Enterprise architects that are moving to a services model face the challenge of introducing business process improvement to their organizations. Modern software web services almost always cut across organizational boundaries. This means that multiple stakeholders and business units are involved in business process initiatives.

We live among the coastal mountains of the west coast of Canada. I was recently hiking in the mountains around a small lake. The stillness of the water and the beauty of the mountains reminded me that organizational change is more like a raging river than a calm lake.

Books have been written on organization change and business process improvement. Change involves people and changing people’s behavior can be arduous. Keys that we’ve identified for successful business process change are:

1. The business benefit to the enterprise has to be clearly articulated to everyone involved.
2. Leadership. For our scheduling application, we are always working with a senior business leader along with a senior IT person. They provide the leadership to implement our scheduling solution across the affected business units. Equally important, they can communicate the changes and the business benefit.
3. Continuously improve your business processes. This is ongoing and not a one time event.

Getting people to change the way they do things will always be a challenge. Competitors, changing market conditions, and technological advances are forcing all of us to change our business processes. We all need to find ways to rise to the leadership challenge to see the necessary business process improvements through to the end.

David Greer

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 7th, 2008 at 4:11 pm and is filed under BPI. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.