Business Architecture in a closed-loop process lifecycle

The desire to have adaptive business processes that can be refined and optimized to respond to changing business environment, government regulations and competitive pressures has resulted in the need for closed loop Business Process Management(BPM) system. The following Closed-loop lifecycle diagram of BPM implementation is well known to most of us –

The greatest benefit of the closed-loop process lifecycle is “Continues Process Improvement”. Majority of organizations follows this methodology, however, they start with executable BPMN process modelling. Recently an increasing number of organizations are aligning their Enterprise Architecture discipline to include the entire gamut of Business process Management by adopting an extended-closed-loop lifecycle. Conceptually the extended-closed-loop lifecycle can be depicted as follows–

Business Architecture defines the blue print and high level construct of the organizational processes in terms of Enterprise Map, Value Chain and Strategy Model that describes the business areas, business goals, objectives, strategies and detailed business process steps to achieve the same. A business process step in a value chain is further decomposed into executable business process which not only delivers the business value it meant to; but is also can be monitored and is measurable.

Note: You may refer to my previous post where the convergence of Enterprise Architecture and Business Process Management has been discussed in detail.

In the classic closed-loop BPM lifecycle operational processes are modelled, simulated, deployed and process performance is monitored by defining KPI on the business indicators. To illustrate, a typical “Order Fulfilment” operational process can be modelled to capture business indicators like Sales Volume as a Measure and Zone as a dimension.  These two indicators can be used to define the KPI – “Zone wise Sales Volume for a specific period of time”.

Sometimes Business Architecture is considered as a mare modelling exercise with the goal of creating a repository of process maps. But when the Business Architecture is considered as part of closed-loop process lifecycle, it brings both high level business process and executable business process in the same process lifecycle. It enables the KPIs from executable business processes to roll up to the high level business processes so that the performance of the high level business processes can be monitored and optimized. Ability to measure high level business processes performance is critical for the business owners to refine the business goal, objective and strategy.

In a separate post, I will detail out the steps to derive executable business processes from high level processes and rollup the KPI from your executable process to high level business process using Oracle BPM 12C.