Statistics: (1558 Views) (0 Comments) Print Posted: Sunday, February 01, 2009 Categories: Business Process Management (BPM)

Business-process-modeling technology provides a powerful set of tools for describing and automating processes. The technology is so powerful that it often seems there are no limits to what BPM can do. But not every process that is automated needs BPM. Following on last week's discussion of process discovery, the JargonSpy asks the question: What sort of processes should be automated using BPM?

Businesspeople and technologists alike quickly get drunk on business-process modeling when they first become competent in the technique. Like wikis, business-process modeling allows you to capture the detail that you have in your head and then leave placeholders for what is not yet baked. In wikis, this takes the form of pages of text that link to other pages covering concepts that you will fill in later. Wikipedia is full of links to pages waiting to be completed.

The analogous act in business-process modeling is to put a box in to cover a step ("solve the halting problem" or "find qualified leads") that is part of the process but that you don't want to worry about just then.

Author: Dan Woods