As Sharp and McDermot demonstrated in ‘Workflow Modelling’, the question, ‘What is a business process?’ is surprisingly difficult to answer. As a business analyst, it’s definitely something you should know about.

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes

The above model, based on a model from Rummler Brache, demonstrates how any business process operates in the context of:

• The external environment, that is outside their control but which they have to align with
• Suppliers of resources linked in often complex and increasingly international supply chains
• Partners
• Customers for their services and products
• Competition for their customers and their suppliers: this affects their costs and their pricing
• Sources of finance
• Executives and “owners”:

The box labelled ‘Processes’, in the middle of the diagram holds sets of related business processes that co-operate across the organisation to create and deliver products and services to customers. We say that the processes deliver value to customers. The sets of related processes are referred to as value chains. There may be a number of value chains processes operating across an organisation.

For more views on this model, see:

• ‘White Spaces Revisited’ by Rummler
• ‘The Basics of Business Process Mapping’, by Damelio

Processes and value

Organisations, commercial and non commercial, serve groups of people and/or organisations who can be regarded as clients or customers. It is essential that every organisation understands what these customers value. The organisation must develop processes to create and deliver that value.

Organisations may opt to compete primarily on the basis of one of the following:

• Operational excellence – Having the most ‘efficient’ processes
• Product leadership – Having the ‘best’ products
• Customer relationship – Exceptional customer service

Obviously successful organisations need to excellent on all of these things, perhaps in particular, customer relationships. But they are likely to optimise their for one above the others. Different customers value different aspects of service. Consider the customers of MacDonalds and those of a top restaurant. The processes will be very different.

Business process improvement must be based on:

• Understanding of the customers
  • Awareness of what they value
• A strategy based on this awareness
• Constant assessment of process performance and customer behaviour
• Continual monitoring of the external environment with its threats and opportunities

This is the basis for boosting business agility, i.e. responding quickly and effectively to change.

Identifying processes in the value chains

We can identify the individual processes in each value chain. It may be more convenient to refer to activities rather than processes so that we don’t get hung up, for the moment, over the definition of a process and what is and isn’t a process.

Top 3 rows of Zachman column, ‘How’ – The Processes

In our article on business agility, we examine the Zachman framework for an architecture. Here, we consider processes in that framework.

The top three rows of the ‘How’ column are concerned with defining and modelling the business processes. The language of these rows is the language of the business stakeholders.

• Row 1: Contextual. Try to list all of your organisation’s core and support business processes.
• Row 2: Conceptual. Try to identify the areas of activity that your organisation is concerned with.  Highlight the dependencies between these areas. Peter Checkland pioneered the development of such models, in what he termed, ‘Soft Systems Methodology’. For more on this topic, see, ‘Soft Systems Methodology Thinking, Methodology and the Management of Change’ by Happeren and Wilson.
• Row 3: Logical. Logical process models are popularly shown in the form of swim lane diagrams, a technique pioneered by Rummler Brache. Popular notations for such models include Business Process Modelling Notation (BPMN) and UML Activity Diagrams.

Lower 3 rows of Zachman column, ‘How’ – The Processes

The lower three rows of the Zachman framework are concerned with increasingly technical views of how the business processes are supported by IT.

These rows are of interest primarily to technical strategists and architects and to those roles that are responsible for making purchasing decisions on systems software and hardware.

The business analyst should be able to contribute to discussions on IT strategy for technical support of business processes. The business analyst should therefore have, at least, an appreciation of the technology. They need to be aware of what technologies are available, e.g. for automating workflows.

Each process interacts with other elements

The Zachman model demonstrated how business processes interacted with other architecutural elements.

A business process:

• Creates, views, modifies and deletes business data
• Is constrained by business business rules
• Operates across locations and organisation units
• Is the responsibility of particular stakeholders
• Is triggered according to business timings
• Has a rationale in terms of its support for business objectives

Note the Zachman model does not have a column for business rules. Zachman said that rules can apply to all columns.

What are core and support processes?

Many of an organisation’s business processes provide routine support.

A critical subset are strategically important and deliver the value created by a business. These are the core processes. The goals of these processes are crucially linked to the strategic objectives of the organisation.

All organisations must continually find ways to incrementally improve business process performance. Many such approaches to improvement are inspired by ideas from Japanese manufacturing sectors. See, for example, the publication, ‘This is Lean’, by Modig.

If any core business process is not effectively supporting the business strategy and goals we may need to take a more radical approach to improvement. Radical improvement was the subject of Hammer and Champy’s ‘Re-engineering the Corporation‘ some years back. That approach spawned a number of later ideas and approaches.

If there is a change to the environment in which the organisation operates, prompting a need to change strategic goals and approach, then one or more core processes will probably need to be changed.

Business process design

View this article for some simple but essential principles of process design.