EA 872 Week 4 Blog

I would like to reflect on business process architecture.  It seems that most companies have forgot this is an important part of the business.  We have become so accustomed to having software applications or systems dictate our processes, that it seems we have lost the art of creating our own.

In my EA 873 class we are focusing on Business Architecture, modeling and business process management.  As part of our assignments is to research how companies are using business process architecture and how mature their process are.  What I am finding is that company are not investing a lot of time and energy into this area.  Most companies are leaving this up to the system or software vendors to dictate process.  This seems to be a very backwards way of thinking in that how would the software and or vendor know how the business is run, let alone what processes makes sense and which do not.

In some cases the business process could be a competitive advantage or business differentiator.  Take the Coke Company, if they were to give away their recipe, they would be out of business.  Apply that same thinking to certain business process, if companies were to use the same process they may gain that same advantage.  The company I work for is manufacturing company, we use a proprietary way of manufacturing with the Surface Mount technology (SMT) machines for building our Printed Circuit Boards (PCB).  If this were to get out some of our additive benefits we provide to our customers would be lost and could cost us business.

That was just one example, but they are more such as payroll processes or HR onboarding processes.  If we  are constantly making up the  process every time we do it, think of how inefficient that is.

Picture walking into a restaurant and ordering the steak with béarnaise sauce, chopped salad and mushroom risotto.  Think now that every time the chef prepares the meal, she does not follow a process.  She just randomly adds the spices, she randomly prepares/cooks the food.  Now you have food that doesn’t taste the same and is ready at different times.  How may times do you think you would return to that restaurant?

 

 

2 thoughts on “EA 872 Week 4 Blog”

  1. You are so right, the business process architecture is a very important. In my company’s project assessment process one of the first steps after identifying problems is looking at the process. We are taught to break down the process in individual steps and analyze where the pain points are. Only after thoroughly analyzing the process can we know if a new system is needed. Just think if we said that payroll was taking too long too process….build a new system; but the old system was fine, just the user interface needed fine tuned. We would of wasted a whole lot of money and time!
    -Carolyn

    1. I would like to echo this sentiment. It also came up in my reading for my Information Security class in relation to Project Management tools, specifically where project managers felt the need to follow the software instead of defining/using a Project Management process within their organization.

      This is actually something that the Army gets right though (in some situations). If you consider operations as processes/projects then the lower echelons have the Troop Leading Procedures (TLPs) and upper echelons have the Military Decision Making Process (MDMP) that are heavily documented methods for how to plan and execute processes/projects.

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