Business process management a mandatory approach
Business process management – a mandatory approach
BPM has been well embraced by many organisations as an approach through which IT and human resources can be structured to pull off superior performance standards. Yet, it is the fact that many other organisations are still hesitant to venture into what they consider to be complex, costly and perilous initiatives. What contribute more to their reluctance are the horrible stories of several organisations that have poorly deployed process management tools and technologies. But, can these imperfect experiences with BPM dismiss its far from describing success in enabling the creation of the emerging open business models that dynamically extend themselves to contain new market roles, business entities and technological innovations?
Indeed, an improved interest in BPM has occurred, coupled with a supply side growth in BPM technologies, techniques and practices. BPM has always been a capable tool to engendering competitive advantage through acquiring and integrating best practices into business procedures and functions. This demands the amalgamation of the following different, yet complementary, improvement techniques which together ensure the full process-orientation of an organization:
Benchmarking, knowledge management and process analysis – to discover and understand business processes.
Simulation, workflow and process analysis – to model processes and build scenarios for their execution.
Project management and risk management – to manage process management implementation and mitigate possible risks.
e-Commerce and enterprise application integration – to enable inter-process communication and interaction.
Performance measurement and business intelligence – to monitor processes' behaviors and suggest realignment actions.
Change management – to enable and increase the adaptation of processes into the working environment.
We believe that the aforementioned areas will have a significant impact on the growth and development of BPM concepts and practices. We have recently updated the journal's introductory section on its Web site to cover many areas relating to the new trends in BPM. Furthermore, a number of special issues are being organized to address specific themes relating to the following topics,amongst others:
process outsourcing and application service provider;
customer relationship management;
e-business process management;
Internet-based workflow management;
knowledge and process management; and
performance management in BPM.
BPM will keep growing and developing as the need for improvement and change accelerated by internal and external business forces will never come to an end. Organisations are no longer able to capitalise only on their old ways of acquiring informal business knowledge through time and effecting incremental improvements in a leisurely fashion. In fact, BPM cannot be avoided as it has the strength of being centred on the concept of "business process" which exhibits important features. The elimination of functional bias can only be best done by adopting a process orientation to gain substantial business improvement(Andreu et al., 1997) by focusing on how work is done within the organisation. A process orientation of business operations is also an effective way to lever IT to support greatly the process of business improvement (Morris and Brandon, 1993). A process-based design business provides a potential for gaining a competitive advantage, and is the only way through which a business can be improved to reduce a substantial amount of costs with no effects on quality of outputs. As business processes are the manner in which work gets done within an organisation, they are a distinguishing characteristic among organisations (Venkatraman, 1993), and thus a significant factor leading to competitive edge (Hinterhuber, 1995).
Majed Al-MashariKing Saud University
ReferencesAndreu, R., Ricart,J. and Valor, J. (1997), "Process innovation: changing boxes or revolutionizing organizations?", Knowledge and Process Management,Vol. 4 No. 2, pp. 114-25.Hinterhuber, H. (1995), "Business process management: the European approach", Business Change & Re-engineering,Vol. 2 No. 4, pp. 63-73.Morris, D. and Brandon, J. (1993), Re-engineering your Business, McGraw-Hill, London.Venkatraman, N. (1993), "IT-induced business reconfiguration", in Scott-Morton, M. (Ed.), The Corporation of the 1990s: Information Technology and Organisational Transformation, Oxford University Press, New York, NY, pp. 122-58.
