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BPM and the Knowledge Economy by Ronald G. Ross

Blog: Colin Crofts - Business Process Improvement

BPM often simply overreaches.  Understanding, modeling, and managing a business effectively requires a balanced view of six basic questions, not just one, as given in Table 1.  I follow Zachman in these matters so, yes, the table is Zachmanesque.
Interrogative
Basic Business
Question
Kind of
Model
1
What
What inventory of things needs to be managed to support business activity?
structural model (e.g., concept model,[1] data model)
2
How
How do transforms of things in business activity need to take place to add value?
process model
3
Where
Where does business activity occur?
network model
4
Who
Whocollaborates with whom to undertake business activity?
interaction model (e.g., organizational chart, use case)
5
When
When does business activity take place?
temporal model (e.g., schedule, event model, milestone model)
6
Why
Why are results of business activity deemed appropriate or not?
strategy model (e.g., Policy Charter,[2]constraint model)
If your business does nothing but manufacture or produce physical widgets (forget all the meta-data about those widgets), you will probably emphasize question 2 (i.e., process) above the others.  Your overall approach and architecture will reflect that.  You will naturally gravitate toward BPM.
That tendency has at least three basic risks, even for organizations that do fall into the nothing-but-widgets category:
Fewer and fewer business problems these days fall into the nothing-but-widgets category.  Even for widget-centric businesses, at least three needs are increasingly urgent:
  1. Ensuring the quality of meta-data.
  2. Demonstrating compliance-based actual rules, rather than the artifacts and effects that IT systems produce.
  3. Retaining, teaching, and repurposing intellectual capital.
These are not strengths of common BPM practices.
For all the non-widget-centric business activity in the world — which includes just about every conceivable form of white-collar work — these needs become paramount.  And make no mistake, the future lies with automation of that white-collar work.
What would I do to correct the shortcomings of BPM?  Our answer is to become more why-centric, as opposed to narrowly how-centric.  That shift has several essential features:
For further information, please visit BRSolutions.com      
References
[1]  Refer to Refer to Business Rule Concepts:   Getting to the Point of Knowledge (4th ed), by Ronald G. Ross, 2013, Chapter 1 and Part 2.   http://www.brsolutions.com/b_concepts.php  return to article
[2]  Refer to Building Business Solutions:   Business Analysis with Business Rules by Ronald G. Ross and Gladys S.W. Lam, 2nd ed. (Sept, 2015), an IIBA Sponsored Handbook, Chapter 4.  http://www.brsolutions.com/b_building_business_solutions.php  return to article
[3]  Refer to the Business Rules Manifesto, now in almost 20 languages:http://www.businessrulesgroup.org/brmanifesto.htm  return to article
[4]  Refer to Ronald G. Ross, “The Why Engineer™,” Business Rules Journal, Vol. 14, No. 11 (Nov. 2013), URL:  http://www.BRCommunity.com/a2013/b727.html 
SOURCE: Ronald G. Ross, “BPM and the Knowledge Economy,” Business Rules Journal, Vol. 16, No. 11 (Nov. 2015), URL:  http://www.BRCommunity.com/a2015/b835.html  

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