What do you mean by “the question of who should manage it”? Isn’t it by default for the Office of BPM to manage it, as they own the tool? NO! The tool administration is highly technical and IT related and to be managed by the IT team, who already handle the server management system. How about outsourcing the complex administration work to the experts?

Insights on who should manage the administration in BPM software tools are provided in the following section, which focuses on various models using business or IT to manage tool administration and their advantages and disadvantages.

Model 1: Administration solely by IT

In this structure, the administrative role is distributed internally into many pockets within the IT envelope. This scenario commonly exists in large multinational companies (e.g. financial institutions, retailing, and manufacturing industries).

Model 2: Administration by an individual project team and IT

This is a large BPM initiation (such as a system replacement project that involves business process and technical modelling from an “as-is” analysis to a “to-be” state). A project of such a scale may require differing methods and settings than the established conventions. In this case, a dedicated project team member is trained on the tool administration to cater for the needs of the project. Meanwhile, IT takes on a reduced role, from hardware and backup perspectives, of server management.

Model 3: Administration by the Office of BPM

In this model, the office of BPM centrally manages all the administrative components. Such functions as the ARIS BPA tools administrator plays a pivotal support role in the office of BPM. This is in line with the purpose of BPM implementation, which gives an organisation the agility and efficiency to meet the business challenges. The continuous engagement in the tool administration provides leverage along the BPM maturity curve by tweaking the settings to meet the needs of the business users as of the office of BPM expands with the maturing organisation.

Model 4: Shifting the Paradigm – Outsourcing

Outsourcing has become a common model in the new business frontier. Organisations are moving their routine and complex activities to the managed service provider by the mean of SLA (Service Level Agreements) that mandate quality deliverables against the standard established in the SLA. So, instead of managing the complexity, the organisation manages the SLA levels. This may appear that the organisations are transferring their “pain” from the process to the managed service provider, which is absolutely not true!

What can be outsourced in the BPM software administration? Basically, the whole suite of administration components can be outsourced.

Next question would be: how does the outsource mechanism work? The project team comes to an agreement with the managed service provider with a SLA outlining the components to be administered, together with their respective frequency and maximum response time. The frequency can be on a weekly or monthly basis. Meanwhile, the maximum response time indicates the allowable time for the task to be carried out, normally in hours.

The communication to make any changes to the administration components is done via a service request by the project team to the outsourced company. The outsourced company may also provide helpdesk services packaged into the SLA.