Ingeniero

MARTYN A OULD VENICE CONSULTING LTD The Old School, Hinton Charterhouse, Bath BA2 7TJ, UK phone: +44 (0)1225 723 822 e-mail: mao@veniceconsulting.co.uk

ABSTRACT
Suppose we have come to an organisation and have the job (for whatever reason) of designing or modelling some or all of its processes. It can be very hard to know how to cut the mass of organisational activity up into componentprocesses and to see how they are related, in other words to determine the process architecture of the organisation. We want a partitioning into processes that is, as far as we can make it, completely aligned to the business the organisation is in and as independent as possible of how it chooses to organise itself. This paper describes the approach to solving this problem offered by the Riva businessprocess management method.

KEYWORDS
process architecture, process modelling, process design

INTRODUCTION
Business Process Management (BPM) situations come in many different guises: – In a BPR context we will want to define a whole new process architecture for the organisation as a first step to defining an organisational structure aligned to the processes. – In a TQM or incrementalimprovement context our need is to prepare a model of an existing process as a diagnostic tool supporting its improvement. But where are the boundaries of this process with others? – When we design IT systems designed to support specific business processes, especially those involving workflow management, we need to understand those processes in order to see how the proposed systems will enable – or evendisable – them. – For many organisations coming to grips with the way they operate, a shared understanding of the way things work – the processes and models of them – can be immensely valuable and revealing.

Copyright © Martyn Ould 2002

Designing a Re-engineering-proof Process Architecture
adapted from an article first published in Business Process Management Journal, 3, 3, 1997 Martyn Ould– An organisation wanting to lay down defined procedures in, say, a Quality Management System, especially in a regulated environment, needs a clear and unambiguous way of defining processes and hence needs models that are good enough to act as work instructions and that clearly delineate processes from each other. The common concerns here are twofold. Firstly, the process designer or modeller1needs a method for working with processes, one that yields clear, unambiguous and revealing models usable by ordinary people. Secondly, and almost as importantly, the designer needs a way of deciding what are the processes in the first place and how they fit together when the world is ‘running’. Both of these concerns are answered by Riva, an approach to process design, modelling and analysis thathas been developed and used in a great many situations and industries. Riva, as described in Business Processes,2 concentrates on the first, process-level question: how can we most revealingly model a process? This paper describes how Riva has now been extended to cover the second question: what are the real processes and what are their dynamic relationships? I shall use the term processarchitecture to refer to a definition of the processes within an organisation and the dynamic relationships between them. By the end of the paper I shall have given a very precise meaning to the term. Does it matter? Why is getting the process architecture right so important? There are several urgent reasons. An inappropriate division of organisational activity into processes can easily lead tounnecessarily complex designs or models. There is a lesson from software development: when we design software modules we look for high ‘cohesion’ and low ’coupling’; when modelling the real world, if we break a process into two along a natural ‘fault line’ we will get fewer broken connections. We want to exploit any cohesion present in the real world. Our aim must be to find those natural fault lines. If...