|
Leading IT groups are recognizing that they also need to deploy Business Process Management (BPM) technology and practices to enable process improvement. They recognize that enabling their business teams with BPM will give their company a competitive advantage in driving process improvement. This competitive advantage is realized through self-sufficiency in process discovery, better prioritization and requirements of requests to technical teams, a more efficient environment for collaboration and the ability to drive requirements down into the SOA layer. In this paper, we will discuss these benefits in more detail and show how leading companies have recognized that implementing BPM and SOA together gives them unique capabilities. However, before reviewing the benefits, it is important to understand what a combined BPM and SOA architecture looks like at a high level. It is this combined architecture that will enable business process improvement.
A Business Oriented Architecture
Consider this typical process improvement example from a leading group life and health insurer. With projected revenue growth of over 50% in the coming years, this insurer decided that it needed to improve its core business processes to support high revenue growth with low staffing growth. One of the most labor-intensive processes was reconciling disputed charges on monthly invoices. In determining how to improve the process, business and technical teams had many questions to answer: What is the process today? What are the target performance objectives for the improved process? Who performs which activities? Where are the bottlenecks in the process? What changes to the process will drive better efficiency? What visibility and controls do the business managers need when managing the running process? What information is required from existing systems? What business events affect this invoice dispute process? What information does the process need to write to existing transactional systems? All of these questions had to be answered to deliver the solution. This insurer combined BPM with their SOA to deliver a combined architecture for driving process improvement. Figure 1 provides a simple functional architecture of what this business oriented architecture looks like.
The red, IT-facing components in Figure 1 are familiar elements of a SOA picture. SOA provides IT groups with an architecture that allows rationalizing of data across multiple stores. Similarly, with consolidation a major source of cost-reduction, SOA provides a model for abstracting out system-specific calls. These "services," then, are really better ways to expose and govern the hard-core IT assets so that they can be more easily consumed and therefore more easily re-used. Building access to data and systems in this way also means that consolidating and changing specific underlying data structures and engines is not only easier now, but in the future, too. SOA, then, provides a strong technical basis for process improvement. It also provides the tools that technical teams will use to build out the services that implement a business process.
However, at this point, technical teams need the input from their business counterparts about which events matter, who uses the specific business services and when. In short, how these services are organized and consumed to drive process improvement is not defined here in the red layer. That work is done in the blue, business-facing layer we will discuss next.
The blue, business-facing layer is where you will find the core functions delivered by BPM. It is here that the questions of how to improve the process itself are answered. The tools in this layer must be designed for business users as those are the people that answer what must be done to improve the process. Furthermore, these tools must allow business users to move directly and seamlessly from the design of a process to the active management of that process and finally to the analysis that leads to the next round of process optimization. The best BPM tools allow business teams to transition between analysis, design and management without ever losing the process context. Properly enabled, a business team can access to real-time process performance information, directly manage process instances, define goals and simulations, and run those simulations using against production data to discover new opportunities for improvement.
|
