My writing on the Trisotech blog: better analysis and design of processes
Blog: Column 2 - Sandy Kemsley
I’ve been writing some guest posts over on the Trisotech blog, but haven’t mentioned them here for a while. Here’s a recap of what I’ve posted over there the past few months:
In May, I wrote about designing loosely-coupled processes to reduce fragility. I had previously written about Conway’s Law and the problems of functional silos within an organization, but then the pandemic disruption hit and I wanted to highlight how we can avoid the sorts of cascading supply chain process failures that we saw early on. A big part of this is not having tightly-coupled end-to-end processes, but separating out different parts of the process so that they can be changed and scaled independently of each other, but still form part of an overall process.
In July, I helped to organize the DecisionCAMP conference, and wrote about the BPMN-CMMN-DMN “triple crown”: not just the mechanics of how the three standards work together, but why you would choose one over the other in a specific design situation. There are some particular challenges with the skill sets of business analysts who are expected to model organizations using these standards, since they will end up using more of the one that they’re most familiar with regardless of its suitability to the task at hand, as well as challenges for the understandability of multi-model representations that require a business operations reader of the models to be able to see how this BPMN diagram, that CMMN model and this other DMN definition all fit together.
In August, I focused on better process analysis using analytical techniques, namely process mining, and gave a quick intro to process mining for those who haven’t seen it in action. For several months now, we haven’t been able to do a lot of business “as is” analysis through job shadowing and interviews, and I put forward the idea that this is the time for business analysts to start learning about process mining as another tool in their kit of analysis techniques.
In early September, I wrote about another problem that can arise due to the current trend towards distributed (work from home) processes: business email compromise fraud, and how to foil it with better processes. I don’t usually write about cybersecurity topics, but I have my own in-home specialist, and this topic overlapped nicely with my process focus and the need for different types of compliance checks to be built in.
Then, at the end of September, I finished up the latest run of posts with one about the process mining research that I had seen at the (virtual) academic BPM 2020 conference: mining processes out of unstructured emails, and queue mining to see the impact of queue congestion on processes.
Recently, I gave a keynote on aligning intelligent automation with incentives and business outcomes at the Bizagi Catalyst virtual conference, and I’ve been putting together some more detailed thoughts on that topic for this months’ post. Stay tuned.
Disclosure: Trisotech is my customer, and I am compensated for writing posts for publication on their site. However, they have no editorial control or input into the topics that I wrote about, and no input into what I write here on my own blog.
Leave a Comment
You must be logged in to post a comment.
