Common Ground between IT and Business
A significant problem in modern business is, paradoxically, the end-result of increased professionalism. With greater experience, more powerful tools, regular training courses and more time on the job, individual departments and their staff become more and more specialised, and constantly improve their daily work. However, that also means that they find it increasingly difficult to step outside their speciality as everybody else is going through the same process of specialisation as well.
A line manager in an enterprise spends years learning his craft, refining understanding and solving departmental problems. Similarly, an IT manager spends the same years learning her craft, going to courses, solving problems, and creatively maximising the ROI from ever-decreasing budgets. These two managers are experienced, intelligent, competent, articulate. Unfortunately, they cannot tell each other what they need, how they could help each other, or even, how their individual skill sets contribute to the enterprise.
Part of general management’s role involves seeing the larger picture, and ensuring that teams with different skill sets can work collaboratively with other teams and departments in the organisation. The highly specialised and constantly changing world of IT makes it difficult to manage the collaboration between information technology and the rest of the enterprise. However, the importance of IT in many organisations means that failure here is not a realistic option.
To communicate, business and IT users cannot depend on shared experience. Therefore, they have to rely on a shared language.
Or at least, that was the conclusion reached some years ago by a group of leading system integrators, consultants and software vendors. This group came together under the name “BPMI.org”, and began creating that language, which they called the Business Process Management Notation (BPMN).
This article provides a basic description of the ‘what’ and ‘how’ of BPMN, an ambitious and increasingly successful attempt to describe the grammar, syntax and semantics of a common language for technology and business. As the only global initiative of its kind, BPMN is recognised as the de facto industry standard, and is well on the way to establishing itself as the official industry standard as well.
A Problem in the Past…
To understand both the dynamic of BPMN and why it represents a solution, we only need to look at the past. Traditionally, a business user described business needs, often on pieces of paper, though modern presentations use more sophisticated tools like Visio or PowerPoint. This description served as a non-technical blueprint for technical developers. They were responsible for “translating” these business needs into practical technical realities.
Even that, a short schematic description dramatically highlights the problems in this approach – duplicated effort, possibilities for misunderstanding, and the impossibility of reusing work because no business user uses precisely the same “notation” (for reasons of both personal style, and increasingly specialised departmental terminologies).
BPMN Advantages
As BPM execution software becomes more widespread, the need grows for an easy-to-use programme that business users can use to map a process, and technical users can use to build integration into the overall system. BPMN is the link that ties these two steps together. BPMN’s graphical terms and symbols are structured into a sequence that represents the flow for each business process. The depth of information held in each symbol is tailored to different user populations. A simplistic example: the business user looks at one symbol and sees “process incoming invoice”. The IT user looks at the same symbol and sees “open external connection using HTTP protocol and receive incoming file”.
This approach of “same symbol – different technical content” is key to extracting the full benefit from the BPMN. It lets business users create and understand the development of a business process from as high a level as is appropriate to their understanding, position, and involvement. Technical developers on the other hand, with a much deeper insight into the technical realities hidden inside those symbols, can integrate the process into the technology infrastructure.
BPMN thus confers three separate but interdependent advantages.
First, the value of a business process model is only unlocked when that process is deployed in a production environment, not while it remains in a memo, or worse, someone else’s memory. BPMN helps unlock that value by externalising the process in a mutually agreed and understood form. With a symbological approach that is primarily visual and graphic, BPMN makes it easier for both sides to understand an agreed set of symbols, and work with them to describe their individual contributions to the business process.
Second, a standard notation increases the possibilities of future capitalisation on past investments. Initially, BPMN speeds process deployment in the present. However, as processes are successfully designed and rolled out, parts of those operational processes can be reused. Within the enterprise, this creates a virtuous circle of ever more efficient, adapted, and powerful process deployments.
Third, a standard notation extends this virtuous circle outside the enterprise since communication is standardised around a symbology, which the entire industry shares in common. Part of the richness of BPMN follows from the fact that many different enterprises have participated in its input and design. Today, those external consultants, service providers, software vendors and system integrators are all using the same notation. This implies that BPMN offers complete freedom of choice when calling on third-party services or external software.
BPMN and Process Lifecycles
One of the important criteria in the development of the BPM Notation was to create a set of symbols that could be shared between different technical “cultures”, and applied throughout the life of a business process. Modeling aids, for example, can help in the process definition phase, but do not provide the next step of technical implementation. Nevertheless, as the BPMI.org discovered from previous experience in software domains like workflow, document management, and the newly developing Business Process Management, even this was not enough. Beyond creation and technical implementation, management needs to be able to monitor and track the execution of business processes, not just locate and correct problems, but also analyse their execution and design ways to improve the process. The cycle must then repeat itself to produce an increasingly optimised business process. BPMN had to make provision for the entire business process lifecycle.
Interestingly, one of the “soft” benefits reported by early adopters of the BPMN approaches is that it genuinely does bring business and IT staff into collaborative cooperation. It is more than just a notation in some file, but with a human face – in some cases, for the first time ever.
BPMN’s shared symbology allows business users and developers to work collaboratively on all lifecycle phases. Business users thus acquire a “user-friendly” version of the developer programmes. Business users can map the flow of a process, outlining and positioning events, tasks and information flows, and specifying the timing and interrelationships that link them together. The developers can build in the constraints, time-outs, and exemption clauses, adding code where needed to retrieve and forward data.
The initial stages of creation and implementation in particular require a lot of interaction. After the technical user integrates the process and adds required parameters and constraints, the business user must check to ensure that the process still meets the business needs. Often, this review procedure must be repeated, but the end-result justifies spending time on this part of the cycle, which is crucial to ensuring the eventual success of the process in production.
Just as important is ongoing process maintenance. As business needs evolve and new processes are introduced to the system, existing processes need continual review and realignment. This “optimisation” stage helps to ensure that processes address longer-term business needs.
To extract maximum benefit, two aspects of the definition and rollout process are critical. First is the question of time and timing. If it takes too long to create, review, and implement a business process, then in a fluid, evolving business environment, that process might address yesterday’s need rather than today or tomorrow’s. Next is the problem of flexibility. A process that is too rigid or difficult to change might meet today’s need perfectly, but fail for tomorrow’s. The response must include rapid process turnaround, which in turn determines the level of corporate efficiency and agility.
Part of what makes BPMN so useful in resolving these problems and supplying that response is that it is visual.
Vision and Graphics
BPMN supplies a visually focused, symbolic mapping programme. The effect goes beyond a mere reduction of confusion in the technico-business dialogue. It also improves efficiencies, and ultimately, that impacts the bottom-line for the business. A small but critical example: the investment required to bring both sides up to speed on a BPMN-based programme is surprisingly small. Generally, individual users learn how to use the tools and symbols in the notation in about a day. As a result, the payback on that investment is almost immediate.
Developers use a more advanced version of the same programme to clearly understand the flow that was created, and the business issue that it addresses. Involved in the reasons behind a process, technical implementers are better placed to integrate the process appropriately into the overall business.
Independence of the BPMI.org
Visibly, given the scope, coverage and importance of such a notation for both business and IT, no single enterprise could impose such a notation on the business community. An industry-accepted notation is needed to accommodate the constantly shifting worlds of business and IT. Legacy policies and processes require updating and aligning, many business processes involve third parties, and any organisation in acquisition or merger needs to integrate policies seamlessly. BPMN is the only industry-accepted visualisation language available. Furthermore, it is a notation that major vendors in the market have invested in, and adopted. BPMN has shaped vendor efforts to improve traditional process creation and management through innovations such as the incorporation of swim lanes.
Swim Lanes and Process Ownership
The importance of the swim lane lies in its place at the backbone of any process: its flow, which is rather complex even for ‘simple’ tasks. For example, booking a doctor’s appointment. The patient (1) requests an appointment from the receptionist, who (2) processes the request. The receptionist in turn (3) notifies the relevant doctor, who (4) accepts the request. That (5) returns an answer to the receptionist, who then (6) confirms the appointment with the patient (always assuming no technical or scheduling problems intervene). In this “simple” case, doctors and receptionists “own” different parts of the process – swim lanes help enable, identify and communicate that ownership. When parts of one process are reused in subsequent deployments, swim lanes can be capitalised for faster development. Equally important, clear ownership identification helps locate and flag bottlenecks in deployed processes.
Fig. 1: The BPMN Modeler
Extending the BPMN: Automatic Graph Layout
Ultimately, it is the business user’s role to make sure a process solves a business need. However, it is common for processes to become excessively complex – too many people, data sources, and impossibly convoluted structures. BPMN helps to correct these problems.
Automatic Graph Layout, an BPMN extension, is an algorithm that optimises process drawing. Using this extension, business users can create processes more efficiently because they can insert activities without displacing objects around them. Furthermore, both business and technical users can understand the processes more rapidly and therefore detect issues or possible improvements swiftly. Although this service is not part of the BPMN standard, it nicely complements the notation by ensuring readable diagrams at all levels of complexity or size.
Extending the BPMN: Dynamic Decorations
The BPMN notation can be extended to meet application- or industry-specific needs in monitoring the execution of individual operations within a process. Here, dynamic decorations are the most appropriate. Typically used in dashboards, they return clear information to operational users, enabling them to react quickly when needed. Dynamic decorations can be configured so that they display what is required to the people who need it. As with the Graph Layout, using BPMN to monitor the execution of processes goes beyond the standard. However, using a consistent notation during all phases of the process lifecycle is a tremendous advantage for everyone involved in the definition, monitoring, and improvement of business processes.
Obviously, both skilled developers and time are required to BPMN-enable an application. Alternatively, developers can use user interface toolkits to accelerate the process development and reduce risks. The initial costs are rapidly covered by sharply reduced development time. Some toolkits even offer out-of-the-box BPMN support, automatic graph layout, and diagram animation – in which case, time-to-market is reduced to its bare minimum.
As the notation continues to find wide industry acceptance and becomes more prevalent in the developer community, it will certainly gain further credibility. Competitive organisations realise the importance of moulding technology around business needs (rather than the other way around). Business users cannot avoid getting more involved in establishing and managing technology. BPMN will continue to act as the interface between the developer and business communities, to ensure that technology meets the organisational needs.
The notation is available free of charge, and is poised to have an impact similar to that of UML in the world of software engineering. Please visit www.bpmi.org for more information.
About the Author
Patrick Mégard is director of Visualisation Products at ILOG, a company he joined in 1995. He specialises in Workflow and Business Process Management at ILOG, and represents ILOG at the Workflow Management Consortium (WfMC) and the Business Process Management Initiative (BPMI). Prior to his current position, Patrick was director of Visualisation R&D at ILOG.
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