Precriptive or Adaptive??

Last weeken I managed catch up with a workshop by Steve Towers. As a part of the 4th Wave one of the paradigm changes expected is of course the customer centric approach, but one of the things that Steve said stuck to my mind.

The Shift from from being Prescriptive to Adaptive..

Quite the cornerstone of BPM philosophy. What I would like to share is how important it is for the entire IT departments and delivery teams to make this change of mindset.

I work as a consultant, nvolved in an effort to define processes and requirements for a ambitious future looking project. The internal IT department seems to keen on delivery of something the users can use.

I have been having pitched battles with the solution architects and system analysts regarding what should be the nature of the system that will automate the future process. The general understanding about most people about the processes seems to be that, they just need to automate it as in a workflow. The result is absolute neglect the core functionality of the solution in question. Anticipating and delivering future requirements is something that seems to make the technical team really wary.

Several features are debated and scorned as too fancy, difficult to deliver. They hold the view that the right way is to ensure, you deliver only what the business user can handle. The problem with this approach is that you tend to become very subjective about what you think the business can handle.

If you consider the CEM Method, each touchpoint with your customer, spawns breakpoints and business rules. The easiest way to simplify the process is to eliminate these. You can tweak around with the processes and make the required organisational changes but IT is going to play a vital role in enabling the whole process.

So IT should never be in a Prescriptive mode. If they do, they would inevitably end up as the roadblock instead of being the enabler to agile business needs.

Heirarchy for Process in an enterprise

This is the simple heirarchy I am using in my current project to depict and manage the process landscape..Has been working fine for most practical purposes but I need to think how to detail this model further.

Process Loops

Here is an excellent article on the representation of Process loops by Rick Geneva. Nice simple diagrams to drive home a few points about the power of BPMN to represent scenarios.

Here goes the link.. http://www.rickgeneva.com/wp/pages/107

Externalizing Business Rules

For the last 6 months have been working on a project which has a rule engine at its core. Needless to say the business processes are such that a lot of decisions have to be taken based on rules. Today came across a second article advocating the externalization of rules. I am referring to James Taylor's blog post titled "Here's how decision management simplifies process management"
I have borrowed the simple diagram he has used to show the externalization of business rules.



No doubt the diagram on the right looks much simpler and purely shows the flow. Although it no longer tells the viewer on how the decisions were made.

The first post that I am referring to, is a post by Bruce Silver. It came up as a part of my watch on BPMN 2.0. In his post called "5 Things to Love About BPMN 2.0" one of the points mentioned is the introduction of a "Business Rule Task" as a part of the BPMN 2.0. Here is the line that i would like to quote:

A major problem has always been that tools have not had a way to properly represent business rules in the process diagram. (I am not talking about routing logic embedded in gateways. Both the business rule and BPM communities, when they are on speaking terms, now agree that these are not what we mean by business rules.)

I am still trying to figure out how BPMN 2.0 will manage to do this. True enough, the gateways provide enough power to let me represent the flow (routing) after a decesion on has been taken. Never really got to use the complex gateway, which I had long assumed is meant for this exact purpose. Here is how it is supposed to function:

Each Decision Gate is associated with a condition expression found within an outgoing Sequence Flow. When a Gate is chosen during the performance of the Process, the corresponding Sequence Flow is then chosen. A Token arriving at the Decision would be directed down the appropriatepath, based on the chosen Gate.

What my tool provides is something like this:


Talking of the BRMS producs, the way a rule is captured is completely different. The best of the breed (whether ILOG or Corticon or the rest mentioned Leaders by research firms like Gartner and Foresstor) provide a way to frame up the rule in the form of tables or IF then Else constructs.

While I wait to see what BPMN 2.0 prescribes, I really think the primary users of my process models, "the business users" should still be able to easily understand what is happening by looking at the visual model.

The next best thing probably would be if the tool allows me to publish the process flows such that the emebeded rules are intutively made visible to the user while viewing the flows. May be a pop up/tool tip every time I place my cursor on the outgoing sequence flow from the gateway.