From an EA perspective, a business process is a set of activities that takes inputs and transforms them into outputs, adding value to an organization and its stakeholders.
Everything in the world is represented by a thing with a state
or a relationship between things with the state. A process can be defined as
anything that modifies a thing with state or anything that forms, breaks, or
modifies a relationship between things with the state. In that sense,
everything is a process, and a business is simply a chain of processes that
gets very complex at times. BPM usually goes hand-in-hand with EA, what is a
business process from an EA perspective?
1. EA
without BPM would not yield and vice-versa. Properly defining a process,
versus a function, value stream, capability, and building block is one of the
key roadblocks for both BPM and EA, which come from different backgrounds and
still evolve independently.
2. From an
EA perspective, a business process is a set of activities that takes inputs and
transforms them into outputs, adding value to an organization and its
stakeholders. The value chain processes produce indeed goods and services and
deliver them to the customers. Therefore the value chain process is the
flow of activities, which include
what managers, employees and IT applications do. Not all processes can be
modeled in a finite process engine, but that does not mean they are not
processes.
3. Capturing
"how" business performs a set of tasks to achieve the desired
capability is a business process. EA Line of Business needs to have a set
of desired capabilities to achieve business goals. The capability, therefore, represents a higher level of abstraction
representing the "what" aspect to achieve. These business
capabilities are then prioritized to arrive at future state hypothesis. While
doing current state analysis, the business capabilities are shown in heat map
or kind of represented in gaps. Further, how to derive (via simulation and
with some accuracy) the enterprise phenotype from the enterprise genotype?
Imagine:
- All artifacts are explicit and digital
- All artifacts are versionable throughout their lifecycle
- All relationships between these artifacts are modeled explicitly
- All models are made to be executable
- All artifacts are explicit and digital
- All artifacts are versionable throughout their lifecycle
- All relationships between these artifacts are modeled explicitly
- All models are made to be executable
4. EA as
Process Conductor: EA should consider things like: Do I have to support both synchronous and asynchronous processing? Do I need a rules engine for what
I do? How do I integrate my systems across geographies and
languages? Rather than worrying about whether something is a flow or a
process or a function, be focused on the capabilities needed to support
business processes, and not focused on the business process itself.
6. There are different ways to manage the process; EA can always complement the process view about BUSINESS TRANSPARENCY with adaptability/interoperability. Especially, EA can provide System-wide view as it's critical to account for cross-cutting concerns (master data, governance, value chain integration, etc.) The concepts that define the processes to be executed include:
Top-down: business objectives, value streams
Inside-out: operational targets and process goals
Outside-In: customer perception and experience
Bottom-Up: people knowledge and innovation
7. Processes are about flows, architectures are about assets.
Inside-out: operational targets and process goals
Outside-In: customer perception and experience
Bottom-Up: people knowledge and innovation
7. Processes are about flows, architectures are about assets.
As a corollary, processes are identified by governing events and should be classified accordingly. Business processes are governed by changes in the relationship between the enterprise and its business environment.
BPM as a management discipline (using the process to
manage business)
BPM as software (BPM suite);
BPM as a portfolio of the business processes of an enterprise, and the practices and tools for governing the design, execution and evolution of this portfolio (enterprise BPM system)
EA is like a compass to guide through BPM journey, as BPM is not a one-time project, it’s continuous improvement.BPM as software (BPM suite);
BPM as a portfolio of the business processes of an enterprise, and the practices and tools for governing the design, execution and evolution of this portfolio (enterprise BPM system)
Read more about EA roles in the digital enterprise:
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