Does your organization have a common integrated approach to enhance communication, measure outcomes, manage resources, solve problems, and deliver capabilities? If not, your likely lost in a sea of Power Points, Word Documents, expensive meetings, challenging days, and poor outcomes.
To succeed in an increasingly complex and data driven world organizations should take a cue from the past 8,000 years of human history: develop maps to understand your environment and use them to help you get where you want to go.
Today's organizations and leaders must deal with endless streams of information across their business. Understanding where it all fits, where it comes from, what it's worth, to who, and how to harness it is imperative in making informed decisions and investments. Control and context are needed to effectively use this information and make meaningful "customer first" decisions. Control is a byproduct of visibility, the organization needs to know where it is, where information fits, and how things relate. The "I think Bill created a power point with some of that information 6 months ago, can someone find it?" doesn't cut it. Often, organizations do not have access to accurate information or the tools to disseminate information that can help manage daily decisions. Without a map for your business, it's all just a guess, or subjective at best.
A map gives you control: it provides a model of your organization and where your information exists, it's the foundation to understand your situation, collaborate, evaluate possibilities, and act in an informed manner. Fortunately for a business, much like a geographic mapping, electrical and mechanical engineering, and architecture, standards and tools now exist to engineer valuable multi-use maps of a business.
Business Process Engineering is the disciplined and collaborative practice by which integrated maps of the organization, processes, policies, resources, people, data, and money are represented. It is not unlike the work that teams do using Office products today but done so in a more efficient, usable, and formal practice. Instead of developing one off documents the team uses appropriate tools to create models that are well maintained, integrated, and evolving much like geographic maps. Like geographic maps, business models are enriched with additional relevant information and reused overtime to solve more complex problems and continuously provide more value. Geographic maps started with informal drawings and as standards have evolved moved to road atlas's, navigation maps, GPS, and predictive applications like Waze. For a business it can start with simply improving communication of a strategy and evolve to supporting operational simulations and process automation that saves millions.
Geographic maps are a great example of a multi-use model to solve problems. As standards have evolved 'geographic models' have been integrated with other models and data to develop powerful capabilities that inform and enhance decision making.
Most organizations today manage their business processes and information simply as pictures or words rather than formal models. These models are more akin to a hand drawn map, useful under limited context, versus a more robust map consisting of structured information that can be used alongside other models for analysis, drive execution of software, measure outcomes, and more efficiently communicate the context and meaning of information. Implementing Business Process Engineering is a cultural challenge in most organizations, but is a game changer if implemented in small silos overtime. Employee productivity, teamwork, and happiness are all proven to increase as institutional knowledge is created and available. A common communication pattern will emerge, and clarity becomes prominent in everyday interactions.
Business Process Engineering allows organizations to address specific problems today while constructing the future foundation of systematic mapping. Effectively tackling siloed problems will lead to success in other areas of the business and eventually become the underlying fabric supporting daily operations. Leadership will be equipped to have the most current available information to make appropriate, insightful decisions, as well as evolve the underlying models to support more advanced capabilities and enhanced decision making.
The tools, implementation approaches, standards and uses of Business Process Engineering have evolved in recent years. This has significantly lowered the barriers to entry, while increasing the organizational value. Are you ready to implement Business Process Engineering into your organization?
To learn more about implementing Business Process Engineering to optimize your business follow us here or contact Thought Layer at info@thoughtlayer.com.
© Thought Layer Co., 2016. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Thought Layer Co. with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
Comments