Marrying technology and the business

William Knight looks at how the IT department and the organisation as a whole can embrace the concept of business process management

The gulf between business and technology is famously wide, and attempting to bridge the gap can be more an act of romanticism than hard sense.

But lately, mutterings from leading analysts and rumours from the technical world suggest we are nearing a workable concept of a business process that the business can design and monitor, the technicians can actually implement, and which will even work in association with other processes.

Is this, at last, the marriage of business and technology? The concept of a business process is not a new one. W Edwards Deming, credited with the rebirth of post-WWII Japanese industry, said: "If you can't describe what you are doing as a process, you don't know what you're doing."

Deming understood that describing in a straightforward manner the steps, procedures and rules an organisation uses to conduct its business, and thereby understanding what is really happening, results in significant productivity gains.

The proposal
Business process has been around for a long time, but the supporting technology has not. Companies have defined their processes and produced manuals, but at implementation they were left with a bunch of disparate systems imperfectly glued together by screen scrapers, fat clients, and unmaintainable software.

Information was duplicated or went missing, responsibility was unclear, and the computer department handled process problems, not the business.

Things are changing. After decades of speaking to IT with a groan, companies are realising the latest standard integration and packaging technologies are ready for the real world. Specifically, web services, XML and componentisation enable IT to deliver the processes business has asked for.

But though the benefits of process engineering are well-known, and the integration technology has matured, many businesses still need a push to take a process-centric view of operations. This push comes in the form of regulation and accountability.

In the finance sector and in US-listed companies, business process management (BPM) is being driven by regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley and Basel II, and the necessity of change here has created interest and raised a platform for change elsewhere.

"The market is moving towards a culture of closer inspection, accountability, reporting, and greater organisational control," says Ian Charlesworth, senior analyst at Butler Group.

"The implications to BPM are huge. To demonstrate compliance, organisations need to get a grip on their business processes."

The engagement
The first task of any business taking the BPM route is to document its working practices, but this is not always easy. "Developing detailed knowledge of a process is a challenge," says Charlesworth.

Technologically, a single business process can affect many layers of an organisation.

Even a simple procedure, such as creating a new customer account, might involve a hotchpotch of tasks linking, for example, departments, databases, systems, credit checks, batch updates, managerial discretion and sales commissions into one concept of a business process.

Because of the pervasiveness of even simple processes, it is vital that the entire organisation is behind the effort.

"Without a clear focus on the goals and direction of the business, from board-level down, a BPM solution could detract precious resources from the core business," warns Russ Thornton, managing director of integration specialist m35.

Thornton links successful BPM to choice of technology. "BPM needs senior management buy-in combined with a service-oriented architecture [SOA]," he explains. "The first step is the automation of the enterprise's existing systems into services."

So is SOA the framework for implementing BPM?

"Trying to execute a business process without web services, XML and component-based application integration techniques would be out of the question," declares Charlesworth.

Gill Corfield, technology support manager at software and services provider Compuware, adds: "Web services act as an enabler to BPM by breaking down the barriers between applications and making integration easier.

"One of the huge attractions of web services is that they meet the need for low-cost and simple integration over standard internet protocols. They also have universal agreement by software vendors and IT service providers."

It is the open and standard way in which BPM products interact with web services that has made the difference. "Without this, a BPM solution will be little more than a pretty process design tool," says Thornton.

Application developers are pleased with the new focus on SOA. It provides a package in which to develop software and gives a standard for reuse that the business actually wants. Platforms such as .Net and J2EE are aligned to providing services mounted on component-based servers, and give developers all they need to create web services.

The need for build-your-own programs will always be with us. "As complexity never disappears, so custom development is part of most BPM implementations," states Fausto Ibarra, director of product marketing at application server vendor BEA.

The marriage
With the maturing of integration techniques it is now possible to imagine the entire spectrum of enterprise technologies working together, and these have taken their place under the umbrella of BPM.

A business process must be designed and implemented. Once running it must be controlled, monitored, handed over to others, put to sleep, resurrected, undone and redone. Processes are designed using graphical tools ð rules and decision points are mapped in a rules engine.

Workflow allows running processes to be scheduled and handed off, enterprise application integration ensures disparate applications communicate, and a process engine distributes running processes, manages load balancing and scalability, and liaises with the rules engine for security.

All the while, each process is monitored for errors and violations, with checks and balances maintained in real time.

"BPM is the ability to orchestrate both systems and people to provide the flexibility to change and add process without incurring huge development overheads," explains Chris Philips, chief marketing officer at BPM vendor Staffware.

"Since business never stands still, the ability to monitor and react in real time and dynamically tune business processes is a major competitive differentiator."

The separation?
BPM is still at the early-adopter phase, and not expected to go mainstream until 2005/2006.

By then the BPM candle may have been snuffed out because of the difficulty inintegrating legacy applications, or because making staff run such pervasive systems becomes the issue and not the solution. Some vendors believe it is merely the imperfect glue making expensive systems work together.

"Enterprises faced with disparate applications are obliged to use some sort of middleware that tries to weld different applications and processes to seek out and analyse information kept in silos," says Andrew Wuille, director of software vendor Strategix Software.

So BPM merely holds the enterprise together while a better solution is found; more of a Band Aid than a band of gold.

Integrating with existing applications also leads to advice from Compuware's Corfield: "Companies should adopt a tactical or evolutionary approach, and unravel the applications one at a time.

"They should focus on the processes which have the most impact on business performance first, as these will bring greater efficiency to the organisation."

Politics can make analysis difficult, and the threat of changed working practices can cause reluctance from users. To protect their position, users may feel it's in their interests to keep details of a process hidden.

There's no denying that better-managed processes make for easier outsourcing; just in case we wondered why our staff were suspicious.

"If the project is a success, job roles are going to change enormously," states Bob Farell, chief executive of BPM vendor Metastorm.

"However, it is easy for staff to assume that their jobs will become redundant or mundane as the automated system develops. An intelligent enterprise will educate its employees and make it clear where the advantages lie, for both the employee and the organisation."

Butler Group says that, at its best, BPM technology "has the potential, and indeed the capability, to deliver strong operational benefits across a wide range of operational areas". But the analyst is suspicious that BPM offers so much to so many.

Despite the warnings, BPM has provided a vision that the business can understand, and technicians can make happen. It's rare for business and technology to share the same outlook, so perhaps it really is a match made in heaven. Raise your glasses to the bride and groom.