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09.22.09 A Successful BPM Initiative Needs Both Decisions And Processes  By
James Taylor
Last week I wrote a piece on the risks of pursuing BPM without decisioning. As promised, here are some thoughts on how to get started. 1. Identify your decisions Step one is to find and name and manage the decisions that matter to your processes. Finding decisions is not always that easy, though it gets easier as you practice. For a BPM initiative, try these specific ways to find decisions: • Hidden decisions, transactional decisions, customer decisions Hidden decisions are those points in the process where you make a decision without realizing it. Where you treat every transaction, every customer the same but not because that's really what you think it the right thing to do. These are the hardest but often the most interesting to find. Transactional and customer decisions are those activities in the process where transaction or customer information is used to change data or handle routing - price this order, cross-sell this customer etc. • Decisions buried in complex processes Any time you have a really complex process, especially one with gateways leading to gateways then you should review it and hunt for decisions buried within it. Harder than the explicit identification of activities while modeling a process, this kind of archeology can be challenging. • Decisions that are the difference between two processes A surprising number of organizations have far fewer processes than they think they have. They think they have multiple processes when they really have a single process with decisioning embedded. Thus a government agency I spoke to found it did not have 30 processes but one process with a single, complex decision about permit approval. They had thought they had one process for each permit when externalizing the decision left them with a single process. Look for similar, related processes and see if they are really different once you externalize the decision. 2. Adopt decisioning technology Having started to document and manage the decisions within your processes you need to adopt some technology to manage them in your automated processes. Most BPMS don't have sufficient decisioning capability (Pega does, Savvion and Intalio are building it today and the rest rely on partners as far as I can see). • Adopt business rules approach and technology The best way to manage the logic in decisions today is to use a business rules management system or BRMS. • Investigate data mining and predictive analytics Many decisions rely on data or, more precisely, on analytic insight derived from data. Some tools to develop this kind of insight will be useful. • Think about adaptive control Experimentation, simulation, impact analysis and other elements of what is known as adaptive control will need to be part of your plan. This approaches/tools allow you to manage the fact that what is a good decision today will not always be a good decision and to evolve and change decisions over time. Continue reading this article. About the Author: VP of Product Marketing with a passion for the technologies of decision automation. 15 years designing, developing, releasing and marketing advanced enterprise software platforms and development tools. Across the board experience in software development, engineering and product management and product marketing. http://www.edmblog.com |
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