About Outside-In, BPM and EA

Just an opinion about the “outside-in” because of the recent debates in the BPM blogsphere, e.g. http://process-cafe.blogspot.com/2010/11/great-outside-in-debate.html

I found the Steve’s training course rather good and I consider outside-in (OI) as a good process optimization technique. 6 Sigma optimizes process to reduce number of errors within the process; OI optimizes the process from the customer’s participation perspective.

To be able to use OI, it is necessary to make in your BPM practice a customer as the EXPLICIT PARTICIPANT of the process – please, allocate a pool for this role (as Thomas shown in his great presentation -- http://taraneon.de/blog/2009/10/01/let-coffee-be-your-guide-to-process-experience/). My example is the submission interface pattern -- http://www.slideshare.net/samarin/process-practical-patterns-si (download it first to play the animation).

You don’t see a customer (end-user who pays our salaries) in your process? Do not worry! Exploit your enterprise architecture to find out all RELATIONSHIPs between your processes, roles and other artefacts and make them (relationships) EXPLICT thus trace a way from “a nail the shoe was lost” to “a battle the kingdom was lost”.

Thanks,
AS