BPM BOOMING IN ASIA PACIFIC

With Asia Pacific growing faster than Europe and the Americas, enormous pressures are being placed on changing the way businesses operate in a much more competitive market. In a way this pressure is the catalyst for businesses to seek more efficient and effective ways of managing their business processes. While workflow and BPM is established in Japan and Oceania; BPM in Southeast Asia, India, and Greater China is now being recognized as a key differentiator for those starting to adopt it.
reproduced with permission from Business Management Magazine (Asia), June 2004

Last year saw the 10^th anniversary of the Workflow Reference Model. This short paper reassesses the relevance of the Model in the current context of Business Process Management. It discusses the principles behind the Model, its strengths and weakness and examines how it remains relevant to the industry today. It concludes by introducing a number of considerations required to establish a “BPM Reference Model” and discusses how the various overlapping standards in this space may be categorised. (extracted with permission from the Workflow Handbook 2004)

The Problem - 1

How are corporations, divisions, plants or large departments to be controlled?  Why does any organization of modest to large size eventually break down from within?  What can be done to halt this inevitable deterioration and increase the organization’s potential for long term survival and prosperity?  How can an organization, or a part thereof, that has broken down from within be repaired?  These are very important questions, but to date few answers have been provided …until now.

For the first time, there exists clear, workable, consistent, standard technology that can be applied across all organizations both within business and other organizations, and across all industries.

The Problem – 2

How can a workflow management project, business process re-engineering project, or computer software conversion project ever be undertaken successfully without the organization first being cleaned-up, aligned and readied?   This too is a very important question, but to date few answers have been provided …until now.

Introduction to Workflow. Evolving from the Executive Briefing presentation, this paper is vendor independent and includes:

• ·  What is (automated) workflow?

• ·  What does Work Management accomplish?

• ·  Benefits

• ·  Technology and Standards

• ·  Success stories

•    How to get started.

Giga's analysts watch a new trend in the way an enterprise delegates and manages business processes in its extranet, and a new role for workflow technology within organizations.  One of the revolutionary concepts made possible by the Internet is “electronic value chains” of carefully sequenced insourced and outsourced business processes for delivering and servicing products. In economic terms, the Internet enables the disaggregation of internal processes and reaggregation of specialists into a modern workflow, often at new price points or with higher-quality products.

Martin Ader looks at how the development of the Internet, coupled with the development of technologies for Knowledge Management and Work Management, will have deep influence on the way economic actors play their role in the worldwide market place. This will lead to the development of a new form of economic undertaking, the “Virtual Enterprises” where sets of economic actors are associating their strengths to provide a specific service traditionally provided by a single enterprise. Such a possibility will have, in the long term, deep influence on the economy and enterprise development strategies. This chapter shows how this can modify the way work can be organized and conducted, and demonstrates how those effects enable competition between virtual enterprises and traditional ones, and gives an overview of the conditions to make it happen.

Derek Miers offers excellent advice to business leaders who must make critical decisions regarding the development of the next generation of Web-based enterprise application systems, e-commerce products and Web-based services targeted at the business sector. The key point he makes is that building and maintaining an effective support infrastructure for business processes have become a technologically demanding task with relatively high costs attached. More importantly, the capability of the firm to rapidly bring products to market is significantly inhibited. On the other hand, embedding robust process oriented components within Web-based applications will speed the time-to-market and lower the cost of ownership. Unless developing process support engines for the Web is a core capability of your company, embedding a product architected for that environment will deliver a much higher return on investment than in-house development, while also ensuring that products and services are brought to market more quickly and effectively.

The Difference Between Workflow and BPR

Keith Swenson, Chief Architect, Groupware, Fujitsu USA

Few things have recently been hyped more than Business Process Reengineering (BPR). "Reengineering the Corporation" by Hammer and Champy has by far outsold any other book on management practice. BPR is both much talked about, and much misunderstood, but nevertheless a significant trend today.
Workflow is quite possibly the fastest growing software market today, having tripled in size for two years in a row. In such an expanding market there is bound to be a lot of differences between the products, as well as more misunderstandings.
Both BPR and workflow deal with processes, so it is natural to assume that workflow might be the perfect tool for implementing BPR, especially if you believe much of the workflow marketing literature. While workflow has a lot to offer, it also has a lot of technical limitations. It will work well for some organizations, in some cases, but it might fail to offer any benefit in others.
This session will cover the ways that workflow can be used to support a BPR effort, what kinds of organizations will best fit this effort, and what kinds of tasks should not be implemented on workflow at this time.
There is, after all, a lot of difference between workflow and BPR.