Tag: BPM

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erwin Expert Blog Business Process

In Times of Rapid Change, Business Process Modeling Becomes a Critical Tool

With the help of business process modeling (BPM) organizations can visualize processes and all the associated information identifying the areas ripe for innovation, improvement or reorganization.

In the blink of an eye, COVID-19 has disrupted all industries and quickly accelerated their plans for digital transformation. As part of their transformations, businesses are moving quickly from on premise to the cloud and therefore need to create business process models available to everyone within the organization so they understand what data is tied to what applications and what processes are in place.

There’s a clear connection between business process modeling and digital transformation initiatives. With it, an organization can explore models to understand information assets within a business context, from internal operations to full customer experiences.

This practice identifies and drives digital transformation opportunities to increase revenue while limiting risks and avoiding regulatory and compliance gaffes.

Business Process Data Governance

Bringing IT and Business Together to Make More Informed Decisions

Developing a shared repository is key to aligning IT systems to accomplish business strategies, reducing the time it takes to make decisions and accelerating solution delivery.

It also serves to operationalize and govern mission-critical information by making it available to the wider enterprise at the right levels to identify synergies and ensure the appropriate collaboration.

One customer says his company realized early on that there’s a difference between business expertise and process expertise, and when you partner the two you really start to see the opportunities for success.

By bringing your business and IT together via BPM, you create a single point of truth within your organization — delivered to stakeholders within the context of their roles.

You then can understand where your data is, how you can find it, how you can monetize it, how you can report on it, and how you can visualize it. You are able to do it in an easy format that you can catalog, do mappings, lineage and focus on tying business and IT together to make more informed decisions.

BPM for Regulatory Compliance

Business process modeling is also critical for risk management and regulatory compliance. When thousands of employees need to know what compliance processes to follow, such as those associated with the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), ensuring not only access to proper documentation but current, updated information is critical.

Industry and government regulations affect businesses that work in or do business with any number of industries or in specific geographies. Industry-specific regulations in areas like healthcare, pharmaceuticals and financial services have been in place for some time.

Now, broader mandates like GDPR and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) require businesses across industries to think about their compliance efforts. Business process modeling helps organizations prove what they are doing to meet compliance requirements and understand how changes to their processes impact compliance efforts (and vice versa).

This same customer says, “The biggest bang for the buck is having a single platform, a one-stop shop, for when you’re working with auditors.” You go to one place that is your source of truth: Here are processes; here’s how we have implemented these controls; here are the list of our controls and where they’re implemented in our business.”

He also notes that a single BPM platform “helps cut through a lot of questions and get right to the heart of the matter.” As a result, the company has had positive audit findings and results because they have a structure, a plan, and it’s easy to see the connection between how they’re ensuring their controls are adhered to and where those results are in their business processes.

Change Is Constant

Heraclitus, the Greek philosopher said, “The only constant in life is change.” This applies to business, as well. Today things are changing quite quickly. And with our current landscape, executives are not going to wait around for months as impact analyses are being formulated. They want actionable intelligence – fast.

For business process architects, being able to manage change and address key issues is what keeps the job function highly relevant to stakeholders. The key point is that useful change comes from routinely looking at process models and spotting a sub-optimality. Business process modeling supports many beneficial use cases and transformation projects used to empower employees and therefore better serve customers.

Organizational success depends on agility and adaptability in responding to change across the enterprise, both planned and unplanned. To be agile and responsive to changes in markets and consumer demands, you need a visual representation of what your business does and how it does it.

Companies that maintain accurate business process models also are well-positioned to analyze and optimize end-to-end process threads—lead-to-cash, problem-to-resolution or hire-to-retire, for example—that contribute to strategic business objectives, such as improving customer journeys or maximizing employee retention.

They also can slice and dice their models in multiple other ways, such as by functional hierarchies to understand what business groups organize or participate in processes as a step in driving better collaboration or greater efficiencies.

erwin Evolve enables communication and collaboration across the enterprise with reliable tools that make it possible to quickly and accurately gather information, make decisions, and then ensure consistent standards, policies and processes are established and available for consumption internally and externally as required.

Try erwin Evolve for yourself in a no-cost, risk-free trial.

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Business Process Modeling Use Cases and Definition

What is business process modeling (BPM)? A visual representation of what your business does and how it does it. Why is having this picture important?

According to Gartner, BPM links business strategy to IT systems development to ensure business value. It also combines process/ workflow, functional, organizational and data/resource views with underlying metrics such as costs, cycle times and responsibilities to provide a foundation for analyzing value chains, activity-based costs, bottlenecks, critical paths and inefficiencies.

Every organization—particularly those operating in industries where quality, regulatory, health, safety or environmental issues are a concern—must have a complete understanding of its processes. Equally important, employees must fully comprehend and be accountable for appropriately carrying out the processes for which they are responsible.

BPM allows organizations to benefit from an easily digestible visualization of its systems and the associated information. It makes it easier to be agile and responsive to changes in markets and consumer demands,

This is because the visualization process galvanizes an organization’s ability to identify areas of improvement, potential innovation and necessary reorganization.

But a theoretical understanding of business process modeling will only get you so far. The following use cases demonstrate the benefits of business process modeling in real life.

Business process modeling (BPM) is a practice that helps organizations understand how their strategy relates to their IT systems and system development.

Business Process Modeling Use Cases

Compliance:

Regulations like the E.U.’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) are requiring businesses across industries to think about their compliance efforts. Business process modeling helps organizations prove what they are doing to meet compliance requirements and understand how changes to their processes impact compliance efforts (and vice versa).

The visualization process can aid in an organization’s ability to understand the security risks associated with a particular process. It also means that should a breach occur, the organization’s greater understanding of its processes and related systems means they can respond with greater agility, mitigate the damage and quickly inform affected parties as required specifically by GDPR.

In the case of an audit, BPM can be used to demonstrate that the organization is cognizant of compliance standards and is doing what is required.

This also extends to industry-specific other compliance mandates  such as those in healthcare, pharmaceutical and the financial services industries.

The Regulatory Rationale for Integrating Data Management & Data Governance

The Democratization of Information:

Increasing an organizations ability to retain knowledge is another cross-industry use case for business process modeling. This use case benefits organizations in two key areas:

1. Democratization of information.

By documenting processes, organizations can ensure that knowledge and information is de-siloed and that the organization as a whole can benefit from it. In this case, a key best practice to consider is the introduction of role/user-based access. This way an organization can ensure only the necessary parties can access such information and ensure they are in keeping with compliance standards.

2. Knowledge retention.

By documenting processes and democratizing information, process-specific knowledge can be retained, even when key employees leave. This is particularly important in the case of an aging workforce, where an organization could suffer a “brain drain” as large numbers of employees retire during a short span of time.

Digital Transformation:

Once in a while, a technological revolution turns the nature of business on its head. The most recent and arguably most significant of which – although at this point it’s hard to argue – is the rise of data-driven businesses.

In a relatively short amount of time, the leaders in data-driven businesses were launched and stormed their way to the forefront of their respective industries – think Amazon, Netflix and Uber.

The result? Data is now considered more valuable than oil and industries across the board are seeing digital transformation en masse.

There’s a clear connection between business process modeling and digital transformation initiatives. With it, an organization can explore models to understand information assets within a business context, from internal operations to full customer experiences.

This practice identifies and drives digital transformation opportunities to increase revenue while limiting risks and avoiding regulatory and compliance gaffes.

Organizations that leverage BPM in their digital transformation efforts can use their greater

understanding of their current processes to make more informed decisions about future implementations.

And the use cases for business process modeling don’t stop there.

A better understanding of your organizations processes can also ease software deployments and make mergers and acquisitions (M&A) far easier to handle. Large organizations grow through M&A activity, and the combining of business processes, software applications and infrastructure when two organizations become one is very complex.

Business process modeling offers visibility into existing processes and helps design new processes that will deliver results in a post-merger environment.

The latest guide from the erwin Experts expands on these use cases and details how best to use business process modeling to tame your organization’s complexity and maximize its potential and profits.

Business Process Modeling Use Cases

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What’s Business Process Modeling Got to Do with It? – Choosing A BPM Tool

With business process modeling (BPM) being a key component of data governance, choosing a BPM tool is part of a dilemma many businesses either have or will soon face.

Historically, BPM didn’t necessarily have to be tied to an organization’s data governance initiative.

However, data-driven business and the regulations that oversee it are becoming increasingly extensive, so the need to view data governance as a collective effort – in terms of personnel and the tools that make up the strategy – is becoming harder to ignore.

Data governance also relies on business process modeling and analysis to drive improvement, including identifying business practices susceptible to security, compliance or other risks and adding controls to mitigate exposures.

Choosing a BPM Tool: An Overview

As part of a data governance strategy, a BPM tool aids organizations in visualizing their business processes, system interactions and organizational hierarchies to ensure elements are aligned and core operations are optimized.

The right BPM tool also helps organizations increase productivity, reduce errors and mitigate risks to achieve strategic objectives.

With  insights from the BPM tool, you can clarify roles and responsibilities – which in turn should influence an organization’s policies about data ownership and make data lineage easier to manage.

Organizations also can use a BPM tool to identify the staff who function as “unofficial data repositories.” This has both a primary and secondary function:

1. Organizations can document employee processes to ensure vital information isn’t lost should an employee choose to leave.

2. It is easier to identify areas where expertise may need to be bolstered.

Organizations that adopt a BPM tool also enjoy greater process efficiency. This is through a combination of improving existing processes or designing new process flows, eliminating unnecessary or contradictory steps, and documenting results in a shareable format that is easy to understand so the organization is pulling in one direction.

Choosing a BPM Tool

Silo Buster

Understanding the typical use cases for business process modeling is the first step. As with any tech investment, it’s important to understand how the technology will work in the context of your organization/business.

For example, it’s counter-productive to invest in a solution that reduces informational silos only to introduce a new technological silo through a lack of integration.

Ideally, organizations want a BPM tool that works in conjunction with the wider data management platform and data governance initiative – not one that works against them.

That means it must support data imports and integrations from/with external sources, a solution that enables in-tool collaboration to reduce departmental silos, and most crucial, a solution that taps into a central metadata repository to ensure consistency across the whole data management and governance initiatives.

The lack of a central metadata repository is a far too common thorn in an organization’s side. Without it, they have to juggle multiple versions as changes to the underlying data aren’t automatically updated across the platform.

It also means organizations waste crucial time manually manufacturing and maintaining data quality, when an automation framework could achieve the same goal instantaneously, without human error and with greater consistency.

A central metadata repository ensures an organization can acknowledge and get behind a single source of truth. This has a wealth of favorable consequences including greater cohesion across the organization, better data quality and trust, and faster decision-making with less false starts due to plans based on misleading information.

Three Key Questions to Ask When Choosing a BPM Tool

Organizations in the market for a BPM tool should also consider the following:

1. Configurability: Does the tool support the ability to model and analyze business processes with links to data, applications and other aspects of your organization? And how easy is this to achieve?

2. Role-based views: Can the tool develop integrated business models for a single source of truth but with different views for different stakeholders based on their needs – making regulatory compliance more manageable? Does it enable cross-functional and enterprise collaboration through discussion threads, surveys and other social features?

3. Business and IT infrastructure interoperability: How well does the tool integrate with other key components of data governance including enterprise architecture, data modeling, data cataloging and data literacy? Can it aid in providing data intelligence to connect all the pieces of the data management and governance lifecycles?

For more information and to find out how such a solution can integrate with your organization and current data management and data governance initiatives, click here.

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Why Data Governance and Business Process Management Must Be Linked

Data governance and business process management must be linked.

Following the boom in data-driven business data governance (DG) has taken the modern enterprise by storm, garnering the attention of both the business and technical realms with an explosion of methodologies, targeted systems and training courses. That’s because a major gap needs to be addressed.

But despite all the admonitions and cautionary tales, little attention has focused on what can literally make or break any data governance initiative, turning it from a springboard for competitive advantage to a recipe for waste, anger and ultimately failure. The two key pivot points on which success hinges are business process management (BPM) and enterprise architecture. This article focuses on the critical connections between data governance and business process management.

Based on a True Story: Data Governance Without Process Is Not Data Governance

The following is based on a true story about a global pharmaceutical company implementing a cloud-based, enterprise-wide CRM system with a third-party provider.

Given the system’s nature, the data it would process, and the scope of the deployment, data security and governance was front and center. There were countless meetings – some with more than 50 participants – with protocols sent, reviewed, adjusted and so on. In fact, more than half a dozen outside security companies and advisors (and yes, data governance experts) came in to help design the perfect data protection system around which the CRM system would be implemented.

The framework was truly mind-boggling: hundreds of security measures, dozens of different file management protocols, data security software appearing every step of the way.  Looking at it as an external observer, it appeared to be an ironclad net of absolute safety and effective governance.

But as the CRM implementation progressed, holes began to appear. They were small at first but quickly grew to the size of trucks, effectively rendering months of preparatory work pointless.

Detailed data transfer protocols were subverted daily by consultants and company employees who thought speed was more important than safety. Software locks and systems were overridden with passwords freely communicated through emails and even written on Post-It Notes. And a two-factor authentication principle was reduced to one person entering half a password, with a piece of paper taped over half the computer screen, while another person entered the other half of the password before a third person read the entire password and pressed enter.

While these examples of security holes might seem funny – in a sad way – when you read them here, they represent a $500,000 failure that potentially could lead to a multi-billion-dollar security breach.

Why? Because there were no simple, effective and clearly defined processes to govern the immense investment in security protocols and software to ensure employees would follow them and management could audit and control them. Furthermore, the organization failed to realize how complex this implementation was and that process changes would be paramount.

Both such failures could have been avoided if the organization had a simple system of managing, adjusting and monitoring its processes. More to the point, the implementation of the entire security and governance framework would have cost less and been completed in half the time. Furthermore, if a failure or breach were discovered, it would be easy to trace and correct.

Gartner Magic Quadrant

Data Governance Starts with BPM

In a rush to implement a data governance methodology and system, you can forget that a system must serve a process – and be governed/controlled by one.

To choose the correct system and implement it effectively and efficiently, you must know – in every detail – all the processes it will impact, how it will impact them, who needs to be involved and when. Do these questions sound familiar? They should because they are the same ones we ask in data governance. They involve impact analysis, ownership and accountability, control and traceability – all of which effectively documented and managed business processes enable.

Data sets are not important in and of themselves. Data sets become important in terms of how they are used, who uses them and what their use is – and all this information is described in the processes that generate, manipulate and use them. So, unless we know what those processes are, how can any data governance implementation be complete or successful?

Consider this scenario: We’ve perfectly captured our data lineage, so we know what our data sets mean, how they’re connected, and who’s responsible for them – not a simple task but a massive win for any organization.  Now a breach occurs. Will any of the above information tell us why it happened? Or where? No! It will tell us what else is affected and who can manage the data layer(s), but unless we find and address the process failure that led to the breach, it is guaranteed to happen again.

By knowing where data is used – the processes that use and manage it – we can quickly, even instantly, identify where a failure occurs. Starting with data lineage (meaning our forensic analysis starts from our data governance system), we can identify the source and destination processes and the associated impacts throughout the organization. We can know which processes need to change and how. We can anticipate the pending disruptions to our operations and, more to the point, the costs involved in mitigating and/or addressing them.

But knowing all the above requires that our processes – our essential and operational business architecture – be accurately captured and modelled. Instituting data governance without processes is like building a castle on sand.

Rethinking Business Process Management

Modern organizations need a simple and easy-to-use BPM system with easy access to all the operational layers across the organization – from high-level business architecture all the way down to data. Sure, most organizations already have various solutions here and there, some with claims of being able to provide a comprehensive picture. But chances are they don’t, so you probably need to rethink your approach.

Modern BPM ecosystems are flexible, adjustable, easy-to-use and can support multiple layers simultaneously, allowing users to start in their comfort zones and mature as they work toward the organization’s goals.

Processes need to be open and shared in a concise, consistent way so all parts of the organization can investigate, ask questions, and then add their feedback and information layers. In other words, processes need to be alive and central to the organization because only then will the use of data and data governance be truly effective.

Are you willing to think outside the traditional boxes or silos that your organization’s processes and data live in?

The erwin EDGE is one of the most comprehensive software platforms for managing an organization’s data governance and business process initiatives, as well as the whole data architecture. It allows natural, organic growth throughout the organization and the assimilation of data governance and business process management under the same platform provides a unique data governance experience because of its integrated, collaborative approach.

To learn more about erwin EDGE, and how data governance underpins and ensures data quality throughout the wider data management-suite, download our resource: Data Governance Is Everyone’s Business.

Data Governance is Everyone's Business