Businesses expect IT management to demonstrate their contributions to end-user benefits and the bottom line while addressing immediate needs and long-term performance management goals. This white paper presents IT2020, a new performance management paradigm for meeting both of these expectations.
BPM: The Intelligent Assembly Line
A WHITE PAPER
An Introduction to Business Process Management and WorkflowBPM: The Intelligent Assembly Line
Executive SummarythIn the early 20 century, Henry Ford revolution- Though we are well into the Information Age,
ized manufacturing when he installed the first knowledge workers can still be found using pro-
moving assembly line at his automotive plant cesses and procedures designed decades ago to
near Detroit, Michigan. However, the assembly produce a physical product, service, or transaction.
line concept had existed for centuries. From the Predominantly manual and labor-intensive, most Chinese Terracotta Army, assembled in 210 BCE, of these processes are based on paper information to sewing machine and bicycle manufacturing in access, isolated applications with limited data, and the mid 1800s, the modern assembly line was the wholly discrete outcomes. These conditions are hardly culmination of wildly divergent experiments with relevant to business processes in the Information Age. interchangeability, creativity, innovation and logic- Whether tasked with delivering value to the internal spurred by technological changes and applied to organization or to the customer, knowledge workers improve production for competitive advantage. are saddled with inefficiencies and obsolete precon-
Assembly lines addressed only the mechanics of ceptions that seriously diminish their productivity
processes. Without assessing the value of the overall and compromise their company's ability to compete.
process, the structure of the workflows that com- The principles of BPM still apply. In fact, given today's posed the process, or the productivity of the people challenging economic environment, BPM is more rel-involved, the benefits of assembly lines were limited evant than ever. The difference lies not in the practice, to technical improvements. In 1911, The Principles but in the premise. Today's work product is most likely of Scientific Management (also called Taylorism or to be digital, content-driven, and multi-threaded. the Taylor system) began to address the value of Value, efficiency, and effectiveness are measured in processes by analyzing and integrating workflows minutes and seconds rather than in hours and days. with the objective of improving labor productivity. As maximizing productivity and efficiently using Taylorism targeted efficiency improvements by human and technology resources become eliminating unnecessary steps and actions and increasingly vital to corporate survival, BPM as replaced processes based on rules of thumb with a concept, a practice, and now a set of enabling precise procedures developed through methodical technologies, offers transformative opportuni-review. In short, the concept of reinventing pro- ties to modernize and automate aging processes. duction, processes, workflow, and job descrip- Technology is the key to this transformation. Just tions through analytical methods supported by as technology enabled "Taylorism" in the Indus-available technology (e.g., stable electrical power, trial Age, it enables BPM for the Information Age.accurate machining tools, power-driven con-veyers) existed long before the phrase "business One of the core technologies that support BPM is process management" (BPM) was ever invented. the orchestration, or workflow management, engine. This paper discusses several areas that benefit from Similar to the Industrial Age of the last century, the BPM and workflow engines, and describes how to Information Age has necessitated a new business realize those benefits. Peter Drucker once said"Effi-stprocess paradigm for the 21 century. Rather than ciency is doing things right; effectiveness is doing optimizing the physical labor needed to produce the right things." Together, BPM and workflow enable goods, modern organizations must find ways to opti- companies to do the right things in the right ways. mize the services provided by knowledge workers.
1The Basics of BPM constructed to begin with will only lead to faster and more automated inefficiency-which is not the goal of BPM. Neither is it Regardless of economic environment, enterprises in both the a valuable application of supporting technologies like workflow. public and private sectors must work efficiently, marshalling and BPM involves more than isolated automation of m... [download for more]
