Business Process Management (BPM) provides a proven method for analysis and design of business processes that can provide agility and flexibility and improve alignment of business goals with IT systems. However, to achieve these benefits, BPM must be aligned with the overall enterprise. One of the best techniques we have to describe the overall enterprise is with enterprise architecture and the architectural domains of business, information, applications and technology, so let's see how these apply to BPM.
At the highest level, the business architecture should describe the overall goals, strategy, structure, and positioning of the enterprise. With this context in place, it can then describe what products, services and processes are needed to achieve those goals now, and over the next several years. More and more, to support today's products and services, business processes need to cross organizational, product, application, and/or line-of-business boundaries, and BPM can be a useful approach to this.
But before we define the details of specific business processes we need to align the business and the processes with the enterprise's information. The information architecture identifies the fundamental business information and entities which are supported and used by the business processes. And like the processes, the information needs to span many types of boundaries. So, the information architecture must define the semantics of the information that is common and will be shared across business processes.
Now we can begin to model the business processes (with BPMN) as a combination of functions, information, and decisions (rules). The model describes the flow of control and information through the steps of a process, but where do the functions, information, and decisions that contribute to the process come from? That is where the application architecture comes into play. To achieve the agility and flexibility promised by BPM, it has to be supported by an application layer of modular and reusable functions, information, and decisions. The application layer provides relatively stable building blocks (with change on the order of 1 year) that allow dynamic flexibility at the process layer (and enables change on the order of weeks).
In other words, BPM needs a Service Oriented Architecture to expose applications, data, and rules as services that provide modular, enterprise level functions, information and decisions to the business processes. These enterprise level services will conform to the business and information architectures and be part of a sophisticated application layer of services (business, domain, utility, integration, and external) that support the business processes with information and capabilities from existing, new, and SaaS systems.
Last by not least, we must have the appropriate technology platform in place to support BPM and SOA now and into the future. Beyond an ESB or other vendor solution, this also means being well integrated into the enterprise's security architecture, supporting collaboration and other Enterprise 2.0 technologies, and taking advantage of cloud services where appropriate.
There is still one more aspect to consider. The 'M' of BPM, 'Management' allows processes to be measured and monitored for performance. Using the Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) component of BPM suites, processes can be analyzed and reported on thus enabling continual improvements at both the process and organizational level. But what should be measured? Obviously we want to measure the throughput, timing, exception rate, resource utilization, etc of individual process. But that just scratches the surface of opportunity. When we think from an architectural perspective, we want to measure not only if a process is performing well, but whether or not it is achieving what it was meant to at the business level. In other words, we want to tie the business processes to the enterprise objectives, goals, tactics and strategies that they are meant to implement in terms of specific business level KPIs. Finally, integration of BAM into an executive dashboard can provide management with previously unavailable visibility and insight.
So, if your organization is doing or considering BPM, make sure it is aligned and supported by your enterprise architecture. And, take advantage of the opportunities to provide business performance information to management. They'll really appreciate it and you too.