Business Process Management (Part-1 Foundation[Chapter II Evolution of Enterprise Systems Architectures ] ) Sec F -- By Mathias Weske

Organizational Business Processes

The early 1990s saw process orientation as a strong development not only to
capture the activities a company performs, but also to study and improve the
relationships between these activities.
The book Reengineering the Corporation, which was briefly discussed in
Section 1.1, proved instrumental in this development. The general approach
of business process reengineering is a holistic view on an enterprise where
business processes are the main instrument for organizing the operations of
an enterprise. Business process reengineering is based on the understanding that the products and services a company offers to the market are provided
through business processes, and a radical redesign of these processes is the
road to success.
Process orientation is based on a critical analysis of Taylorism as a concept
to organize work, originally introduced by Frederick Taylor to improve industrial
efficiency. This approach uses functional breakdown of complex work to
small granularities, so that a highly specialized work force can efficiently conduct
these work units of small granularity. Taylorism has been very successful
in manufacturing and has, as such, fuelled the industrial revolution in the late
eighteenth and early nineteenth century considerably.
Small-grained activities conducted by highly specialized personnel require
many handovers of work in order to process a given task. In early manufacturing
in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century the products
were typically assembled in a few steps only, so that handovers of work did
not introduce delays. In addition, the task were of a rather simple nature, so
that no context information on previously conducted steps was required for a
particular worker.
Using Taylorism to organize work in modern organizations proved inefficient,
because the steps during a business process are often related to
each other. Context information on the complete case is required during the
process. The handovers of work cause a major problem, since each worker
involved requires knowledge on the overall case. For this reason, the functional
breakdown of work in fine-granular pieces that proved effective in early
manufacturing proves inefficient in modern business organizations that mainly
process information.
From a process perspective, it is instrumental to combining multiple units
of work of small granularity into work units of larger granularity. Thereby, the
handover of work can be reduced. But this approach requires workers to have
broad skills and competencies, i.e., it requires knowledge workers who have a
broad understanding of the ultimate goals of their work.
At an organizational level, process orientation has led to the characterization
of the operations of an enterprise using business processes. While there
are different approaches, they have in common the fact that the top-level business
processes are expressed in an informal way, often even in plain English
text. Also each enterprise should not have more than about a dozen organisational
business processes. These processes are often described by the same
symbols as those used for value systems, but the reader should be aware of
the fact that different levels of abstraction are in place.
The structure of organization-level business process management is shown
in Figure 2.12. The business process management space is influenced by the
business strategy of the enterprise, i.e., by the target markets, by business
strategies opening new opportunities, and, in general, by the overall strategic
goals of the enterprise.
Business process management is based on the resources of an enterprise,
most prominently on the information systems in place. Information systems
enable knowledge workers to perform business process activities in an effective
manner. Information systems also have implications on business processes,
since some business processes might not be possible without appropriate information
system support.
Stakeholders are among the most important influential factors of business
process management. The stakeholder box in the left hand side in Figure 2.12
represents the fact that stakeholders have implications on the organizational
business processes. But business processes also have implications on the stakeholders,
as shown in that figure, too. Stakeholders include external business
partners, customers, and the personnel of the enterprise.
The organizational business processes are influenced by a number of activities
that the company performs: the management, the organization, the controlling,
and the optimization of business processes, as shown in Figure 2.12.
Management and organization include activities for the identification of
business processes, as well as the selection of roles and persons responsible, and
the rollout of the implemented business processes in the enterprise. Setting
up a business process management team and, if desired, installing a Chief
Process Officer in the management of the enterprise are additional activities.
Each business process contributes to one or more business goals. To gain
information on how efficient the business processes are actually conducted
and whether the business goals are actually met by the business processes,
controlling activities are conducted. Key performance indicators of business
processes are determined, for instance technical indicators, such as average
response time and throughput, but also domain-specific aspects, such as, for
instance, reduction of error rate, and cost savings.
Controlling also develops methods to measure key performance indicators
and to actually install them in the operational business processes. Valuable
information on shortcomings of current business processes can be found, which
can be used to continuously improve and optimize them.
Organizational business processes have a large granularity, and they involve
many persons and activities in a company. Therefore, they are typically
described in a textual form, often using a forms-based approach. This means
that individual process activities and their orderings are not addressed. The
elements of these forms include the name of the business process, a person
responsible for it, the objects addressed, the inputs and the results of the process, and the suppliers and customers of the process, both of which are
organizational business processes.