Introduction to Business Process Management

Business Process Management (BPM) and Enterprise Architecture work together to help organizations reach strategic objectives and drive meaningful organizational change. Whether your goal is to improve digital services to customers, optimize IT systems, or make any other fundamental change to the way your business, processes or technologies operate, these two disciplines help you create a more efficient and future-ready enterprise.

In this article, we’ll look at the importance of BPM and answer the following questions:

• What Is Business Process Management?
• What Key Questions Does Business Process Management Answer?
• Why Is Business Process Management Important for Businesses?
• Business Process Management With Ardoq

What is Business Process Management?

Gartner defines Business Process Management as:

“A discipline that uses various methods to discover, model, analyze, measure, improve, and optimize business processes. A business process coordinates the behavior of people, systems, information and things to produce business outcomes supporting a business strategy. Processes can be structured and repeatable or unstructured and variable. Though not required, technologies are often used with BPM. BPM is key to aligning IT investments to business strategy.”

Some examples of business processes provided by BPMN include:

• Order Fulfillment
• Shipment process
• Customer refund process
• Invoice process
• Customer onboarding
• Account management

Business Process Management (BPM) is crucial because processes do not operate in isolation. Business processes involve many moving parts—people, systems, integrations, data, and interconnected workflows—making them complex and interwoven. The interrelationships can be difficult to identify and manage, especially since many steps are automated and hidden from view. In addition, IT and business professionals often use different terminology when describing change processes, creating confusion and misunderstandings.

This complexity creates a challenge for organizations looking to automate processes, digitalize customer experiences, improve operations, or adapt to regulatory pressures. Changing any element impacts the others, which may be a reason up to 70% of business transformation projects fail.   

BPM addresses this issue by continuously mapping the interrelationships between business strategies, capabilities, processes, people, and technologies. With a clear, up-to-date understanding of the interrelationships within the organization and how each part contributes to success, decision-makers can better communicate their vision, strengthen collaboration, and manage business, process, or technology transformation.

Above: Business processes management and enterprise architecture create links between business and IT, helping leaders navigate change and succeed in their transformation journeys.

Visibility into business processes benefits many people, including: 

• IT and business leaders
• Process managers and process owners
• Process management participants
• Enterprise, business and solution architects
• Business analysts and strategic planners
• Process management participants
• Information security officers
• Risk specialists, auditors and compliance officers

What Key Questions Does Business Process Management Answer?

Some of the key questions BPM helps answer include:

• What are the business processes across my organization?
• Which technologies are used to deliver those processes?
• Which processes enable business capabilities?
• How effective or efficient are my processes in terms of maturity, duration, and automation?
• Who is responsible for the business processes?
• Which processes deal with sensitive data?

Answers to these questions are helpful in many situations, such as:

1. During a reorganization: When an organization needs to merge teams and streamline operations, it needs a clear view of current processes to identify inefficiencies and align operations with new organizational goals. 

2. When planning and executing a merger or acquisition: The overview from BPM helps organizations understand and integrate workflows and evaluate the efficiency and necessity of IT systems connected to those flows.

3. When hiring and onboarding leaders: Insights from BPM provide incoming leaders with a clear understanding of the organization's strategies and workflows. This transparency helps them quickly grasp the organization's operational landscape and sets them up for success.

4. When cutting costs or optimizing IT: BPM helps organizations efficiently analyze and identify ways to rationalize their application portfolios and assess the impact of making IT changes on business processes.

5. When complying with regulatory requirements: Organizations in regulated industries often document key processes in multiple systems. Integrating that information with EA platforms allows process owners, architects, compliance officers, and others to align business processes and dataflows with regulatory requirements.

Why Is Business Process Management Important for Businesses?

By capturing and analyzing processes across the organization, senior decision-makers can realize several benefits associated with having a clear understanding how business capabilities are operationally executed through detailed workflows and activities.These processes may be manual, automated or semi-automated.

1. Improves Visibility and Transparency: BPM provides visibility into how various processes function within the organization. This visibility allows decision-makers to understand how each process contributes to the overall strategy and where improvements can be made.
   
   
2. Facilitates Process Optimization, Standardization and Consistency: BPM helps to standardize processes across the organization, ensuring that tasks are performed consistently and efficiently. This is particularly important for companies that want to streamline operations across multiple locations or comply with industry standards and regulations.
   
   
3. Improves Governance, Compliance and Risk Management: For industries subject to regulatory compliance, business process management helps ensure that all necessary steps in a process are followed and documented appropriately. It also aids in identifying and mitigating risks associated with various business processes.
   
   
4. Aligns Processes with Strategy: BPM helps align business processes with the organization’s strategic objectives. By mapping processes, identifying inefficiencies, and streamlining workflows, BPM ensures that operational activities are aligned with strategic goals.

Business Process Management With Ardoq

Ardoq’s Business Process Management Solution connects business processes to the wider enterprise architecture, enabling organizations to plan and execute enterprise-wide change more effectively.

This includes:

• Identifying business processes and process owners across the organization
• Automatically generating and visualizing high-level flows for each process and activity
• Mapping how processes are connected to business strategies and capabilities ensuring the business stays aligned
• Providing a single source of truth about the technologies and data that are used to deliver the processes
• Analyzing the impact of changing a process on sub-processes, systems or integrations
• Documenting who is accountable and responsible for a processes and align to corporate governance, risk and control frameworks

Ardoq’s Excel import, REST API, and powerful suite of integrations, enables organizations to exchange business process information from specialized tools and integrate that information into the wider EA context. 

Learn more about how business process management with Ardoq can help you get a holistic view of the enterprise. Get in touch to discuss your specific business needs and challenges and how to optimize your strategic planning and decision-making.

FAQs About Business Process Management

What Is a Business Process Versus a Business Capability?

Business processes and business capabilities provide a comprehensive view of organizational performance and potential, aiding both strategic decision-making and day-to-day operations. A business capability is a more abstract concept that describes the organization's capacity to achieve a specific business outcome or goal. Capabilities reflect the organization’s potential or ability to perform a set of related activities, regardless of how these activities are performed and what processes are used. A business process is a structured set of activities that are performed to produce a specific service or product for a group of customers or stakeholders. Processes are about the execution of activities (the "how”), whereas capabilities focus on the capacity or ability of the organization to perform specific activities or functions, in other words the “what”. 

For more information, see What Are the Differences Between Business Capabilities, Processes, and Value Streams?