business process discovery == Align Journal - Aligning IT and Business Strategy

Align Journal - Aligning IT and Business Strategy

這篇談到 business process discovery 的做法，只有純文字。

Five Steps for Implementing Business Process Discovery to Maximize Business Process Management

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by Stuart Burris
November 28, 2007



Business Process Discovery (BPD) is a new set of technology that enables organizations–-from C-level down to the IT department–-to automatically discover and analyze their current business processes. The technology works by examining processes as they are executing in the supporting technology. Although BPD is a new concept, the good news is it’s easy to get started and quickly delivers real benefit to an organization.



BPD provides a new way to quickly discover business processes using the process artifacts found in the supporting technology. Analyzing the business process using the facts of process evidence provides two important benefits. First, BPD provides a quantitative view of the current state of your business processes. This allows detailed analysis of both the root causes as well as the costs of the process inefficiency, letting organizations quantify the benefit of improving the process. Second, BPD provides this data from a process perspective. BPD produces explicit, fully quantified process representations. This allows any Business Process Management (BPM) initiative to leverage the process models from BPD as the current “as-is” starting point.



Given these two facts, BPD provides organizations a process-centric business intelligence solution. By providing detailed, real-time analytics based on a process model of operations, BPD enables the ability to efficiently analyze, report, and manage tremendous amounts of event-level data. This allows organizations to continuously optimize their operations by repeating a quick cycle of process discovery, analysis, and improvement.



Quick Start Guide



Getting started with BPD is easy. BPD solutions all embody the following properties:



· Emergent paradigm: An automated discovery process relies on collecting data from the information system over a period of time. This data can then be analyzed to form a process model.

· Automated process discovery: The system has an ingrained methodology that has been shown, through repeated trials, to accurately discover processes and process variations without bias.

· Complete Information: An automated process captures all the information that’s occurring within the system and represents it by time, date, user, etc. Since the information is collected from the real-time interactions, it isn’t subject to lost or selective memory issues. This includes completeness of the information regarding exceptions in the processes. Often, exceptions are treated as statistical “noise.” This may ignore important inefficiencies in business processes.

· Standardized process: The automated collection of information will provide data on the process that can be grouped as quantified and classified. This provides the basis for the development and monitoring of both a current and new process to which benchmarks can be assigned.



The first two properties indicate that any BPD solution should be able to quickly observe your technology systems and automatically build a process model. The third and fourth properties provide that any BPD system gives a complete and standard process model, allowing you to accurately analyze the data without bias. In practice, because BPD is easy and automated, the best way to get started is to execute a mini-BPD project.



Step 1: Identify a Set of Business Challenges



The first step is to identify a small set of current business challenges. Any modern business has many business processes with many supporting technology sets. While BPD certainly can apply to an enterprise scope, it’s quicker to prove the value by limiting the initial scope to a set of processes that are currently a pain point for the business.



Limiting the scope brings a small controllable example that will allow for a quick process of discovery and validation. Because BPD is by design an iterative process, moving from a small scope to larger scope is natural as the scope of process discovery and analytics grows.



Step 2: Select Candidate Vendors



Bring BPD vendors into the process early. As this is a new and emerging field, the vendor should be willing to step beyond the vendor role and provide valuable insights as a partner to your process. There’s a great deal of learning about the methodology, value, and communication of the benefits of BPD. Select a vendor based on their ability to help you quickly prove the merits of the approach to your organization.



Step 3: Scope and Value Assessment



Once your vendor is chosen, a quick scope and value assessment should be performed. This quick, usually one- or two-day exercise, allows everyone involved–-from users, process owners, executive sponsors, IT, and the vendor–-to get on the same page as to the exact process, challenges, and supporting technology that define the scope of the BPD effort.



Step 4: Execute Your Mini-Project



Having defined the scope, expectations, and potential value of addressing those issues, it’s time to start your mini-BPD project. This being your first project, you will of course need to go through the standard software installation process. For BPD, this should be a relatively straightforward process of having the vendor work with the hardware/infrastructure and security groups. As is typical, the actual installation process is much shorter than the meetings with security/infrastructure. However, as BPD will provide process analytics and analysis of event-level data, it’s critical to have your information security groups evaluate the solution to ensure adequate controls.



Once you’ve gone through the installation process, typically less than a day, it’s time to get started.



Step 4a: Discover Pilot Processes



With the BPD solution installed and running, let it collect some data about your processes. While it does depend on the processes you’re observing, most business processes produce enough activity for BDP solutions to accumulate adequate information for meaningful analysis within a week.



After collecting process execution activity for a week, the BPD analyst starts examining the processes discovered. It’s important to note that the processes discovered by BPD are much richer than a typical top-down process model. BPD is able to include all process variations and exceptions, as well as provide for myriad ways to examine different views of the process data.



Having this complete picture is essential to any BPD project, as often the challenges faced by the business represent exceptions from the normal business process. For example, if we’re looking at a call center’s operational processes, it may not be the “typical” call that’s causing the issues, but rather, the business trying to get control of the costs and time required for the 10 percent of the calls that are “atypical” in some sense.



By providing complete information, BPD allows the analyst to dig into these process variations to discover what root cause(s) are giving rise to the greatest costs.



Step 4b: Analyze Processes for Inefficiencies and Opportunities



This is the heart of any BPD project. Since BPD keeps all the data related to process execution, the analyst has the ability to evaluate the process to determine the root cause of the inefficiency. By focusing on slow or costly process steps and narrowing down the data to view associated with those process steps, the analysts can formulate a hypothesis as to the business issues leeching value out of the process.



It’s in this respect that BPD acts as a process lens to business intelligence. By examining your operational data in its native process model form, the analyst is able to quickly and easily pinpoint process issues and inefficiencies. By using the process model, BPD allows analysts to interactively analyze, interrogate, and query real-time process data to find process issues as they occur.



Step 4c: Quantify Process Improvement Options



Armed with a detailed knowledge of the process issues, improvement options can be formulated. The improvement options can range from technology-related to purely process-related. For example, BPD projects have shown where small changes in the technology-supported workflows can result in an 80 percent improvement in process cycle times. At the other end of the spectrum, BPD has been used to identify policy and training issues that dramatically impact the process costs.



Regardless of the improvement, the quantified process data from BPD allows you to fully quantify the expected value delivered from implementing the process improvement. The improvement can be valued based on the change to the as-is model that would result from the implementation. The direct benefit can then be calculated based on the decrease in costs associated with the process steps. For example, consider a process where an extra step is taken 15 percent of the time at a cost of $20/per time. (This cost could be the blended cost of external processing costs as well as internal staff required to manage this process step. It’s interesting to note that often BPD helps determine process costs by giving accurate detailed timings of the amount of staff time required to execute process steps.) The improvement may expect to reduce the incidence of the extra step to just 10 percent. Based on the processing count out of BPD, we now can easily quantify the expected savings.



Step 4d: Implement and Validate Process Improvement



Having a fully quantified, detailed analysis of the business process issues and expected ROI of the business process improvement options, the next step is to implement some set of improvement options. The power of BPD is the impact and value of these improvements, which can be measured and validated through the continued use of BPD to monitor process execution. This leads to continuous process optimization, where BPD can be consistently used to discover, analyze, quantify, and measure process inefficiencies.



Step 5: Deployment



Once the mini-BPD project validates the value that BPD can bring to your organization, the final step is to fully deploy the solution and use BPD projects to grow the scope of the BPD solution. As the BPD deployment grows, BPD provides not only the ability to discover and act upon process issues, but also serves as part of the overall corporate intelligence through the dissemination of process reports and metrics.



Summary



BPD is a powerful combination of analytics and business process. By providing a way to automatically discover and analyze a fully quantified business process, business process improvement efforts become shorter and less risky. Smaller, targeted improvement efforts with incremental changes to the as-is result in quantified ROI, all as a result of knowing, based on facts, the exact current business processes. Because of this, getting started is easy, low risk, and opens a door to a whole new way of looking at business processes and process analytics.