Breaking Down Your Business Process Architecture

In our BPM Guide, we spend a chapter discussing the importance of scoping and prioritizing your business process architecture. When you’re breaking down a single, sometimes siloed business processes to move them into an automation platform, you see a limited context for your process. There a no doubt big gains to be made in this limited context, for instance, automating a New Hire Process. You may increase the accuracy and speed of the process by 4 or 5 times through your efforts.

However, as an organization, you may be suffering from the “Blind Men and the Elephant” problem (we include a very nice video of this phenomenon in the guide as well). The problem is that individual people or departments approach enterprise-wide processes from their own perspective, with their own biases and expectations. Depending on where you “touch” the process you may feel something different than someone else.

When you step back, as with our New Hire Process example, you can see where that process fits into the overall organizational process hierarchy. If that overall organizational process is “Employee Development”, then you can see that hiring new employees is just part of the process of finding, onboarding, developing, and managing employees. Other processes may include:

• Recruiting

• Training

• Benefit Management

• Performance Reviews

• Change Requests

• Promotions

• Employee Relations

• Offboarding

Considering the interconnectedness of all these processes in an employee’s development over their tenure at an organization, it makes sense to consider the scope and hand-offs between all these processes and ensure that there is consistency in both process and data between sub-processes. There may also be many instances where redundant processes can be absorbed or eliminated through business process reengineering.

For more on this topic visit our BPM Guide and the section called “Scoping and Prioritizing the Business Process Architecture.”