The power of using EA to optimize BPM
Oct 20, 2022
Business process management (BPM) and ‘business processes’ are at work in our everyday lives when we order products from the Internet, buy goods from a store, or check into a hotel. The list goes on. There are many definitions of business process management on the Internet, and this discipline essentially focuses on delivering the organization’s products and services to customers (external or internal). BPM focuses on ‘how’ the organization operates.
Business processes don’t work independently. They’re related to areas like applications, risks, data, etc., and they’re aligned with the organization’s strategic goals. When business processes are well designed and function optimally, they run unnoticed. However, sometimes business processes aren’t clearly defined, effective, efficient, or well designed. When business processes go wrong, customers and employees become frustrated due to waiting times, products and services are not delivered as they should, and the organization may even lose revenue because tasks take too long.
To ensure that the organization’s strategy is accelerated, risks are minimized, and processes are optimized in the context of the larger organization, it becomes necessary to integrate Enterprise Architecture (EA) and BPM.
EA provides an integrated view of the entire enterprise – your business and technology environments – and focuses on the enterprise-wide coherence between strategy, the organization, capabilities, operations, and technology support. It also considers the position of your enterprise in its broader ecosystem of customers, suppliers, and partners. In essence, EA focuses on the ‘what’ and not the ‘how’ of the enterprise.
Combining EA and BPM is necessary to design well-defined, optimized business processes that run efficiently throughout your organization’s ecosystem.
Download: Integrate EA and BPM to Support Change and Transformations
Bizzdesign Horizzon is a modern EA and BPM software platform that helps you integrate EA and BPM. For process owners and users, Bizzdesign Horizzon offers insightful publication and easy maintenance of processes with interactive dashboards to visualize and analyze business and IT processes on aspects like cost, risk, processing times, etc.
For process designers, Bizzdesign Horizzon provides powerful modeling, analyses, and design of business processes in relation to strategic goals, applications, business rules, risks, and controls. Bizzdesign Horizzon offers multiple levels of detail, from process architecture to individual tasks using relevant modeling languages such as ArchiMate, BPMN, DMN, UML, and ERD.
Elements in these models can be related to each other (for example, a process in BPMN is supported by an application in ArchiMate and uses a business rule defined in DMN), which results in integrated modeling and analysis for EA and BPM.
The value of using Bizzdesign Horizzon is that it enables you to integrate EA and BPM to benefit from the best of both disciplines. You can perform critical analyses covering the entire space – from strategic direction via your architecture backbone to the concrete business processes underlying your strategy.
Source: Bizzdesign Horizzon
Many of our customers may not know that Bizzdesign was founded over two decades ago as part of a research project to develop methods and tools for business process (re) design. Our efforts led to creating Bizzdesign Horizzon, but suffice to say, we’re experts at integrating EA and BPM. Models in Bizzdesign Horizzon are supported by best practices based on our many years of experience.
