Process Mapping: A Vital Step in All BPM Deployments

Instead of sharing a specific customer anecdote today, I want to take the opportunity to talk about the first – and arguably the single most critical – stage of BPM deployment: process mapping.

While there are a myriad of overly technical definitions out there, process mapping is at its core defining how an organization performs a specific function. To do so, you should clearly outline the steps involved for each sequence, who is responsible for each step and how different work groups interact with one another. It’s critical that a process is clearly defined and mapped out early on; it’s literally the foundation on which an entire BPM deployment rests.

To that end, we’ve begun to send our technical experts out to customers to assist with the process mapping phase. In the past, this was generally handled internally by business analysts at a given organization. They would then relay the process to their IT team to design/automate. Time and again, we saw customers running into performance bottlenecks due to technical issues stemming from the process mapping phase.

Since business users don’t generally have deep technical visibility into process automation—and since IT professionals don’t always have deep visibility into how a specific business process is carried out, it’s of the utmost importance that they collaborate at the earliest of stages.

This is often easier said than done; it’s often a challenge to even determine which questions need to be asked to properly define a process—which is where our technical team comes in, to help with that process and flag any potential issues before deployment begins.

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