Faced with a rapidly changing business climate, many organizations are seeking new methods to enable rapid systems development and modifica- tion. The promise of universal connectivity offered by Web services coupled with the promise of technology-neutral systems offered by model- driven development offers a compelling vision of the future of systems design, development, and integration. This not-so-distant future will be process oriented, with systems designed and created by using a process model to direct the interaction of various systems and human actors. These systems will have their functions exposed as services to achieve maximum accessibility. The process engine technology will capture the semantics of the business process at various levels (O’riordan, 2002).
Currently, most organizations use business process automation in discrete areas, primarily as part of their integration environments. Leading organizations will enable process development across organizational boundaries, but most will struggle with the business (rather than technologi- cal) issues associated with these activities. The process model is becoming a standard part of the developer tool kit, and standards-based engines will shortly replace proprietary ones. Many orga- nizations are beginning to make advances toward this future vision, particularly those organizations that are adopting service-oriented architectures. The issue of how to deal with the many challenges of the interim states and advancing this vision incrementally presents a great challenge to the IT organization.
The first roadblock organizations encounter on the path toward business process management is its basic value proposition. Although many projects using BPM tools have shown significant value (in terms of return on investment [ROI]), much of that value comes from the automation of manual processes. These processes, typically those that span organizational boundaries, involve manual touches to information and manual decision making that are not tracked through the formal automation systems embodied in the enterprise applications. The simplest means of creating value in this circumstance is to use process automation to automate these manual processes and their interfaces to enterprise applications and systems (Sharp & Mcdermott, 2001). This is useful since it creates automation for manual tasks and often will significantly reduce the costs and errors in- herent in those tasks. However, the scope of this automation is clearly not the complete process, but only that portion of it that is reflected in these manual steps.
Even in this limited-scope case, there can be significant challenges. The manual processes often are developed to address exceptions and inconsistencies in the formalized processes em- bodied in the enterprise application portfolio. These processes often are either incomplete as implemented, or the business activities have changed yet the process assumptions on which the enterprise systems are based have not. In ei- ther case, one finds a situation where the manual parts of the process often are undefined or do not have clear rules, roles, or responsibilities. They may even contradict logic that is embodied in the formal systems. The BPM exercise will highlight the weaknesses for interaction in the existing model (Ettlinger, 2002). Furthermore, many of the manual parts of the process will retain manual components since they primarily focus on excep- tion handling.
Compounding this issue is the challenge of the ownership and stewardship of business processes. Unless an organization has taken an aggressive, process-oriented view toward its business, there often is a tremendous amount of confusion about process definition and ownership (Adhikari, 2002b). Because the processes whose automation can provide the most value often span functional areas, there are usually no individuals with re- sponsibility for the overall process. Instead, we have functional managers, each with individual responsibility for the subprocess performed by their areas. Effectively automating these pro- cesses requires the creation of new channels of communication as well as new decision processes to enable the organizations involved to reach an agreement on how to handle the processes.
Another issue affecting the achievement of this vision is that Web services are not complete. Although substantial progress is being made re- garding the standards for and interoperability of Web services, the practical use of Web services within corporations is in its early stages (Charfi & Mezini, 2004). The universal connectivity that is required to link a process execution en- gine with the various actors and systems in the environment requires a substantial investment in integration technologies, and the minimal integration among various components in the infrastructure demands a substantial investment in the software platform. There is little doubt that creating business process models, deriving application code from those business models, and monitoring such models can create the right level of organizational linkage between IT and business executives. The problem is that much of this is an afterthought in a world that contains a collection of ERR best in class, and legacy applications that are either not modeled or modeled with multiple tools.
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conclUsion
Business process modeling is quickly becom- ing the central point of organization for many systems. Model-driven development frameworks are quickly becoming the preferred platform for service-oriented architecture, and Web services composite application design, development, and deployment (Smith & Fingar, 2004). Business- user-oriented modeling environments enable businesspeople to model the process as if it were an assembly line of swappable components (tasks) that can be reordered to achieve various results. A business process management suite exposes these components as XML Web services. BPMN will offer a common standard for enterprise process modeling that has the potential to make the model- to-execute vision more viable. Business analysts, process designers, system architects, software engineers, and systems consultants that utilize process modeling should begin their evaluation and adoption of emerging business process man- agement suites that utilize BPMN.
These IT professionals must understand foun- dational BPM concepts as well as the emerging technologies and standards that enable these concepts. With this foundation, they will be able to better assess the importance of business agility, to better perform business process performance analysis, and to model business processes and systems in a manner that expedites development. More than technology, becoming an adaptive organization requires leadership and change management. The cross-boundary characteristic of BPM initiatives creates a unique opportunity for the leaders of the initiatives to become the enterprise change agents.
Corporations are beginning the transformation to a process culture and the implementation of business process management methodologies and technologies (Smith, 2003). The first steps can be problematic and political, even within organiza-
tions that have already committed to transforming to a process culture. Organizations are looking to strategically optimize, automate, and integrate key processes to provide seamless service to more demanding customers in a multichannel world. To do this effectively, systems must be integrated at the process level as well as the data level (Sim- sion, 2000). This environment requires system architects, consultants, analysts, integrators, and developers that have an organizational perspective and a diversified set of skills.
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