 | Level: Intermediate Abdelilah Lali (abdelilah.lali@fr.ibm.com), Solution Architect, IBM
03 Apr 2008 Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to learn the
fundamentals of business process management (BPM). Play the strategic IBM®
BPM-simulation game, Innov8, in which you focus entirely on BPM activities. Interact
with other virtual employees, participating in their daily activities in the
fictitious company, After, Inc. In the process, you learn all about BPM,
discovering, collaborating on, and optimizing the company's business processes.
Overview
Thunder crashes. Lightning flashes. You enter After, Inc., a shadowy,
futuristic-looking, gray and black office. A voice resonates:
"Pay careful attention to what I am about to say. Your background
demonstrates a keen instinct for business process management, and it will be
tested. Your mission is to investigate a critical process from the inside. Are you
ready? Good. You will use business management software tooling acquired by the
director of IT, Sam Archer. I will contact you with further instructions."
It's up to you to play now. Keep in mind that After, Inc. has some business
performance issues, and Mike, the CEO, has recruited you to investigate, discover,
and optimize the pain points in the business process. You, our hero, have been
given the mandate by the CEO to find all documents and indices to help accomplish
this mission. In addition to the CEO and you, the BPM expert, the other employees
you work with at the company are (see Figure 1):
- Stavros, the business analyst.
- Sharon, vice president of sales.
- Sam, director of IT.
- Stella, the call center veteran.
Figure 1. The main characters
There are three types of BPM activities you discover during the game:
- Process discovery and process modeling
- Collaboration-driven simulation and iterative process improvement
- Real-time business management
BPM concepts introduced
by the game
To help you understand this game, let's start by defining a few concepts related
to business process modeling and business performance management:
-
Business modeling and simulation helps you visualize processes and
identify bottlenecks, disconnects, and inefficiencies. Simulation lets you
create and test what-if scenarios before deployment to identify business impact.
you define metrics, or key performance indicators (KPIs), that are used in the
monitoring environment.
-
Collaboration helps clients share responsibility for managing business
processes to compete more effectively anywhere, at anytime. It also facilitates
teamwork, throughput, and team creativity for changing rule processes and rules
no matter what the geographic location of the participants.
-
Business activity monitoring (BAM) is the ability to monitor process
performance and detect events that may influence performance. Analyzing process
efficiency and efficacy, and aligning process improvement with enterprise goals
and objectives involves using software agents to listen for critical business
events, correlating the event data and updating KPIs. When these are combined
with KPI-designed dashboards, operational managers can visually monitor and,
thus, better manage the progress of individual work items in real time. This
approach enables managers to intercept work where appropriate and alter the work
item or the process flow to improve the desired result.
-
Analysis and optimization is the ability to continuously evaluate
process execution and results, applying analytical insight, trending, and
predictive, action-based suggestions to optimize the in-process model.
Ultimately, the goal is feedback into the model for continuous improvement and
optimization.
During the game, you can use a laptop to store working files, see your to-do
list, access product documentation, and, of course, use the business process
management software tools:
-
Business modeling tool lets the people who know the business model the
vital aspects of the process by using drag-and-drop functions (referred to as
business modeler later in this article).
-
Business monitoring tool is designed for managing and interacting with
processes as they are executing by leveraging powerful analysis technology and
real-time monitoring capabilities. (This tool is referred to as business monitor
later in this article.)
Process discovery and
process modeling
The CEO provided you the business architecture heat map to start with.
This map is a component-based model of the enterprise, shown in Figure 2, in which
the components selected as the initial focus for the business transformation are
identified.
Figure 2. The business
architecture heat map
The rows represent the three types of management activity performed:
-
Direct activities relate to defining policy, plans, goals,
organization, and budgets, and assessing overall performance.
-
Control activities involve allocating tasks and resources, authorizing,
and making decisions, as well as overseeing and troubleshooting.
-
Execute activities relate to administering, maintaining, and
operating.
The columns in Figure 2 represent groups of related business activities that are
obtained by partitioning the complete collection of functions. For example,
business administration involves decisions and activities that enable and support
all the other functions (such as, how the business supports and enables itself).
As a result of prioritizing the highlighted components in Figure 2, you have to
select Customer Service/Call center as the primary component for
transformation.
The next steps you need to complete in this activity are:
- Obtain the software modeling tool from Sam Archer in the IT department.
- Get from Stavros, the business analyst, the call center business process
model.
- Find the call center veteran to model in the tool the selected business
process.
- Get all the items to add metrics to this business process.
Indeed, the first step in business process modeling is to model the as-is
business process. How does it operate today? Maybe your client is currently
capturing process information via a desktop procedure, perhaps using
Microsoft® Visio or PowerPoint slides. That's a first step (being able to
capture the process on paper), but you need more than just a picture. You need the
ability to capture business metrics and data, business rules, volumes, and
dependencies.
Figure 3 shows the modeling tool you use during the game:
Figure 3. The business modeling
tool
This prepares you for step two: Analyze the as-is business process. During this
step, you bring the model to life through simulation. Simulation lets you view the
process in operation before you deploy it into production so you can optimize
process cost, efficiency, and effectiveness. Simulation also lets you see if there
are bottlenecks or queues building. It allows you to consider various options, or
what-if scenarios, so you can make an informed decision based on best business
practices. You might want to consider what if we simply hired more people
versus a scenario where you use technology to automate routine steps.
After collecting all the data you need to simulate the business process, you
discover the process bottleneck depicted in Figure 4.
Figure 4. Business process
bottleneck
By using the capabilities of a business modeler, you've demonstrated that After,
Inc. has gained a deeper understanding of the processes the company already has in
place and potential ways to improve them. Often, as existing processes are modeled
and simulated, complex relationships and behaviors are exposed and evaluated.
Collaboration-driven
simulation and iterative process improvement
During the second part of this game, you participate in a business meeting where
you're involved in process enhancement. Around the table, the executive team
represented in Figure 5 discusses highlighting resource issues, areas of high cost
or low profitability, and portions of the process that merit examination for
streamlining. From left to right you see:
- Ashok, the director of human resources.
- Liang, the director of customer service and call center operations.
- Thomas, the senior IT architect.
- Sharon, the vice president of sales.
- Mike, the After, Inc. CEO.
Figure 5. The business executive
team
One of the more powerful capabilities of the business modeler is to include the
financial attributes of the process model. This provides ways to examine the cost
implications of a proposed change to the process. The model also can include
revenue attributes, which enables the evaluation of profitability or even
break-even analysis when examining the impact of a new version of a process.
After process enhancements are modeled by you, these changes can be simulated and
validated in multiple what-if scenarios for comparison and analysis. These
scenarios can vary the quantity and timing of the input, the available resources
and costs, and the paths through the model.
When the new version of the process has evolved to a fairly complete stage, the
business measurements can be established and added to the model. These elements
can form the structure for measuring the business performance of the new process
when it's deployed.
Real-time business
management
This is the most interesting part of the game: monitoring the automated process.
Monitor can be an overused term, as it means different things to different
people. But make no mistake about the use of monitor here; this is a
line-of-business (LOB) monitor meant for LOB executives and managers to monitor
the business process as opposed to having the IT staff view server usage and
throughput.
One key feature of the business modeler is its ability to create the business
criteria of interest for monitoring after deployment. The business modeler exports
these business criteria, or business measures, in the form of a business measures
model. This model is imported into the business monitor and used as the basis for
the presentation of dashboard data to both business and operational viewers using
a portal interface.
The dashboard you have to manipulate is represented in Figure 6.
Figure 6. The business monitor
dashboard
Monitoring allows management to:
- See the work as it's being processed.
- Understand who has the work.
- Measure items that fall outside established business guidelines or key
indicators.
- Take corrective action to correct problems by reassigning tasks and resources
to get the process back on track.
A key advantage here is that you can alert LOB management before it's too late,
so action can be taken to fix a problem. Through the monitor's operational
dashboard, managers can see the work and start, stop, and transfer work items
directly in flight.
The last step of this game consists in taking the corrective actions. The
business environment is constantly changing (regulations change, competition
changes, customer demand changes), but now your client can monitor, take
corrective action on, and improve the business processes.
Try it now and get the best score (KPIs). You have to dynamically change the
business rules and the human resources allocation, analyze the running process,
and survey alerts to adapt to these new requirements. Good luck!
If you succeed in your mission, you'll be congratulated. If not, well, there are
other options, as you can see in Figure 7.
Figure 7. The epilogue
Conclusion
Innov8 is an interactive, 3-D business simulator designed to teach the
fundamentals of BPM. BPM enabled by SOA delivers continuous lifecycle improvement,
driving innovation in the business process and business model. Capabilities from
both the software and the expertise follow a logical lifecycle approach for
modeling, optimizing, designing, deploying, and managing business processes.
BPM allows your organization to:
- Expose bottlenecks, resource issues, and other potential areas of improvement
and latent value in your processes.
- Test proposed processes and study results before committing resources using
simulation and analysis.
- Evaluate the financial impact of existing and proposed processes.
- Bridge the domain gap between business and technology for faster and more
accurate communication.
- Reduce implementation time, making your business more agile.
- Establish a structured measurement regime for the business value of your
processes.
The goals of business activity monitoring are to provide real-time information
about the status and results of various operations, processes, and transactions.
The main benefits of BAM are to:
- Enable your enterprise to make better informed business decisions.
- Quickly address problem areas.
- Reposition your organization to take full advantage of emerging
opportunities.
Resources Learn
Get products and technologies
- Download
Innov8
now! (Register as a member of the IBM Academic Initiative.)
- Innovate your next
development project with
IBM trial software,
available for download or on DVD.
Discuss
About the author | 
| | Abdelilah Lali is a solution architect with the IBM Advanced Technical Support, European Business Solutions Center in La Gaude, France. He has 12 years of software development experience as a developer and architect. His current focus is in the areas of SOA and consulting on design, configuration, and development issues related to WebSphere Business Integration products. He works with partners and customers consulting, mentoring, coding, and teaching. |
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