The Leonardo Blog

Most organizations fail to sustain effective process-based management because they fail to firmly embed business process governance.

Process Measurement is one of the key aspects that lead to organisational success (Kellen 2003). Measures give visibility of organisational performance and provide control to determine the direction of the organisation. Measurement is also a crucial factor in Business Process Management; it is the ‘Management’ part of BPM (Tregear 2009). Knowing what an organisation does through a Process Architecture is important, knowing that those processes are being executed well and knowing where to focus attention and resources is even more important. Measures need to be balanced between Functional and Process. Functional measures focus on performance within a particular department or division, while process measures ensure the end-to-end process is delivering value to the customer.

Everybody says it’s important. Not so many do it well. Everybody promises to do better. We still end up with too many question marks.

Target >Measure >Respond is the essential lifecycle of business process management. Set a performance target for a process, measure what is really happening, and do something if the results are not what they should be. This is it; all process management and process improvement comes down to this. If we aren’t improving processes, sometimes with radical effect, then we are wasting time. Process-based management is both as simple and as complicated as target>measure>respond.

Both disciplines, Business Rules Management as well as Business Process Management (BPM), have been around for quite some years. In fact, the term ‘business rule’ was first published as early as 1984. This is why it is surprising that only during the last couple of years the subject of Business Rules Management got the attention of a wider audience. And only recently there is increasing emphasis on the combination of processes and rules. But what is the difference between business rules and business processes?