We have recently completed a project for a multi-national customer to transform their IT service management capabilities in only eight weeks. We achieved that by utilising a structured methodology and the easy to use process discovery and capture solution from Process Master.

Their Challenges

• ITSM processes not clearly defined and standardise
• Tools focus - no service or process orientation
• No clear definition of roles and responsibilities
• No integrated view of processes (silo based – Unix Team , Network Team, Desktop Team)
• No group wide guidelines and process documentation
• Users not satisfied with level of support
• Service level not clearly defined
• No ability to accurately track performance

And Goals

• Create standard support processes across the organisations
• Continuously improve the quality of IT services
• Make IT a business enabler
• Improve service level and user satisfaction
• Align IT services with the current and future needs of the business and its customers
• Provide more services for the same cost, and reduce the long-term costs of service provision

What was achieved?

• Service consistency and stability – repeatable processes
• Improved user satisfaction
• Identified clear responsibilities and authorities
• IT infrastructure under control
• Better use of resources – IT and the Business
• A shared ITSM process portal is available to the whole organisation (easily accessible on intranet)

The below presentation provides further details:

Established in 2001, Blue-Crow provides business integration and enterprise architecture solutions across all areas of Public and Private sectors.
We advise our customers on a range of areas …

Practices

Our Solutions focus on four practice areas:

Enterprise Architecture

Business Process Modelling & Analysis (BPM)

Application Development & Integration

Business Intelligence

The Benefits BPM

Capture and validation of processes

- often crucial details about the organisation’s processes are never documented and the manner in which they operate remains ambiguous. BPM offers the opportunity to capture these details and ensures that key knowledge is not lost when people move to new roles or leave the organisation.

Process Improvement

- once process information is captured it is easy to identify bottlenecks, duplications and inefficiencies. Process models are also an essential component of business process reengineering (BPR) and continuous improvement initiatives, such as Lean or Six Sigma.

Better alignment of business and IT

- well-defined processes help IT teams develop systems that better much the business requirements.

Communication and Collaboration

- BPM enables organisation to effectively communicate organisational change, train employees on how new processes should work and gather feedback for further improvement.

Expanding Beyond Process Modelling - Developing a complete Enterprise Architecture

Business process modelling forms the foundation for developing a complete end-to-end Enterprise Architecture, which includes not only the business process view of the organisation, but also information about data-architecture, hardware and software infrastructure, applications, organisational structure and strategies.
Using the process models already in place Blue-Crow can help expand the scope of the models to create an all-encompassing Enterprise Architecture.

Enterprise Architecture is the glue to bind information systems into the business forming a smoothly running corporate entity. It provides the means for ‘the business’ and ‘IT’ to truly function as partners to deliver the benefits of information systems investment.

Enterprise Integration
Today’s business applications rarely live in isolation. Users expect instant access to all business functions an enterprise can offer, regardless of which system the functionality may reside in. This requires disparate applications to be connected into a larger, integrated solution.
Integration of applications and information is usually achieved through the use of some form of “middleware”. Middleware provides the “plumbing” such as data transport, data transformation, and routing.

When different systems can’t share their data effectively, they create information bottlenecks that require human intervention. With a properly architected integration enterprise, organisations are able to focus most of their efforts on their value-creating core competencies.
At Blue-Crow, we believe that through Enterprise Integration, we can assist organisations to truly exploit applications and data that serves the business.

We define Enterprise Integration as a combination of two major disciples:

Enterprise Application Integration (EAI)

Enterprise Information Integration (EII)

Through Enterprise Integration, Blue-Crow can help your organisation to remove information silos across departments and deliver seamless movement of information from one application to the other.

Our Methodology - STITCH™

The Blue-Crow STITCH™ methodology ties the three practices together under the umbrella of Enterprise Architecture.

There has been much discussion recently about the BPMN standard, as the new version of the standard (2.0) is being agreed.

First to recap; the goals of the notation have been defined as:

“.. to provide a notation that is readily understandable by all business users, from the business analysts that create the initial drafts of the processes, to the technical developers responsible for implementing the technology that will perform those processes, and finally, to the business people who will manage and monitor those processes. Thus, BPMN creates a standardized bridge for the gap between the business process design and process implementation.”

(Source: BPMN specification document)

The key point in the above statement, in my opinion, is the fact that the notation aims to address both the technical perspective and the needs of business people. As a result it had to be simple to learn yet powerful enough to depict the potential complexities of a business process; therefore it may not be a surprise that a recent research conduct by Michael zur Muehlen: How much BPMN do you need? found that “the average BPMN model uses less than 20% of the available vocabulary”; suggesting that the notation is used in a simplistic way.

He also indicates in his findings that there are two types of BPMN modellers, which can be summed-up (more or less) as business v. IT focused:

1) the business focused modellers who use BPMN for process re-engineering and process improvement type work, and
2) the IT solution focused modellers who use it for workflow engineering or process automation.

However, in my experience, the first type of users, people carrying out process documentation that is not IT driven, have not yet fully embraced BPMN (many are not even aware of it). Organisations are still using a wide range of inconsistent notations; and making use of numerous symbols and objects in their processes models. It’s not rare to see that within the same organisations or sometimes within the same projects, process maps utilise different symbols, objects and terminology; making it difficult to compare different models or to deliver a consistent message across the organisation (especially in large change programmes).
In 2-3 years BPMN has become the de-facto standard when it comes to workflow automation design, but hasn’t seem to be fully adopted for every process modelling activity.

Sebastian Stein has been asking Where is BPMN heading to?

My view is that the next challenge for BPMN is to ensure that it truly develops into a common business language understood by all; and becomes more accepted beyond the domain of workflow automation and system analysis to be used across all facets of business.

This may require enhancing the notation by adding additional views to help express the full complexity of business processes or business architecture as a whole, for example, a view that covers the organisational perspective showing roles and responsibilities in a hierarchical structure?!. This, since business processes can not be fully expressed using only one type of diagram (The fact that the UML notion includes 13 different diagrams, representing different points of views, illustrates this point). However, this may be difficult to achieve without increasing its complexity.

It will be interesting to see how BPMN evolves over the next few years.

On few occasions in recent months I’ve been involved in process analysis engagements where we had to get business people involved in helping documenting their processes. Our aim was to accelerate the process discover stage by having the people involved in the work actually documenting their current processes, instead of bringing external business analysts that would have to spend time to learn and understand the business first, before actually carrying out the actual process capture work. We were then able to move ahead to the re-design and improvement stage much quicker.

We used a process capture and design tool from Process Master, that is based on the industry standard BPMN notation; however we realised that although the BPMN notation has been well-established and know to business analysts, system architects and workflow solution designers; business users will need some initial guidance and training to understand what each object within the notation means and how to use it. The good news is that BPMN is straight forward to learn and utilise quickly.

The below presentation was part of a 2 days training course we delivered. The purpose of this presentation is to introduce business people to BPMN, its usages and benefits. Following the days they were able to successfully carryout the process discovery themselves as planned, saving significant time on current state analysis work.

Business Challenge
Processes are at the core of any organisation, yet they are not always clearly defined, documented or optimised.  With the rate of change in the business environment increasing and greater pressure to become more efficient; organisations must form a clear view of how their processes operate.

Solution
Business Process Modelling and Analysis provides a comprehensive method for organisations to better mange and improve their processes. It offers the ability to properly document, analyse, and optimise processes and to better align business and IT.

Introduction 
Faced with over changing market conditions, competitive pressures, additional regulatory requirements and introduction of new business models, organisations whether in the public or private sector must have the ability to transform and improve continually. 
Existing business processes need to be regularly reviewed and improved, while new business initiatives require the development of new processes. Additionally, the developed of new system that automate time-consuming or complex manual activities and the management of end-to-end IT programmes such as SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) require rigours process analysis, to insure that they deliver the expected business benefits.  
Business process modelling help organisations collect and objectively analyse information about their operations, then effectively communicate that information to business and IT staff. Armed with this information, executives can make informed decisions about how to optimise those processes and IT staff can design appropriate solutions. Modelling provides a mechanism for capturing key enterprise business knowledge while increasing collaboration, improving productivity quality, and guiding the development process.
 
Defining Business Process Modelling and Analysis
Business Process Modelling and Analysis (BPMA) is the practice of documenting, identifying, analysing and improving organisations’ business processes. It leverages software tools and design methodologies to developed models that help the organisation reduce cost, reduce complexity, become more efficient and design better IT solutions.    

Business Process Modelling involves the development of models representing both the current (”as is”) and future (”to be”) processes of an enterprise, so that the current process may be analysed and improved. BPMA is typically performed by organisations who are seeking to improve process efficiency and quality. The process improvements identified may or may not require IT involvement, although that is a common driver for the need to model a business process.

BPMA software tools can provide much more than just simple process mapping, which tends to be a static, two-dimensional representation of the process. What is often missing from a standard process map is the data that goes with the flow and the ability to analyse the data using powerful analytical engines. The data, the process flow and the analysis are often the combination that allows for clear identification of bottlenecks, waste in the operation, root cause determination and prioritisation of improvement opportunities.

A BPMA initiative involves a range of stakeholders within the organisation; executive managers, process owners and the individuals who are actually involved in the day to day execution of these processes, all need to provide their input and process knowledge. Business analysts and process modellers then take this information and create models that document these processes. And finally IT teams can utilise the process models to define business requirements for systems development.    
BPMA should be a continuous activity, where process models are regularly reviewed and updated to reflect the progress made in improving them or when new requirements come up.