Business Process and IT Systems – A New World Order

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In my last blog From Chaos to Compliance, I explained how an organisation with vision and leadership can put business processes at the heart of the system for management using Barium Live! to stabilise the way of working and increase the chance of a successful improvement initiative. However as I mention in my blog Business Process Management in the 21st Century, this is treading directly into the territory that was the domain of the IT systems department.

Business+ITI think I ought to explain why this is and how the worlds of business process improvement and IT system professionals can be brought together by using Barium Live!.

“Getting by” using a different language
In many medium to large organisations it is the data management systems of a business that drive the behaviour of the employee on their PC or laptop, requiring them to input data and save. For example, the stationary order would not arrive unless the correct procurement form was completed. Sitting behind these systems is usually a fairly rigid work flow that can’t be changed without further time or money being expended with the system provider. Most businesses end up adapting their way of working to suit these work flows rather than spend time and money trying to change the system. This is the domain of the IT systems department.

In the same organisations are the business improvement professionals who are promoting the use of documented and visible processes to design and continually improve work flow to add value to their customers and stakeholders. Up until now the visual process maps of an organisation usually exist a few clicks away on an employee’s PC or laptop. However, the employee does not follow a visual process map to get their stationary delivered, they follow the business rules built in to the hard wired data management system. The visual process maps designed by the business therefore tend to become second class citizens behind the work flow in data management systems. However this is written in a language that business process owners and business improvement professionals don’t understand.

Both the IT systems department and the business improvement professionals are trying their best to run and improve the business but the trouble is that neither are speaking the same language. Although not ideal, this is all very well where internal, standard, non-customer facing processes are concerned. We see organisations select a data management system to drive their internal financial processes and generally the business will have to conform to that way of working regardless of what they might like to do differently and what they would or have mapped out. They get by.

What customers want
However if they took the same approach to the processes that they use to deliver services and products to their customers then organisations would soon start to struggle. Their increasingly sophisticated customers want their processes to be designed to deliver their requirements and they want to see that if those requirements change, then organisations are flexible and agile enough to change whilst maintaining the provision of the high quality product or service that their customers procured in the first place.

However, the continually improving processes designed by the process owners are not the same as the rigid work flow that the system that runs the business supports. If they want to continue to be competitive, organisations can no longer afford to take the same approach as they do with their internal processes. They must find a common language which defines how their business is run and the worlds of business improvement and the IT systems department must come together to deliver the requirements of the customer.

The common language – BPMN on Barium Live!
The common language they should start using is Business Process Modelling Notation (BPMN) and then the two worlds can be brought together in a unique way using Barium Live!. The Barium Live! Map to App functionality provides the process owners the tools to map out the processes that are needed to deliver the requirements of the customer using BPMN and then, without the use of any code, turn them into applications which can be run on the employee’s PC or laptop or mobile device.

If we now have a way of bringing these visible and documented processes to the forefront at the heart of a system of management and putting the mechanism for continual improvement of such systems in the hands of the process owners and business improvement professionals then they are very much treading in the domain of the IT systems department.

However what we have produced is a process model that both process owners and the IT systems department can understand. The role of the process owner now becomes the maintenance and improvement of these processes to meet customer and stakeholder requirements, and the role of the IT systems department becomes the integration of these process models with the data management systems and the automation of the process model using business components as required by the business.

Application Programming Interface
Barium Live! allows custom integration with existing data management systems via an Application Programming Interface. Developers can access the API to get information from and set information to activities in process models and applications that process owners create.

Instead of the process owners developing their processes separately and then trying to negotiate with the system designers to develop or change the work flow in their data management systems to suit using only the language that they know, the processes mapped in BPMN in Barium Live! are the starting point from which integration takes place.

Business+ITBusiness and IT working together
Theprocess model using BPMN in Barium Live! and the code free functionality therefore eliminates the divide between the world of the process owner and user and the IT department. Discussions on how to improve the business are focussed around the visible process model using a language that both the business and the IT professionals can understand. The process owners change the work flow of the model and the IT systems department integrates and automates.

Andy Salmon
Technical Director, WSP UK

Happy New (Process) Year

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Happy New Year, and many thanks to all our clients, partners and employees for a fantastic 2011!

Happened at Barium during 2011

  • The Map to App concept is gaining ground, and the number of users on Barium Live! is steadily growing – and Barium as a company has grown by 50 percent for the second year in a row.
  • The app Barium Business Navigator makes processes and applications available in every iPhone.
  • Barium SharePoint Client adds processes to the widely used portal Microsoft SharePoint.
  • The welcome of 23 new process-oriented employees.
  • The move to a larger office, better equipped for inspirational meetings.

Now we are looking forward to another exciting year together!

Barium Live! updated to 2011.1.13

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We have updated Barium Live! with a small patch to fix some minor issues, add some additional stability and speed and add a few improvements.

The details of the update can be read in the Barium Live! Wiki but the highlights are:

  • Fixed issues when viewing embedded sub processes via External Web Links.
  • Improved the speed when loading lists for those with many lists and many list items.
  • Improved the External Web Link and External Start layout design.

Read all about it in our release notes.

Merry Christmas!
Jonathan Franze

Automating your process decisions

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One of the key features in using Barium Live! and the Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) is the ability to automate steps in your process that used to be manual.

Gateways is one of the activities that can be automated so that:

  • Decisions are made automatically.
  • The best path is chosen based on information in the process forms.
  • The path continues on a path based on a sub process end state.

This allows you to create a process application that is faster and more precise compared to a process that requires a lot of manual tasks being performed by the people in the task and a faster and better experience for your clients.

This is done using Expressions where you can create simple scripts, much like the type of scripts used in Excel to validate information in your process to automatically choose one or more paths to continue.

Automate a gateway to choose a path based on form data:

Automate a gateay to choose a path based on the end state of an embeded sub process or an independent sub process:

You can create advanced decisions based on mathematical calculations, combinations of expressions, choosing one or more paths and more…

To learn all about how to do automate gateways, visit our wiki: http://wiki.bariumlive.com.

Direct link here.

This is available for all Premium Trial and Premium Subscription accounts.

Regards,
Jonathan Franze

Do not reinvent the wheel. Use standard BPMN instead!

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Last week went utterly fast, and soon it is time for Christmas again (luckily we have nice weather in Sweden though). Time is running away!

Some people quote “time is money”. Therefore I am surprised organisations still bother to reinvent the wheel all the time when they work with processes.

I recently represented Barium during an IT exhibition conducted by two Swedish organisations called KommITS and Sambruk. One of their great ideas is to share competence, know-how and at the same time increase the value of invested time and money.

I have seen several projects in the public sector, which all have potential to add great value to the networks involved. But many of these projects are still very much focused on managing the hygienic factors of IT, which could be legislation, communication standards, archiving and more.

What I do miss is the shared knowledge around processes. I dare to actually question the awareness of the standard process notation BPMN. The whole idea behind processes is to standardise. Is it not wise then to actually follow a standard notation?

BPMN symbols from Barium Live!

If you do so, you can actually benefit from collaborative invention! If Stockholm City creates ten HR processes, Gothenburg can exchange them for a couple of city building processes. And Svedala can exchange a non-conformance process in exchange for a service request process from Kiruna etc. The processes of course need to be redefined to the actual council, but this can be done relatively easy. So don’t start from scratch! And if you do follow a standard, you will also be able to exchange process diagrams between tools. No more vendor lock-in. Instead you can focus on business improvements, and continuous development of the processes!

Keep up the process revolution!

Fredrik Selander
Barium AB

Introducing the Barium SharePoint Client BETA

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Now you can present the processes from Barium Live! in a SharePoint portal. Starting this afternoon, invites to try our beta version of the Barium SharePoint Client are available.

Barium SharePoint Client: Barium Process Viewer for SharePoint
Build your own process based management system in Microsoft SharePoint.

Extend your process models on Barium Live! to SharePoint and let your users see all processes in their intranet, extranet or portal based on SharePoint 2010 while you continue to model and create new process models on Barium Live!

The Barium SharePoint Client is an add-on for SharePoint 2010 that allows you to add Barium Live! processes to your SharePoint portal. The formal release is planned for first quarter 2012, but for those who cannot wait there is a private BETA version available.

The Barium SharePoint Client BETA includes:

  • Web Part for viewing process models
  • Clickable process models
  • Clickable sub processes
  • Ability to open attached process documentation

Find out more in the Barium Live! Wiki, or request an invite to try Barium SharePoint Client BETA right away.

Enjoy!
Jonathan Franze

From Chaos to Compliance

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My last blog, Business Process Management in the 21st Century, explained the Business Process Management (BPM) breakthrough that puts business processes at the heart of the system for managing a business. I said that this will help organisations save time and money and deliver value. All good words but this is easier said than done!

Process chaos

Chaos!
In many organisations the way of working seems chaotic from the oustide and sometimes also from the inside. However there is generally an underlying order of events, allbeit with unpredictable results, with people using work arounds and short cuts to achieve their tasks.  

So, how do we practically apply this BPM breakthrough within these organisations?

I am sure that you are aware of many examples where the concept of business processes have tried to be implemented under the banner of improvement initiatives such as business process re-engineering, lean philosophy, total quality management, six sigma, value chain analysis, cycle time reduction, Kaizen and EFQM … and failed to live up to expectations and deliver the improvements and savings that were expected. There is a view that 80% of all initiatives fail.

Will this change and why should this 21st century concept of BPM make any difference? Well, the good news is that these initiatives did not fail because they were not good initiatives. They and many other initiatives are good and founded on sound theory. So why haven’t they worked?

Why improvement initiatives fail
After spending a lot of money on resources to come into an organisation to project manage and facilitate changes with the team, department or business unit, initiatives have been deemed to have failed because of :

  • lack of drive from people at the top and the bottom of the organisation
  • people falling back into old habits and the interest not maintained
  • people don’t like change and there is no buy in to the new way of working
  • others trying to change what people do, don’t really understand what they do

If it wasn’t for the people then everything would be fine!

The business case for an improvement initiative requires a return on the investment in the resources and the time that people spend identifying and designing improvements. Therefore the outcome of the initiative must be a step change to what an organisation does now in order to deliver the savings – otherwise why invest in it?

What is probably going through peoples’ heads is that they can see improvements to what happens now but there is no way of implementing them – they don’t need step change for this. People don’t follow what they are supposed to do now so why should they follow a different way of working. Let’s sort this chaos out first before a step change is made to a new type of chaos.

Stabilising the way of working
They are absolutely right and therefore there should be no surprise when the people resort to trying to sort out the chaos that they know, rather than the change to the improved chaos that someone thinks is better. No wonder we see these reasons for failure.

How will the concept of 21st century BPM make any difference to this?

One of the tools used in nearly all improvement initiatives is process maps. Many initiatives will start with mapping out what is known as the current state processes with the team, department or business unit. A BPM System such as Barium Live! can easily be used to model what happens in an organisation. Links can be made to documents such as guidance notes, forms and procedures and to urls to web sites or to the data management systems of the organisation. These process maps or models can then be made accessible to everyone in the organisation to follow.

However, to be absolutely sure that these processes are followed, these processes must become the heart of the system that is used for managing the business. This is where 21st century BPM concept makes a difference and the rapid Map to App functionality of Barium Live! becomes really important. When the processes are run as applications, everyone in the organisation follows the processes as designed. Chaos no longer exists and the way of working is stabilised.

By mapping out the current state, you will find that quick win improvements are obvious and can be implemented immediately. These are usually the ones that have been obvious to people for some time. By running a processes as an application, people can see that everyone is following an agreed way of working. There is something tangible upon which to have discussions on improvements and there is a confidence that an improved way of working can be implemented and complied with. Now, maybe those sound improvement initiatives stand a better chance and there will be closer to an 80% success rate rather than an 80% failure rate.

Vision and leadership
What is required of a leader in an organisation wanting to change is the vision and leadership to initiate the change and to require the use of business processes at the heart of the system for management. However, as I mention in my blog Business Process Management in the 21st Century, this is treading directly into the territory that was the domain of the IT systems. Future blogs will look at how the Business Director leading the change can convince the IT Director that a BPM System is there to complement the data management of the IT system and how the improvement initiatives can be applied to a stable way of working using systems like Barium Live!

Andy Salmon
Technical Director, WSP UK