Business process management – the chameleon

By Prof. August-Wilhelm Scheer, Founder, Chairman and Chief Technology Advisor of IDS Scheer

“BPM is like a chameleon. The topic is highly adaptive and serves countless uses”
-August-Wilhelm Scheer

In the last several years, the concept of business process management has been characterized and interpreted in many different ways. The term has been applied to a variety of fields extending from strategic innovation to IT support and on to automation. Sometimes the expression is used in a business management sense, sometimes in a technical sense, occasionally in a strategic sense, and in an operational context as well. It’s no wonder that one feels compelled to ask what aspect is actually implied when business process management is discussed. The concept is a bona fide chameleon.

Business process management gained popularity thanks to the management books written by US consultant Michael Hammer and James Champy. In 1993, they published a book auspiciously entitled Reengineering the Corporation: A Manifesto for Business Revolution with which they brought the topic of business processes to the upper echelons and raised great expectations. However, a company cannot be reorganized by opaque wording and zealous demands alone.

One also had to lay the groundwork. Methods and tools were necessary to describe business processes in a clear and detailed manner. And that is where IDS Scheer came in with its ARIS product to help build that foundation.

Generally, a business process is a sequence of task steps that when executed will achieve an operational result. A business process can be part of a higher-level business process, exist next to another business process, or control a lower-positioned one. Every business process has a beginning and an end. For example, it governs how a company executes a customer order, creates a product, prepares a financial statement, or manages its procurement. No company could exist without business processes, whether they are clearly defined or run unbeknownst to us.  Accordingly, business process management deals with the systematic planning, control, execution, and analysis of business processes in accordance with a company’s objectives. These can include cost reduction, more innovation, and greater customer satisfaction, or internal goals like improved communications and collaboration.
Once a concept was in place, process modeling became increasingly accepted as a design and documentation means for operational business process management. The ERP world discovered the concept because only by improving business processes can customers be made aware of the systems’ benefits. As ERP systems were implemented, process models became a critical aid that enabled departments to understand the contents and configure systems in a process-oriented manner. However, even workflow providers who supported the flow of documents in a company suddenly labeled their technology as “process management.” But that only addresses the technical execution-level and disregards the operational design part of it. Process engines in a middleware role and representing a technical platform for application systems are also associated with the process notion. Thus, new BPM-related aspects and application areas continue to pop up without the proponents themselves having a uniform picture of what business process management is.

With the expansion of the Internet, business process management is growing beyond corporate boundaries. Business partners develop common business processes to eliminate redundancy and misunderstandings, and to create transparent structures. Virtual companies are born into existence as are new forms of cooperation. It is therefore all the more important to have a joint understanding based upon standardized documentation and terminology realms.

Besides business processes like procurement and sales, complex management issues such as quality management, corporate governance, and compliance management, which themselves represent business processes, can be tackled with the help of business process management. Once a company has a handle on its operational processes and has them linked to the flow of information, then management processes can also be supported.

The topic’s layered depth and universal scope explain the widespread dissemination of business process management, but also its critical weakness. A business process can only run effectively if it is described, executed by IT, and finally monitored. These steps require an integrative concept that encompasses a business process’s complete lifecycle. In ARIS, IDS Scheer has developed an architectural model that ensures all the steps take place from the integration of strategic planning, to execution, and on to monitoring. Given the new service-oriented architectures, information technology has fully developed to the point that operational business process models become the starting point for configuring applications. And that opens a new dimension in business process management.

It has been now twenty five years – from the first modeling attempts to today’s all-encompassing business process management. In order to beat the competition, companies need to stand out from each other. There is no doubt that such differentiation requires innovative business ideas and models. The inter-connectedness between business models, business processes, and IT architectures now enables companies to flexibly tailor processes to new demands – from the management level to execution and on to monitoring by every individual at every workstation. The various aspects of business process management thus acquire a meaning and it becomes clear that they fit into an all-inclusive complex – just like the diverse colors of our aforementioned chameleon.

Looking to the future
The basic ideas that have determined the development of the ARIS concept from the very beginning are still guiding IDS Scheer now, namely supporting the generation and adaptation of information systems from business organization ideas, which is now known as model-driven software development. For the company, this means combining ARIS with new software technologies, particularly the SOA approach (service-oriented architecture). At the same time, IDS Scheer is constantly improving the user-friendliness of its systems, as expressed by the call for 'models to the people'.

Also, IDS Scheer's far-reaching strategic partnerships with major international IT companies and the own international sales and consulting activities provide a platform to take the ARIS concept out further into the world.

I am confident that in spite of the 25-year development history of business process management with ARIS, the concept's greatest success is yet to come.  We believe that in future it will not just be specialists working with our systems; it will be nearly every employee in a company. Every employee has to understand how they are integrated into a company's business processes. By knowing the processes and constantly adapting them, we are promoting flexibility, security, transparency and efficiency for companies.