Business Process Modelling No.1 Talent being Sought by IT Departments‏

Is Business Process Modelling of any value? It seems that it is valuable. Foote Partners’ CEO David Foote says “what’s unique about this downturn is that IT departments are hiring talent in certain areas – such as business process modeling and project management – while laying off in others connected to weak product lines.”

And, indeed, coming in at the top of the list was Business Process Modeling:

Business process management, methodology and modeling is one of the few IT niches that saw pay gains in the fourth quarter of 2008, according to the quarterly IT salary survey compiled by Foote Partners. In particular, companies were willing to pay for workers with ITIL IT best practices and CobiT IT governance experience. Pay for these skills was up 10.3% from a year ago and 5.6% from the previous quarter, the Foote report says.

Kevin Faughnan, director of IBM’s Academic Initiative, says business process modeling is one of the key skills that business majors should be studying. “It’s about how does our business work, what are the business processes and how do we analyze them,” Faughnan says, adding that this is a key issue for companies to consider before applying IT to solve business problems.

This seems to make sense to me. It is always important to know your business processes in order to be able to modify and refine them to keep pace with change… and today there is an extra helping of change that we all must not only keep pace with but get ahead of. Business Process Modeling is a key first step.

I believe this is excellent news and hopefully it will be understood by the wider global market place. Why? Business Process Modeling done well delivers a raft of efficiency and performance improvement.

As Napoleon Bonaparte said, "a picture is worth a thousand words". Process "models" are certainly useful tools for managers to visualize process and intended results.

But models alone are often not enough. During a process improvement exercise, interviews with process participants yield a theoretical, future, and intended-to-be improved "picture" of the process itself. This visual model attempts to communicate how the process will be improved.
For many, visualization best illustrates the overall flow (actions and decisions) and—depending on the type of process diagram—resources that act in a process. The goal, of course, is to intuitively reveal the expected process enhancements. These "models" also provide emotional buy-in for the proposed progression.

By themselves, however, models can be misleading. A process has many factors that lead to improvements beyond the re-arranging, consolidation, and overall optimization of activities and resources. The area of Information or data management is one of the underestimated areas in Business Process Management (BPM).

Reducing duplication is only part of information change. What about information omissions? Information management in BPM is also about the informal exchange of corporate assets in the form of e-mails, phone calls, and other casual communication. The cost of not measuring and managing such information sharing can be enormous. To understand these costs, imagine a crucial employee who suddenly is unable to work. In his or her absence, many organizational processes would not only suffer, but would also stop since critical corporate information often resides in the minds of individual contributors.

Just as BPM's tools often excel at consolidating duplication information, it can also expose information that is not visible today as a corporate asset. With proper planning, when a resource or activity goes amiss, the business can recover quickly because they know what was being done, when it was done, what progress has been made, and where the information is available for a supplementary resource. Such capability is important in our every global economy where a back-up of a process may be a corporate resource half way around the world.

Following a BPM methodology that addresses the reality of such information management needs is important. It is critical to identify duplicate corporate information as well as spot critical orphaned information hiding in business activates. A large financial services company recently identified several critical areas of data duplication and a need for improved data management.

The institution had the ability to leverage a full BPM Suite not only to manage orphaned process data, but also to re-use existing corporate assets in order to reduce errors, shrink process complexity, increase process throughput, and provide overall improved customer satisfaction.

Please tell me of your experiences in benefitting from Business Process Modelling.