Applying a Role-Based Approach to Business Process Management

With so much emphasis on automation, it’s easy to overlook the human element involved in a business process. But that oversight hinders efficient business process management (BPM).

A business process can easily involve multiple users with different responsibilities, including executives who map out strategic corporate objectives, IT architects and developers who design and automate tasks, and business users who facilitate manual operations, among others. Ideally, to achieve the best business benefit, a BPM suite should incorporate input from and cater to the particular needs of all participants associated with a process.

However, as many businesses discover too late, BPM solutions often promise more than they can deliver in terms of end-to-end process management. Too many vendors fail to tailor their suites to provide the right capabilities for users’ specific roles. As a result, modeling, implementing, and managing processes becomes more difficult.

To address the human component of process management, IBM designed a role-based business interface for its WebSphere Dynamic Process Edition business engine. This browser-based mashup environment, which pulls in content about tasks from multiple sources, helps organizations model, deploy, monitor, and continuously improve key business processes by adjusting to the particular needs of individual business and IT users.

The WebSphere Dynamic Process Edition business engine allows users to customize their own business spaces — a set of pages that encompasses all tasks associated with a business process or application. These role-based business spaces, which ship with WebSphere Dynamic Process Edition, give users access to templates for creating new processes or adapting existing ones. The templates cover several BPM tasks, including business monitoring, modeling, task and workflow management, and policy authoring. Users can collaborate within these business spaces to refine processes.

The interface enables teams to collaborate on specific BPM assets, such as process models. Users can also monitor key performance indicators (KPIs) that track progress in meeting business objectives and key agility indicators (KAIs) that measure how quickly an organization can respond to changes. Team members can also adjust business rules and policies within the same environment.

A Tool for the Times

This out-of-the box collaborative environment helps accelerate development and speed time-to-market. Business users gain better insight into daily operations, knowledge they can use to adapt to meet business requirements. Because the interface allows business users to customize and manage processes with capabilities designed specifically for them, IT resources are freed in favor of high-value technology projects.

In essence, WebSphere Dynamic Process Edition handles everything from process modeling to preproduction testing to execution. The net result is a tool that effectively leverages each participant to create effective and continuous process improvements.

Businesses are putting this role-based interface to work in a number of ways. One European retailer used the interface to successfully implement end-to-end business activity monitoring (BAM) within its supply chain. The company is able to track shipments between its warehouses and distribution centers in order to expedite delivery to its retail stores.

Improved visibility into processes is a key benefit of the interface. A U.S.-based pet store is relying on WebSphere software to better coordinate business processes across the organization. The insight the company gained into its existing accounts payable processes allowed it expedite invoicing and improve the tracking process.

Perhaps the biggest benefit an organization gains from this role-based approach is the opportunity to increase corporate agility. Consider the example of the property and casualty insurer that is using WebSphere to model and simulate how altering business processes will impact KPIs and KAIs. In one project, the firm examined how supplementing existing internal capabilities with the help of a third party partner would help get quotes back to independent agents faster and increase premiums written.

Ultimately, a role-based approach to BPM empowers business users by giving them the operational insight and tools to make improvements dynamically. Ultimately, IBM’s BPM solutions support the kind of agile and effective business moves necessary in an increasingly complex, challenging, and continuously evolving global marketplace.