Tag Archives: map to app

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!

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

Business Process Management in the 21st Century

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BPM in the 21st century is summed up perfectly in Howard Smith’s and Peter Fingar’s book Business Process Management: the third wave:

The BPM breakthrough is for business people. Designed top down in accordance with a company’s strategy, business processes can now be unhindered by the constraints of existing IT systems.

So what is this breakthrough and what constraint do our existing IT systems provide? Is this breakthrough that significant or just more technology designed to confuse us?

The radical breakthrough in what Smith and Fingar call the third wave, is that business processes are directly and immediately executable with no code or software development necessary. In the past and still today, IT systems are developed to try and deliver our standard business processes. However in order to be agile and competitive our business processes need to be customised and continually improve and evolve. Therefore as soon as the IT department deliver the procured or developed system, the processes have changed, new ideas for improvement need to be implemented and the system doesn’t quite do what the organisation wants. The organisation is therefore constrained by the IT system unless more money is spent.

What we find in many organisations is that managers map out the way the organisation work, in some cases linking documents to the activities, and using these to inform and provide ways for employees how to go about their work. We find that these are independent of the IT systems and generally lack the detail to represent the implicit work flow built into such systems. Primarily the process maps are used to create accredited quality management systems but as they are only a provider of information they allow the user to be selective in whether they conform to the process or not. In fact we find that it is the IT systems that drive the organisation rather than the business process. Even if the IT system did meet requirements when it is first used, it soon becomes out of date and employees end up creating workarounds.

However, after so many years of IT systems driving the business, it requires a significant shift in thinking to put the business processes at the heart of our system for managing our businesses. Smith and Fingar give IT departments and IT systems a hard time in their book but we must not ignore the fact that businesses have made significant investments in these systems over the years and they must form part of the solution going forward even if we now think that it is the business process that should be sitting at the top table now.

Barium Live! directly delivers the vision of Smith and Fingar by providing a simple way to produce a process map and turn it into a system application – map to app. The use of standard Business Process Modelling Notation provides the tools required to model the working processes of an organisation building on basic process mapping skills. This can then be immediately turned into an application by the press of a button and upgraded as often as the organisation requires by just changing the original model.

The transformation Barium Live! delivers is similar to the impact that the spreadsheet had on organisations in the latter part of the 20th century. When computers were only used for programs written in BASIC, spreadsheets gave business people the ability to manipulate rows and columns of data and the ability to use schoolbook formula to analyse data without the IT department needed. Now the business people have the tool to design how we want our organisations to work and run through our system applications.

Applications can be produced for all parts of the business where their use can deliver efficiencies and not just the parts where IT systems exist already. Where expensive IT systems do exist, the process model can sit over the top of these to provide a consistent way of running the organisation providing all the work flow features that will complement the data management of the IT systems. Where no IT system exists, Barium Live! has the functionality to produce data input forms and store data.

So this really is a BPM breakthrough and a significant paradigm shift which will help organisations save time and money and deliver value. My next blog will start to explain how we can practically apply this breakthrough BPM within our organisations.

Andy Salmon,
WSP UK