The IDS Scheer ProcessWorld has started with a Keynote speech by Professor Scheer. The keynote room of the Maritim Hotel in Berlin is completely filled by the audience. As a passionate jazz saxophonist, he starts, of course, with a short jazz play introduction with the song "Milestones".
Prof. Scheer starts his presentation by stating that he will now talk about milestones in the context of establishing a change process within a company. He sees Business Process Management as a holistic management concept to improve a company's performance and profitability, which has an impact on everybody within a company.
However, a holistic BPM approach is always a combination of BPM methods and applications and BPM technology. He mentions different key technologies that changed our live and named them "killer applications". As an example for killer applications states mentioned e-mail and the Internet. Scheer sees BPM as the killer application within a company and especially for IT systems. A CIO should not only know about technical trends but also a lot about Business Process Management.
Scheer starts explaining the interaction between BPM application and BPM Technology based on two wheels. The first wheel is about BPM applications and has 3 major milestones or phases. Phase 1 is related to the past (90s), phase 2 shows the situation around 2000, and phase 3 is now and the future (an upcoming and advanced approach for BPM).
He explains all this based on BPM objects. During the 90s data modeling was very important, after that and today process models and the description of business processes was important. Today and in the future, it will be more and more important to react quickly to non-predictable and upcoming events and flexible business rules within the process. That's the reason why event management and rules management will be an important part of BPM applications.
Then he talks about the different kind of processes and the process hierarchy as well as the related roles in a company. He explains the different levels of a process hierarchy:
- operational processes (like sales processes, purchase processes, etc.)
- management processes (supporting and controlling operational processes and business operation)
- governance processes (processes like compliance management processes, etc.)
Also the BPM user groups are a part of his BPM Application wheel concept. In a company there are different roles related to BPM:
- Technical experts (i.e. IT department)
- Business Process Owners (people that are responsible to run dedicated processes)
- Business Users (all people that are involved in the business operations are involved in BPM).
All those different kinds of users have to be addressed in a way that they are optimally involved in BPM and understand the meaning of BPM for their business. Prof. Scheer mentions a new initiative from IDS Scheer and ARIS development named "Process to the people" with the goal of bringing all business and process information on the right to all the different people and roles in a company.
After a short jazz play interruption, he switched to the BPM technology wheel because the technology is the basis of every kind of BPM application and necessary for a holistic BPM approach.
First, he explained the modeling area in the BPM technology wheel. Then the models were isolated and not connected to technology. Regarding IT implementations it was only a kind of blueprint with no integration into execution. Today and in the future, the software will be completely model-driven. As an example, he mentioned SAP's Business by Design architecture and technology as one good example of such a close integration between model and execution.
Then he explains important BPM technologies like Business Software Architecture, the Process Integration and the importance of the user interface.
He summarized his presentation with an example of an user evaluation that can be done based on the two wheels to help companies identify their actual as-is situation regarding BPM. This user evaluation can be implemented as a basis to define important next steps to improve the BPM application and BPM technology within a company that will finally help improve business performance.
