Best Practices in Process Solution Infrastructure

Business continuity and agility are tightly linked to a solid IT infrastructure. Successful process deployments therefore show alignment of business needs, process solutions and technology infrastructure. Below are some best practices to follow to ensure you achieve the results you expect.

Design for users

People enjoy working with applications when they provide value, are well designed and meet their expectations in respect to speed and availability. Server capacity, network bandwidth as well as solution functionality, architecture and technology have a significant impact on the usability of process solutions. When choosing the right configuration, make sure the technology is well suited for the purpose. Production databases e.g. are mainly designed to store current data and not intended for storing process data for archiving or business intelligence.  Making the wrong selection can impact the performance of the solution and result in poor usability.

Plan for change

Process solutions are frequently adapted to changing business requirements. Ultimus therefore empowers business users to handle many adjustments themselves. Significant changes require a redesign of the process and can hold challenges, if not anticipated from the start.  Here is an example: When process incidents have a long lifetime, it is recommended to split the process into smaller portions and creating process chains. This minimizes the risk and maintenance effort for existing process incidents, whenever changes need to be published to the production environment.

Anticipate the future

One of the most quoted best practices for BPM is “Think big – start small”. While the latter part is very important, it is equally important to consider the mid-term future usage scenario. Expected incident volumes and lifetimes, load peaks etc. impact the original decisions in respect to scalability, database configurations or solution architecture e.g. With enhancement plans in place, you are well prepared to handle rapidly growing process needs without impacting user satisfaction.

Consider the dependencies

Processes interact with many different people and systems, which may not always perform as planned. Directory servers may not be available, users might have different browsers and language settings, process solutions may require local installations, require support for multilingual environments or interact with different product versions like Office. It is important to take all current and future dependencies into consideration when choosing the connections, designing the process and maintaining heterogeneous IT environments.

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