As organisations continue the journey to develop high levels of Business Process Management (BPM) maturity and innovate their processes, an effective process modelling platform becomes vital. Moving from static, disconnected process documentation to dynamic, flexible views of process is the key to realising process modelling benefit.
The Repository Dividend
Formal, systemic and graphic documentation of business processes is central to the process-based management philosophy. The underlying premise of BPM is that the activities that combine to achieve work outcomes can be usefully abstracted, i.e. “modelled”. The case can be made for managing process documentation in a particular way, namely through object-oriented repositories of business process data. The repository facilitates coherent creation, publication, viewing, storage, organisation and linking of business process models and their data. Properly designed and managed, object-oriented repositories significantly increase capability in model management, process analysis and improvement, change control, cross-enterprise useability, and process performance management.
Delivering Benefits
Object-oriented process repositories deliver many benefits:
- better control over model production – higher quality at higher speed and lower cost
- easier and more cost-efficient reuse of models and their component objects
- integrated and consistent publication of process information
- enhanced control over who can access the various models
- increased ability to change process models at reduced effort
- better control over versioning and change histories
- ability to generate different views of process information for different audiences
- significantly increased ability to use ‘what if’ analysis scenarios
- ability to create and manage process variants reflecting different global requirements
- ability to track the source and history of process information.
A Repository Based Approach
The following table summarises the benefits of the repository-based approach:
|
Topic |
“Flat” Files |
Object Oriented Repositories |
|
Access & Governance |
Can only be enforced via network or external document management system privileges |
Can be tailored based on organisation process role and responsibility |
|
Standards & Quality Checks |
Can be developed and documented, but can only be enforced manually |
Modelling standards and conventions can be enforced by configuration changes; quality checks can be automated to speed their application or highlight errors in the models |
|
Queries & Reports |
Inferences and searches only (“show me models with word “x” in it”) |
Queries, summaries and detailed analysis of connected objects and occurrences of objects can be easily obtained; summary views can be generated |
|
Content Re-use |
Content can be copied and pasted; but it’s impossible to control this |
Controlled re-use of standardised objects reduces modelling time, improves recognition, reduces adoption risk and ensures traceability |
