Artikel ini saya temukan di Internet (lupa dari situs apa) yang cukup relevan dengan SI-454.
IT organizations continue to find themselves under increased reassures to do more with less. In many cases, the development and integration efforts of the 1990s were designed to heighten organizational efficiency by automating departmental functions. Nowadays, with the Internet, e-mail, and the Web, companies can collaborate and share information far more easily than they could just a decade ago.
These developments have been paralleled by an expanded role for businesspeople in IT. Business users increasingly perform tasks that were previously only for the technically initiated. Business executives who were once scared of spreadsheets now use them for planning. E-mail has become ubiquitous. The Web is being used by businesspeople to boost knowledge, watch what competitors are doing, and check for stock information. The result is that the profile of IT looms large on a business agenda that demands heightened organizational efficiency in what are currently difficult economic times. And from an IT viewpoint, increased productivity -- especially in a slowdown -- depends on linking distributed systems together. It is against this background that business process management (BPM) is gaining momentum, receiving serious attention from many vendors, and appearing on the radar screens of senior end-user management.
Of course, there are those in our industry that take a slightly cynical view that BPM is simply the cosmetic re-branding of previous generations of workflow software. The efforts of the IT to reinvent different waves of technology that BPM is a lot more than a re-branding exercise.
Two trends are coming together that are creating enormous opportunities and challenges for the management of business processes across organizational boundaries. The first is a business trend toward the truly networked business that crosses organizational boundaries in an ever more adaptive fashion. The other is an IT trend that concerns development of enabling technology that has grown naturally out of distributed computingand component-based development. This mainly involves Web service protocols, description and discovery mechanisms, BPM languages, and standards. Each trend fuels the other: business pressure to realize the full potential of the Internet. Conversely, as the technology "opens up," business is awakened to increasingly imaginative ventures involving hitherto undreamt-of partnerships.
BPM sits at the confluence of these two trends and as such needs to be taken seriously. It must be understood in both IT and business terms. The business element involves developing an ability to explore, understand, and define cross-enterprise business processes. This, in turn, raises the bar for business process modeling and design techniques that are still largely wedded to the concept of an organization as a production line. That world is changing at a rapid pace. Today's unremitting technological innovation and change is mirrored by unpredictable and discontinuous changes in the marketplace. Businesses are responding by becoming more adaptive. The only strategy that makes sense is to become adaptive -- to sense early and respond quickly to abrupt changes in individual customer needs. Agility is needed both in rapid adoption of new technologies and in timely response to business change.
The IT element in actually making cross-enterprise business process automation happen rests partly in the ability to describe the contractual aspects of business protocols in a standard form that can be consumed by tools for process implementation and monitoring. At the same time, tools must provide much more innovative techniques that bring diagrams to life in a way that maximizes the involvement of businesspeople at the business process modeling and design level.
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