Iceberg of processes within an enterprise

Processes within an enterprise are not equally visible.

• document-centric processes
• human-centric processes
• core-business processes
• supporting processes
• lead processes (standing governance, management, monitoring)
• life-cycle processes ( http://improving-bpm-systems.blogspot.ch/2013/11/practical-process-patterns-lifecycle-as.html ) for ALL enterprise assets and resources
• customer-experience processes ( http://improving-bpm-systems.blogspot.ch/2013/06/practical-process-patterns-cxaap.html )
• policies ( http://improving-bpm-systems.blogspot.ch/2014/07/practical-process-patterns-laap.html )
• projects ( http://improving-bpm-systems.blogspot.ch/2014/01/is-project-management-bpm-application.html )

All together should be a system-of-processes ( http://improving-bpm-systems.blogspot.ch/2014/03/enterprise-as-system-of-processes.html ).

Thanks,
AS

Practical Process Patterns: Customer eXperience As A Process (CXAAP)

Another practical process pattern - Customer eXperience As A Process (CXAAP)

This blogpost is inspired by the sentence "The reason customers use our products and services, is to get jobs done in their lives." from http://bridging-the-gap.me/2013/06/03/designing-the-business-around-the-experience/

This sentence made me thinking about a hierarchy of embedded (in some sense) processes: 
"person's life-as-a-process", 
"person's situation-as-a-process" (e.g. expecting a baby), and 
"person's job-as-a-process" (e.g. buying a bigger car for bigger family).  

Note that I define process (noun) as explicitly-defined coordination of services and/or activities to produce a particular result (see http://improving-bpm-systems.blogspot.com/2013/03/bizarch-artefacts-definition-again.html for more details). Thus the process is not only a predefined order of activities which is repeated many types. There are other variations of process as shown in see http://improving-bpm-systems.blogspot.com/2010/12/illustrations-for-bpm-acm-case.html .

For example, buying any car requires some planning, visiting car dealers, taking a credit, etc.  - a normal process which is unique in each case, but is constructed from some, mainly decision, process patterns (I must write a blogpost about those decision patterns).

Customer-experience-as-a-process - a person who is buying a car acts as a customer for a car dealer. This is a normal selection, trying and negotiation process among two roles. Each role has its own process (or own BPMN pool) and both processes are working together as co-processes. An excellent example http://www.slideshare.net/Olbrich/process-experience-the-coffee-example-2103831 shows what is important to measure in such case.

If your products and services fit better into those processes (i.e. reduce the hassle for a customer) then they will be more attractive for customers.  Potentially, all four mentioned above processes should be taken into account to improve the customer experience.  Then the customer will consider your service again.

IMPORTANT: Ask right questions. For example, a civil architect will ask a customer "Do your parents visit?" "How many kids do you want?" "How long do you want to stay in this place?" and then the architect works with the customer to find the best design that meets the customer needs.

Product-as-a-process (it has the life-cycle) and service-as-a-process are designed, delivered and evolved to fit those four mentioned above processes.

Business-as-a-process or enterprise-as-a-process are taking care to organizing the that design, delivery and evolution.

Unit-of-work-as-a-process is a typical decomposition of "normal" business processes.

Resource-as-a-process - each resource has its own life-cycle; for example a document or business object (BO) as shown below (slide #15 from http://improving-bpm-systems.blogspot.com/2013/04/addressing-security-concerns-through-bpm.html).

Processes must be made explicit and executable to employ the power of processes. An enterprise can do this with its own processes. Person's and customer's processes are still implicit (although they may use some explicit process patterns). Nevertheless, an enterprise should anticipate and maybe model those implicit processes to see how enterprise internal processes fit those external processes (sounds like some variations from  http://improving-bpm-systems.blogspot.com/2010/12/illustrations-for-bpm-acm-case.html maybe useful).


A related post https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/understand-customer-lifecycle-create-impact-melvin-brand-flu

Thanks,
AS

Integration via #BPM: become friendly to #cloud

This post was inspired by article "Cloud-Friendly BPM: the power of hypermedia-oriented architecture" from ZApThink available at http://www.zapthink.com/2013/05/21/cloud-friendly-bpm-the-power-of-hypermedia-oriented-architecture/ and, also "BPM and middleware vendors failing to adapt to the cloud – IDC" http://www.information-age.com/technology/cloud-and-virtualisation/123457063/bpm-and-middleware-vendors-failing-to-adapt-to-the-cloud-------idc?goback=%2Egde_36604_member_245840070

Integration via #BPM: become friendly to #cloud from Alexander Samarin

Thanks,
AS

LinkedIn: Does process need to be Re-Branded?

<question group="Business Process Improvement">
Does process need to be Re-Branded?
For those in the BPI/BPM space, the reason that process is in the middle of People, Process and Technology is not just because it sounds better. Process is the meat of the People and Technology sandwich. People and Technology can be very efficient, add a so-so process and you can get greater efficiency.

However, transform the process to drive the business model and you change an efficient process to an effective one.

So after all these years of Six Sigma, Lean, TQM and others why is process management not a top executive level activity.

Is the reason that process and process management have a negative reputation? Say the word process and do you hear response phrases like 'red tape', 'get in the way', 'stifles innovation and creativity' and 'process gets in the way'?

If this is the case, than is it time that we re-brand process.

Seeking your thoughts for or against and if for, ideas on how to re-brand.

</question>

I also noticed that “process management have a negative reputation” but I am not sure that just re-branding will help. I start from education.
(repeating from another discussion) We observed that architecting/implementing BPM systems requires a lot of communication with practically everyone within the enterprise and everyone should be treated as a stakeholder of the BPM system.

Each group of stakeholder has different views, different concerns and different understandings of the BPM system. Those groups are:
• top managers
• business managers
• process owners
• super-users
• users
• project managers
• business analysts
• IT managers
• IT architects
• IT developers
• IT operators

It is mandatory to explain to each stakeholder (not just CxO) how their concerns will be addressed and how their current working practices will be changed for the better. If all subordinates are happy with a new tool, i.e. the BPM system, then CxO has "no choice".
As a first step, I think, this requires “BPM reference model” which can bring a commonly agreed terminology and improve understanding. Certainly, such a model should not come from a vendors-dominated group, but from a customer-advocates group. Does such a group exist?

Thanks,
AS