Hi community,
Given that business process design is now more than ever important in defining business operations (and ranging from fine-grained automation detail to high-level business compliance and staff training) I’m interested in hearing what others think needs to be improved or evolved in a modern process description.
How can we be more explicit in Process Definition yet also more concise, to better align with new business & technical expectations?
We have come a long way, from brown paper and sticky notes to online process drawing tools, but to me, there still feels a big (even confusing) gap between the business view/description of a process and how a supportive technical team might wish to understand the same thing, when say requested to implement an automated “next state” solution.
Please share your thoughts.
One of the big changes over the past decade or so has been the shift away from a single modeling standard to a set of them.
UML, BPMN and ArchiMate are three of the more well-known ones.
The direction has been to use these standards to complement each other and build up not only a complete model but a complete interconnected model.
A business process can be modeled in BPMN and also in ArchiMate yet they should represent the same thing, albeit from different perspectives.
A business process in BPM defines a recognized distinct defined undertaking in a business environment with a specific business-related purpose. IN BPMN these processes interact with each other and each one is composed of activities.
In ArchiMate, a business process is part of the overall structure and flow of business collaborations, activities, services, and so on.
The best way to produce a structured and useful model of all this instead of an amorphous block of things is to define each process and consist of whatever representations are useful to you at any given time but ensure that any process is represented, however, you choose to represent it, only once.
If you choose to represent a process as a doublet of a BPMN and ArchiMate business process then make sure there is only one doublet per process and make sure each member of the double is associated with the other.
That way, as your model grows and evolves, you can represent it in the appropriate context without ending up without multiple versions of "Bank Loan Application" all over the place.
Other possible approaches include defining a hybrid stereotype to incorporate both standards, using one notation everywhere, or setting up a hyperlink based relation
Cheers,
Allan
I favour a top-down approach to any specification.
1. I often use a UML activity diagram for this type of 'complexity reduction analysis' because it is easy to model the complexity hierarchically (drill down if interested)
2. Start with broadstrokes top-level activities in client speak.
3. If the activity deed elaboration - create a child diagram from it.
4. Do that recursively as required
* Essentially diagrams should not be overly complex (ideally printable on A4).
* This aids cognition by interested parties of diverse backgrounds and expertise.
However, where complexity does need elaboration then use the hierarchical structure alluded to above (win-win).
If I knew how to share an image I would post it here.
The tool I use is not specific to Business Process - and indeed it does have specific BPMN and other business Process diagram capabilities. Experts in this field will have their own preferences.
I like the basic UML Activity diagram because it is powerful and simple to use.
The tool I am using here is Enterprise Architect by Sparx - an affordable but powerful Analysis/design/code generation tool that does so much more. It has loads of diagrams and model types.
Hope that helps?
Terry
I have tried to understand the two main things:
1. Who is involved? and
2. What is the end goal?
Once I understand these 2 things, I then start working towards the middle.
I use Obsidian to define each of the actors, processes, definitions, what connects to each thing, etc.
I have been venturing into this space to help other companies figure out what they want to accomplish and what tools that are out there (low code/no code) is best to implement for their use case. I enjoy good complex debates.
Hi @Tracy Hautenen Kriel, @Dawn McClure, @MichaelSukachev, @Shankar HN and @Santosh Kurakula,
Can you please share your professional thoughts with your peer, @Ian Ramsay?
Thanks!