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Business Agility at the Speed of Light

The very end of the 20th century brought us e-business or as Bill Gates put it 'business at the speed of light.' An enormous paradigm shift facilitated via the Internet, as big a paradigm shift to the way companies do business as the PC and Lotus 123 were in the 80s. The next big paradigm shift and the next big competitive advantage companies can leverage is here in the emergence of business process management (BPM). Well designed and implemented BPM enables business agility at the speed of light. This article describes how BPM can not only wring competitive advantage from your business but how it can maintain that competitive advantage through its ability to allow your business to change its processes and rules in near real-time.

BPM enables business agility around process and rules in much the same way that Visicalc or Lotus 123 enabled agility around financial modeling and calculation. Lotus 123 and the evolving spreadsheet applications that followed allowed anyone familiar with the paper spreadsheet paradigm to quickly migrate their inherent and valuable business knowledge to the new electronic equivalent. Lotus 123 wasn’t merely an electronic mechanism for capturing calculation requirements that were then handed to IT or an army of developers, what was keyed into the spreadsheet as formulas and labels actually defined a working application. More importantly the behavior of the application could be changed in near real-time by merely changing a formula, constant or cell reference. No compilation, no coding, no complicated deployment procedures. Many BPM vendors have taken good steps toward a similar paradigm by allowing “process owners” (be they IT or non IT resources) to graphically model (in a fashion similar to flowcharting) their Business Processes and describe Business Rules in simple terms (figure 1).

However to achieve true business agility at the speed of light business process modeling cannot stop there, the traditional cycle of business analysts gathering requirements which are then handed to developers must be broken or short circuited. BPM cannot yield its true promise of process and rules agility if the process diagram or flowchart created by process owners and business analysts is merely a glorified requirements document against which Developers and IT build and integrate Web services or code based encapsulations and representations of the business activities, rules and logic.

Figure 2 illustrates a simple yet common business process handling expense report approval. Analysis of this and most Business Processes reveal that the vast majority of the steps in a business process legitimately are common business centric activities such as sending an email, tasking a human worker, creating or reading data from a document or reading data from a database, the types of activity within a process that the Process Owner should have a good understanding of the requirements and desired outcome. A small percentage of the activities are integration or system-to-system activities such as writing to a database, calling an external Web Service or writing to a message queue, these activities typically require a high degree of technical knowledge to implement.

A BPM application that enables near real-time change must facilitate and allow the process owner to make changes to the behavior of activities within a process in such a way that they are not merely providing and populating a requirements document from which developers work but are actually affecting the way in the which the process executes so that when they save those changes they can be immediately tested or put into production. Those more complex activities that require IT involvement should not require that work be done in a separate design or development environment resulting in a disconnected view of the overall solution. A unified modeling environment with appropriate role based rights and security will yield maximum productivity and a common and holistic view of the process being implemented ultimately resulting in greater understanding and concurrence by all involved parties.

Several BPM vendors have embraced this approach with the net result being that often 90% to 95% of the work involved in designing, testing and deploying business processes can be performed by process owners resulting in extremely short implementation times even for very complex processes. Re-work due to poorly communicated requirements amongst team members or between business analysts and developers is also drastically reduced because a step in the implementation cycle is effectively eliminated. Post implementation Process changes also become significantly easier and quicker to implement, often in near real-time.

It is important to understand that I am not advocating the elimination of IT from the implementation of Business Solutions and Business Processes; I have a vested interest in preserving the role of IT in the enterprise. But IT people rarely understand the business problem unless it is IT related (in which case IT become the “process owner”) to same degree that the business people intimately involved with it do, and think back to the paradigm shift that occurred with spreadsheet applications. Developers would find it incomprehensible if they were tasked to write an application to perform the types of basic calculation that can be readily performed in a common tool such as Excel. The best use of IT in the implementation of BPM is around supporting and building the integration with other systems not the modeling of the sequence of activities, the content of email messages or identifying the role and escalation parameters around a human worker task. IT will obviously also retain responsibility for managing the infrastructure and systems on which the BPM application executes ensuring if it is mission critical in nature that it meets availability requirements.

So what are the real benefits of this ability to change your business processes and rules in near real-time. Often the key to successful business is the ability to react and change your business model in the face of market changes or the actions of your competitors. Just as e-business revolutionized retailing allowing a startup such as Amazon to quickly outstrip the sales and profitability of high street retailers, BPM has enabled the emergence of new online business models. Witness the explosion of online lending institutions such as Lending Tree and eLoan where much of the paper shuffling and human application of business rules and discretion has been replaced by a self service web based internet application triggering a business process that verifies applicant information, credit scores and perhaps only involves the human worker when exception conditions are triggered. These businesses can introduce new product offerings and handle changes in market conditions far quicker than traditional institutions. Anywhere in your organization you find yourself unable to monitor the progress of work as it passes through a group of individuals, or you find data being re-keyed into multiple applications, or you find the ad-hoc or poor application of policies or rules there is likely huge benefit to be realized through the implementation of BPM and through careful selection of a tool that allows the Process Owners to be intimately involved in the majority of the implementation the time taken to get BPM into production may be much less than anticipated.

There is of course associated with any paradigm shift a degree of skepticism that it is possible to accomplish what is being proposed. My memories of the introduction of tools such as Visicalc and Lotus 123 are a little faded but I suspect the same skepticism existed around the paradigm shift those applications introduced also. Technology and the skill set of the business analyst with applications such as Excel, Access and Visio has advanced to the point that modern BPM tools should not and need not be constrained by the old school method of building “applications” that dictates that business people provide the requirements and developers build the solution. A new breed of BPM tool makes the notion that business people and more importantly the people who understand the desired outcome (the process owners) can create the solution a reality. These new tools make the promise of business agility at the speed of light well within the grasp of many organizations, and with that new agility even small businesses can find true competitive advantage over those yet to adopt this exciting new technology.

When evaluating BPM tools be sure to ascertain exactly what roles within your organization will have to participate in the design and implementation of a new Process, and be sure to evaluate exactly what is involved in taking a process from whiteboard to production or what degree of effort it takes to make even the smallest change to the process or an embedded business rule. Measure the effort and time involved and ask will this really give me 'business agility at the speed of light' or business as usual?