yield
greater Business Productivity and People Efficiency.
- IT facilitation and automation - So many years
of BPR yielded to the business world a more mature understanding
of generic
business
processes and you are able to apply that knowledge and
experience to facilitate your processes with new technology tools.
Some
technology tools (e.g., Savvion) will allow you to automate
significant portions
of many of your processes. And many tools will allow you
to leverage a variety of platforms (from desktops to handhelds
and
mobile devices)
within your workflows. Of course, many of these processes
might require input from clients, vendors, or other people outside
your organization, and again many tools will help with those
tasks in
new and wonderful ways.
This is where the rubber starts
to hit the road when talking about Business Efficiency, People
Productivity, and the Mobile
Workforce,
and where the concept of duplicating perfect processes
can become reality.
- Process renewal - Assuming process mapping
and automation with new IT tools yield new ways of working, chances
are good your
process workers and managers will discover weaknesses and/or
new ideas
for improvements in your process automation. Focusing on process
renewal, therefore, is an ongoing commitment to monitoring,
reealuating, and refreshing processes: the real "management" in
Business Process Management.
This is where you continuously
strive to wring as much as possible out of Business Efficiency,
People Productivity, and the
Mobile Workforce, and so many other valuable if not overused
catchphrases.
Our experience with process management is founded on our two
core competencies of Taxonomy/Search/Metadata and KM: we
focus on business
processes in creating Taxonomy and KM strategies and tactics.
In other words, we don't deliver Taxonomy and KM solutions
in a vacuum;
rather, we look at business processes as the skeleton on
which hang the meat and muscle of requirements for our clients'
deliverables.
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