The Leonardo Blog

Prof Michael Rosemann is not surprised to see BPM on the list of management disciplines that are going through the so-called trough of disillusionment. For too long now, its practitioners have used BPM only to exploit existing business processes. It’s time to start exploring too – and make BPM exciting again!

IT applications contribute to the support of business processes, or other applications, thanks to the execution of IT software. Directly or indirectly, IT applications have one main purpose: supporting the business in the most efficient way. They can be considered as an asset of the enterprise. Either custom developed or packaged, IT applications represent a cost: licences, maintenance, customisation, development, running fees, etc. In a large organisation, due to reorganisation, acquisitions or lack of coordination, it is hard to keep track of which business processes are supported by which applications. A trusted IT application inventory, united with process descriptions, is the necessary foundation to answer the following questions with fact-grounded confidence: What are the applications that support the most critical processes, and which require attention and investment? Are there applications that are unused (or barely used) for which recurring fees occur? Is it possible to reduce costs by using one application instead of many for the same business purpose? By virtue of the dependencies between applications, is business continuity at risk if there is an IT failure?

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.

So you’ve created your As Is models. You’ve spoken to the stakeholders, drawn the diagrams, collected the data, documented the problems, and discovered some opportunities. You know how things are done now, and have a good understanding of all the problems with the current processes. You know everything you need to get on with improving the processes, to create the To Be, and establish a new and better As Is. Or do you …?