Articles

Business Process Discovery

Business Process Management (BPM) is rapidly growing and becoming the technology for modeling, optimizing and automating business processes. A number of research reports and customer case studies have shown that BPM yields impressive bottom-line and top-line benefits to organizations trying to compete in a global economy.

These reports and case studies provide significant justification to support the continued and rapid adoption of BPM. Analyst firms predict the BPM market growth rate at 15 percent to 20 percent, which far outpaces the 3 percent to 4 percent growth rate predicted for ERP and CRM markets. BPM will continue to accelerate this momentum by expanding its ability to model, manage and optimize the business process flow in correlation with systems, employees, customers and partners within and beyond corporate boundaries.

Beyond enjoying inherent advantages, companies that realign their organizational structure to exploit BPM’s new cross-functional capabilities benefit as well. BPM bridges application and enterprise silos, driving companies to operate around a set of business processes as opposed to business functions or specific applications. BPM allows this to occur incrementally rather than starting from scratch – it is not an “all or nothing” approach. The ability to incrementally deploy is based on business needs, not traditional release or upgrade cycles. More importantly, ROI can be delivered and measured throughout the implementation.

Technology and business drivers for enterprise application development should focus on providing an environment where better business applications can be developed with less effort. Business applications should closely align to business processes that can be readily adapted to the changing nature of business processes.

From a pure technology perspective, Java has proven to be an excellent platform for developing these applications. Unfortunately, business applications today cannot be isolated – they are required to interoperate and integrate. Integrating different applications has always been a difficult task for various functional and technology related reasons.

The latest and best approaches to this interoperability and integration challenge are Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and the Web services technologies. The bottom-up view of SOA sees different business applications exposing their functionalities through Web services. SOA creates standard, consumable services that are mapped to business processes. Further, SOA enables rapid BPM as each atomic business process will call a service or human activity.

However, developing Web services and exposing functionalities are not sufficient alone. A way to compose functionalities in the correct order and define processes to make use of exposed functionalities is needed. The obvious preference is a relatively simple and straightforward way to define such processes, particularly because we know that business processes change often and need to be modified easily.

This is where the BPEL (Business Process Execution Language for Web Services) becomes important. BPEL4WS provides a structured approach to specify business processes and interaction protocols. BPEL enables organizations to quickly respond to changing business requirements and reduce the cost and complexity of enterprise application integration projects. BPEL allows composition of Web services and is considered the technology process oriented approach to SOA.

If the benefits are real and the technology process oriented approach is legit, then what is missing? Why hasn’t adoption been even greater or faster? Why hasn’t everyone jumped on the bandwagon? Simply put … the difficulty and challenge remains in defining, documenting and exploiting real business processes. Capturing and analyzing real business processes is considered the critical step in any business process initiative. Unfortunately, it is the one step most often fraught with failure.

Does this scenario sound familiar? A large, progressive company wants to be a more processed-focused enterprise. Best practice dictates combining business analysts with consultants from a major system integration firm to detail architecture and interview employees to capture the real business process. Plans are developed, and with methodologies in hand, significant initial progress is made. As weeks and months progress, more time is spent managing documents, drawing and re-drawing process maps, reviewing, correcting, checking interdependencies and trying to ensure consistency and uniformity. After 11 months, the combined teams are disbanded and no actions or conclusions are reached. Budgets exceed planned expenditures and frustration prevails. Ultimately, the entire project is put on the back burner or …

This is a typical “best practice labeled” engagement that will more often than not fail. Not because of poor planning, resource allocation or budget constraints, but because of a typical and traditional “top-down,” macro-view analysis. Industry research suggests that time and effort involved in defining business processes accounts for 70 percent of a project lifecycle. Most often, by the time business processes are fully identified and documented, the business itself has changed. In most cases using this typical approach, the real discovery comes after the system is built and deployed in a test phase. While effective, this slow, after-the-fact process seems to limit the promise of providing the IT agility and flexibility the business requires.

Business process discovery (BPD) is an exciting, emerging field of tools and methodologies that allow for a bottom-up approach to business process analysis. BPD examines the current work processes and builds a picture of the business process based on the actual evidence of work being done.

The allure of BPD is to quickly discover, detail and document localized business processes to enable the definition and construction of SOA services. Rather than waiting for a long, drawn-out and expensive top-down analysis, BPD tools can quickly provide the information required to make intelligent decisions on the granularity of a service in the context of the real, supporting business process. BPD is capturing the business process as it exists and is exercised daily in the enterprise, by users on IT systems. The real answer to what business processes are encapsulated and used truly within the user community.

With BPD, capturing the real “as is” automatically reduces the risk, time and error associated with the most costly part of any BPM or IT project. Requirements, analysis and design cycles become a cycle of review and validation. Business process improvement efforts can be targeted at specific documented pain points found through analysis of actual user processes, not emotional educated guesses.

A recent research report citing a survey with 1,400 CIOs points out that top-line benefits (revenue generation) are becoming as important as bottom-line benefits (TCO and ROI). The focus is now squarely on delivering business value related to faster deployment of new business services and more agile IT systems supporting these services. Consider the impact BPD could have on improving the business process based on using actual empirically derived analysis and data of all users’ business processes.

SOA and standard BPM technology (BPEL) are making BPM solutions a real option for application development in the 21st century. Defining what an appropriate business process is to encapsulate as a service is the key to success. Business process analysis tools and methodologies provide an excellent top-down analysis to put business processes into context. However, they are poor at deriving the details of a business process. BPD tools excel at discovering the details of a business process from real business use. Applying both of these tools together can quickly provide a business process map, complete with details allowing your services to finally meet the needs of the business.

About The Author: Alex Moulas

As senior vice president of business development and marketing, Alex Moulas is responsible for expanding market presence by developing strategic alliances with key industry players and channel partners. He also develops and drives strategic marketing initiatives across the enterprise to increase sales and foster growth.