Business Process Management Alignment

From ERP EnterprisePLUS [E+]

Introduction

Alignment is a concept that dates back to the late 1990s, when it was described by Paul Strassmann1: “Alignment is the capacity to demonstrate a positive relationship between information technologies and the accepted financial measures of performance.” Alignment of business process management (BPM) hence should follow a similar principle or pattern to be effective. The objective therefore is how this alignment to and between BPM can create value that is ultimately measurable as a favorable financial outcome for a commercial enterprise.

Business process management alignment, which is focused on both reusability and accelerating automation, requires that business managers have an understanding of what alignment is, how to develop an alignment competency, and what considerations should be made by organizations to ensure alignment is adequately adopted. This article dis- cusses these aspects of alignment and gives credence to the development of aligned BPM.


Background To A New Way Of Looking At Alignment For BPM

The portfolio alignment-unity concept was developed for the United States Department of Defense (DOD), Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Department of Justice (DOJ), and Department of State (DOS) with the aim of;

  • Unifying common stakeholders, objectives, and size for common, complex, and critical missions and multidimensional warfare such as cyber war, combating weapon of mass destruction, combating transnational organized crime, and for security corporations.
  • Achieving information sharing and unity of effort to meet national security objectives for the US DOD, DHS, DOJ, and the DOS.

US Government research involving the DHS, DOS, DOJ, and DOD initiated an alignment effort to:

  1. Identify and specify common and repeatable patterns for business, application, and technology areas
  2. Support analysis and stability operations planning efforts per JROCM 172-13
  3. Change and update joint doctrine
  4. Assess for use by the Executive Committee Joint Program Office (JPO) for Assignment of National Security and Emergency Preparedness Communica- tions Functions per Executive Order 13,618
  5. Benchmark, research and analyze, and identify alignment and unification patterns
  6. Pilot first projects within US Government
  7. Join and develop alignment and unity reference content that increases the level of reusability and replication within alignment and unity of stakehold- ers, portfolios, programs, and enterprise modeling, enterprise engineering, and enterprise architecture concepts
  8. Extend with accelerators and templates, such as the:
    1. Alignment and Unity Stakeholder Map
    2. Alignment and Unity Quick Scan
    3. Alignment and Unity Maturity TCO-ROI evaluation
    4. Alignment and Unity Maturity Benchmark
    5. Alignment and Unity Development Path


Alignment of BPM

Most stakeholders across the enterprise landscape have some of the same external and internal forces and drivers influencing them, but different approaches. These stakeholders do not see what is common and hence they do not know how or why to work together. This indicates a lack of alignment maturity and results in enterprise strategy, management, and operations that are disjointed and do not provide the expected return on investment, representing an untapped potential of cost savings and operational excellence for both effectiveness and efficiency only based on the wide range of duplica- tion of goals, competencies, services, process, functions, task, resources, roles, data, etc.

Alignment of BPM provides for the policy or strategy of the organization to drive the alignment of BPM portfolios, programs, and projects that require the relevant stakeholders (business process owners) to develop a common understanding of their business process so that there is a transformation of business process from the “as-is” through to the “to-be.” The to-be business processes that have been aligned can then be used in enterprise transformation and innovation to enable improved financial measures of performance. This high level of BPM alignment is described in Figure 1.


Business process management alignment from policy to enterprise innovation and transformation.
Business process management alignment from policy to enterprise innovation and transformation.


Document: Download the BPM Alignment document