Since we have established the importance of BPM towards EA, it would now be appropriate to discuss how we would drive EA with BPM. If you recall from our previous article on “Why to drive EA with BPM”, the key differentiator between a conventional EA initiative and a BPM driven EA initiative is the fact that BPM driven EA initiatives to transform your EA initiative from being a static snapshot of your organizational framework to a transformative and informative live representation of the current architectural blueprint of your enterprise. That being said, how then would we go about establishing BPM that would allow us to drive an EA initiative in perpetuity.

At the initiation of a BPM driven EA initiative, it would be important to first define the standards, methods, and conventions for a process design. This means defining the types of models and objects that you would like to use when designing the process. This definition is not just limited to the tasks to be performed but also the support people (such as the RACI), inputs and outputs (in terms of data or information required), and technologies (such as systems and documents) in place. This is usually defined by the process analysts who are in charge of designing and analyzing the business processes for improvement potential.

It is important to note here that for BPM driven EA initiatives, the respective architects (Business, Data, and Application Architects) should also be involved in this standardization exercise as they would also need to determine the additional details or attributes that should be defined for each of their respective artefacts, such as contact information for persons, data details for data sets, application owners and support teams for various applications et. Cetera. The rule of thumb for what attributes to define for each artefact type is determined by the reports that the Architects would like to extract, with the exception of the relationships between different artefacts which would be defined by the logical sequence of tasks that incidentally also prescribes the manner of interaction between different artefacts. These standards, methods, and conventions establish a uniform and communalized language in which a process is being described and sets a checklist of all the artefacts that should be collected when defining how work should be performed.

Once this standard has been established, the process analysts would then start going about collating the required process flow and the respective details revolving around each task. This is the stage where the architects would also participate in the collation of their respective architectural artefacts (including the organizational objects, the data objects, and the system objects). Any information that is deemed missing would be gathered either directly from the stakeholders or any other reference points such as CMDBs (Configuration Management Databases). The main objective to note here is to ensure that the entirety of the architecture is derived from the business processes to ensure the most relevant and reflective logical state of utilization of all the artefacts and thereto the architectures.

With the derivative architectures being drawn up, Enterprise Architects will then need to conduct one final step to determine if the list of all available artefacts (i.e. the physical state of people, data, and systems) are in sync with the derived state (i.e. the logical state). This is where the all-important question of “Which resources are important?” is brought to light and answered. If there exists a gap between the logical and physical architectures, then it would be both the architects’ and the analysts’ jobs to mitigate the gaps, either by updating missing artefacts in the logical architecture and defining its utilization or by highlighting the physical artefacts as redundant or unused to be earmarked for sunset. Regardless, the final state of the derivative architectures must be in perfect synchronicity with the logical sequence of the business processes.

Once this synchronous architecture of both logical and physical designs is founded, reports can then be created to automatically determine the physical relationships between the various artefacts of the enterprise, be it between people and process or process and technology or people and technology, et cetera, by virtue that how people, process and technologies interact are all defined by the logical sequencing of their utilization from one task to another in the business process. Impact analysis for any changes required of any artefact can also be quickly collated across the entirety of the process architecture to determine the effects of the change. Most importantly, as process monitoring mechanisms can be easily put in place to continuously audit the process performances, we would also be able to derive live states of how the physical artefacts and thereto the architectures are performing. In essence, our derivative architectures would now be living reflections of how all artefacts prescribed by the business processes are behaving.

All in all, BPM driven EA initiatives target to harmonize the logical and physical designs of Enterprise Architectures albeit in a derivative manner, resulting in a methodology that establishes not just a consistent and standardized way of defining Enterprise Architectures but a sustainable and scalable technique for maintaining Enterprise Architectures as the organization evolves.

Before we can even begin to discuss the why and how to drive Enterprise Architecture (EA) with BPM (Business Process Management), we need to first define what EA is and how it is useful for an organization.

In short, EA is a conceptual blueprint describing the structure and operations of an organization. Elaborating on this slightly more, this conceptual blueprint describes how various enterprise components, be it people, process, data, or technology are organized logically and physically throughout the organization and how they are inter-related, for example, how a person is involved in certain tasks in a process or how certain technologies are being utilized when carrying out a certain task, et cetera.

There are a lot of frameworks and methodologies supporting EA to provide a standard for the classification and taxonomy of people, processes, and technologies. Amongst the most popular are the Zachman framework, FEAF (Federal Enterprise Architecture Framework), DoDAF (Department of Defence Architecture Framework), and TOGAF (The Open Group Architecture Framework), all of which center on architectural descriptions across people, processes, and technologies. Insofar as provisioning tangible value to an organization apart from being a taxonomy for enterprise artifacts, EA is often geared solely toward justifying IT investments. The strength of EA is the ability to provide an in-depth impact assessment for change, which is usually why most view EA purely from the light of reconciling a system change. However, significant time and effort usually need to invest in order to create the mapping of enterprise artifacts, such as defining which process ties in to which person, which system is used by which process, which person has access to which system, et cetera. Maintaining the currency of these relationships is yet another challenge, without which the architectural blueprint would rapidly descend to becoming a white elephant.

This is where BPM plays the most significant role. Due to the abundance of process monitoring and process mining technologies, the ability to maintain a process framework is usually the most effective and efficient. If we can simplify our taxonomy of EA to people, processes, data, and systems, we find that almost all of this information can be quickly retrieved if we can monitor or mine our daily processes.

Simply put, BPM describes each task by defining the action, the actor, the input information required, the output to be generated along with the medium or system upon which the action is performed. This is the value that any process monitoring or process mining tool adds simply because they can gather and record these information sets for each transaction made in real-time. Under the granularity at which the process information is being captured, BPM can act as the natural stepping stone towards EA since in essence, to build up the architectural blueprint of any organization simply means collating the granular details of each transaction to establish the inter-dependencies and thereto the relationships between people, process, data and systems (i.e. the bedrock to any EA framework).

More importantly, because the effort to configure a process monitoring or process mining tool is usually one-off, the future maintenance of the monitoring or mining system would be greatly reduced, directly implying that if the architectural blueprint is a derivative of BPM, it too will be automatically maintained and updated in a timely and accurate fashion. This transforms EA from being just a snapshot of the enterprise’s architectural framework to becoming a living blueprint representative of the actual activities being performed at any moment over the lifecycle of the organization. This transition from static to transformative allows EA practitioners and consumers alike to improve the reliability of their analysis and assessments of any change proposed.

That being said, it is important to note here that process monitoring and mining prescribed by BPM are most effective for people, processes, data, and systems. Other artifacts such as strategy and vision tie-ins along with manual taskings where the medium of data exchange is through physical manual documents or interactions are still not mineable so these gaps would still need to be mitigated by specifying and maintaining the relationships manually. Nonetheless, with the continued push towards digitalization of operations, manual activities and actions would soon become a thing of the past and increasing the value of process monitoring and mining as the go-to solution toward a sustainable EA blueprint.

Throughout the past topics that we have been discussing, from Fueling Growth and Driving Work Live Balance to Size, not Mattering and imposing the Sticks and Carrots that can be driven from BPM (Business Process Management) and BPX (Business Process Excellence), we have focused on Why you would want to Achieve BPM in your organizations. In today’s topic, I will discuss further how we can go about achieving BPM.

As would any other new initiative within an organization, the most important step to ensuring that BPM is a success is the unwavering support of top management in its embedment. This is realized through a clear vision and strategy that will need to be set by top management, albeit for increased productivity, better cost savings, improved governance, effectiveness in re-organizations, or simply better clarity and transparency upon the going-ons within and across the various divisions and departments of the organization. Once this vision and strategy are set, a time limit needs to be placed on when this vision and strategy need to be realized. With the time limit being set, expectations on performance improvements in the Targeted Operating Model will need to be defined clearly and in measurable terms, the simplest of which being in the form of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). It is always imperative to ensure that KPIs are defined in the simplest of terms and their metrics defined in their absolute.

With management’s vision and strategy defined in realizable terms of KPIs, the scope of inculcating BPM in an organization will need to be identified. This scope will need to include the trifecta of people, processes, and technologies being impacted. Inevitably, people would require the most attention to managing the change as BPM embedment requires deep acculturation of each person to align their behavior and attitude towards the new BPM discipline. Because people would require the longest time to inculcate the BPM discipline, it is logical to first ensure that the processes and technologies are being tackled first to ensure that all the required support and guidance systems are in place for the individual to learn and practice BPM. Support processes for BPM usually include a well-defined process governance process describing who are the process owners, what type of changes can be made to a process, and the overall flow of how a process change would include and who would be involved. Support systems for BPM would usually include a flexible and inclusive tool that allows processes to be published and shared. More importantly, it would need to be a collaborative tool that allows viewers and subscribers to raise comments and suggestions that can easily be responded to and when a change is warranted, would allow the appropriate actors to make and version the changes in a robust workflow. With these tools and systems in place, it would help to foster a more confident environment for people to trust that the processes being published are the single source of truth with the timeliest updates on who, what, where, when, and how activities are to be performed throughout the organization.

Finally, to ensure that the embedment of BPM is truly a success and the intended results due are achieved, the goals achieved by BPM will need to be constantly monitored in real-time and publicized, not just to top management but to all who are involved. Not only does this allow top management to have real-time insights into the return on investments on BPM, but it allows all employees to both bask in the successes achieved by BPM and also study collaboratively on lessons learned where BPM has fallen short. This allows all parties, from top management to the working level to work cohesively to ensure the success of BPM is achieved. Most importantly, having real-time insights into the successes and failures of BPM allows organizations to adjust their methodologies of employing BPM in a much more judicious manner by strengthening factors contributing to successes in BPM and abridging factors hindering the progress of BPM. Traditionally, such monitoring would come in the form of program audits which fact check the successes and failures of the BPM program but nowadays, process monitoring mechanisms and tools are much more available and capable, and enabling real-time monitoring of processes and KPI achievements is no longer a want but a need.

As a final closing note, it would be important to affirm that BPM is not a cure-all pill. It simply underlies the most fundamental foundations upon which organizations are being built, vis-à-vis the people, processes, and technologies. Employing BPM would therefore be central to any initiatives that the organization seeks to realize. Ensuring that change is managed at the most elemental levels of operations safeguards the effectiveness and efficiency of any change.

Business Process Management (BPM) is a discipline that employs various methods and mechanics to discover, design, analyze, execute, measure, monitor, and optimize the operational activities underlying an organization. The goal of this discipline, according to the BPM Institute, focuses on achieving three main outcomes:

(1) Clarity in an organization’s strategic direction wherein the idealism held in top management’s vision and mission statement for the organization is transformed into tangible goals and objectives measured by well-defined KPIs and realized through the daily processes of the organization’s operations. In short, this implies aligning the organization’s strategy to the entirety of the execution of this strategy in its operations.

This comes to become extremely useful when the market in which the organization operates is in constant flux and requires constant changes and adaptations to suit the market’s and customer’s needs. However, the inertia of a change in a strategic direction is due directly to the wide implication of such a change and as we all know, change is difficult especially if the reality of such a change in strategy is not being communicated in its impact on the daily operations of the organization.

This is where BPM will bridge the gap by taking the minutia of a strategic change and developing it as an impact statement on the day-to-day activities of the company. This is done through the direct correlation between KPIs and activities and the metrics upon which these KPIs are measured. By understanding the impact of change in the KPIs, we will be able to directly allocate this change to the specific activities that are being impacted and therefore determine the gaps in operations that need to be abridged due to the change in strategy.

(2) Alignment of the organization’s resources wherein resource assignments and utilization are optimized based on the required capabilities and capacities to maximize efficiency, efficacy, and productivity of the operations. BPM thereby ensures that any allocation of resources to a specific task of a specific process can carry out the task to the best of the resources’ abilities. Such resources are not just limited to human resources but also include any systems, equipment, or applications that are brought to their fruition in the carrying out of the assigned task.

BPM does this assignment in a very clear and concise manner by ensuring that during the design of the process that all these contributing resources, human or otherwise, are specified at each task level. However, to truly ensure the resources are utilized to their optimal capacity, it would be important to then determine and define performance attributes for each of the resources assigned to the task. More importantly, the metrics upon which each performance is to be measured are also clearly defined and defined tangibly. When these are all put in place can we then be able to monitor and measure the efficacy and effectiveness of each resource employed in the process to derive not just the performance of each resource but the overall performance of the process that has been designed.

(3) Increased discipline in the organization’s daily operations wherein the roles responsible for each activity are documented and communicated and all the actors of this operating system can understand, appreciate, and collaborate with full clarity of their counterparts’ dependencies on them being able to perform their role and jobs correctly and effectively. This is where having a proper discipline in BPM shines as all processes defined and designed are made available for all employees to access and learn, making transparent the job scope for not just each individual but all actors that are required to work in tandem for the end-to-end process to be completed successfully.

This especially rings true when each resources’ performance at each task is tied intricately to the processes that have been designed, making transparent that each employee should follow a certain prescribed method of working to produce the intended results that their subsequent peers would require to do their work effectively.

In conclusion, we practise BPM because it transcends idealism to reality. With BPM we can better align our business functions with customer needs, and help executives determine how to deploy, monitor, and measure company resources. When properly executed, BPM can enhance efficiency and productivity, reduce costs, and minimize errors and risk – thereby optimizing results.

Carrot and stick methods have been synonymous with behavioral science. In essence, the reward for good behavior and punishment for bad behavior has been core to the mantra of teaching and training. We use it to inculcate our societal norms and behaviors in our children to ensure that they become contributing members of society, to train our pets to ensure that they adhere to the social do’s and don’ts and to teach our peers to ensure that they can embody preferable practices and competence.

Creating the right carrot and stick to motivate changes in behavior is often the biggest challenge for any organization. Carrots and sticks in organizations are usually formulated via KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) upon which their staff would be appraised. Perform well and the rewards will be great, make a mistake and the punishment will be proportional to the deviance. Insofar as clearly defining what is good and what is bad and the metrics upon which those should be measured, it is the go-to method for any management team in managing their staff.

Likewise, in the discipline of BPX (Business Process Excellence), its practice also requires acculturation within the organization, not just at its inception but also during its embedment within the organization’s culture to ensure continuous improvement and innovation.

Just as in any atypical culture that management would like to embed, the very first step would be to set a goal. In the context of BPX, goals set by top management should then be aligned with the objectives of BPX, vis-à-vis continuous improvements, and innovations that ultimately result in increased productivity, improved cost-effectiveness, better governance, wider market share, etc. For example, if top management’s goal is to increase productivity, then an objective of BPX may potentially be to analyze PCE (process cycle efficiency) to reduce the amount of time spent end to end to generate an output, thereby reducing the throughput time and advertently resulting in greater output over the same period.

Once such a goal has been set, it would be important to spell out the potential carrots (i.e., rewards) associated with the achievement of such a goal. More importantly, would be to ensure that the carrots are attuned to the performance that we are trying to motivate. Monetary rewards, in the form of salary increments, bonuses, profit sharing, commissions, etc. are usually the common motivators. However, we as management should also look at other aspects of carrots that are more aligned with the individual’s needs such as his career growth in the form of a promotion, his individual upskilling in the form of sponsored professional certifications, or perhaps even company-sponsored childcare or family vacations are all other potential forms of carrots that could be used to motivate an individual to strive towards a better adoption of a new culture.

Once the goals and rewards have been defined, it would be important to define the metrics upon which the attainment of such goals is being achieved. Such metrics should be uniformly employed across all employees of the company to maintain a fair and just reward system. The parameters upon which the metrics are measured should also be tangible where little is left to personal judgment and bias. Outputs, time, cost factors, customer base, even achieving required certifications, etc. are all tangible factors that we can use as parameters to attribute each individual’s performance. In determining the most suitable parameters, it may be better to follow the mantra where the “Ends justify the means”.

Lastly, with this well-defined reward system for adopting BPX, it would be important for us to not forget to embed potential sticks (i.e., penalties) for not achieving a bare minimum requirement of BPX. Such penalties could stretch from having a cap embedded on all bonuses until the employee performs up to standard to even having shown cause letters produced by the employees explaining why they were not able to achieve the set expectations on the BPX culture. In the instance of organizations that flourish based on innovations and continuous improvements, penalties incurred could even cost an employee his career.

That being said, at the onset of any cultural changes as in the case of BPX, I would highly recommend a carrot over stick approach. Providing more incentives to adopt a new culture and a new way of working would usually ease the transition until the culture is more widely adopted and embedded should sticks be used. Cultural change takes time, encouragement, and most of all constant support and nurturing.