The Chief Information Officer's Body of Knowledge: People, Process, and Technology

Chapter 11

A New Paradigm for Managing a Suite of Business Processes Inexpensively

Charles Follett and Jeff Goldberg

Large organizations today must manage many business processes—often numbering in the hundreds. Often these processes have evolved organically over the course of years, creating a working—but inefficient—collection. Rarely does an organization have the luxury of organizing its business processes in a coherent fashion.

However, as things become more complicated in a business, this lack of coherence can cause all kinds of problems: employee and customer dissatisfaction, missed opportunities, lost profit, loss of business, and even legal issues.

Managers in such organizations are typically acting in the dark—blind to the big picture of what is really happening in their organization because their tools do not provide enough feedback. Some of their processes will produce exquisite measurements and others no measurement at all. But worse is the fact that the measurements are not comparable and not visible together.

Many software vendors have developed tools to help automate business processes, with the promise that these tools will solve their clients' problems. However, this promise cannot be fulfilled by tools alone if the underlying processes are chaotic in and of themselves. It makes no sense to automate and streamline the wrong process; it is better to fix a process first before introducing automation.

Lack of clear process definition, in turn, leads to another issue: ...