For those that follow this Blog closely, you may have noticed that one of my timeless quotes on the right is not from a noted philosopher, rather is from a conversation a colleague and I were having at dinner one winter night after finishing a day’s work at our mutual client.
This same individual introduced me to concepts around Business Architecture. Over a long evening session we doodled out an entity-relationship diagram to show the ties between various components in a high-level business architecture. That model depicted everything from customer experience to systems and data, from product and service strategies to organizational design, and from goals, metrics, and KPIs to processes, business rules and corporate policies.
One benefit of the model for me was that it reinforced (and we know this intuitively) that business processes are how an organization gets things done. They are the enablers of much of what the organization tries to achieve. They are the glue between loftier notions like customer experience, corporate strategy, product and service planning, and the underlying IT systems and data that form the infrastructure to build upon.
Willow Works for BPM 