Businesses and organizations everywhere struggle with the pace, volume, and complexity of change. Most of them are attempting to adapt, but they often act in a vacuum, and lack the context, control, or understanding to affect the desired organizational change. As a result, vast resources are wasted by multiple groups within the same organization all responding to the same change -- but working in isolation.

Most of these novel changes are brought about by new technologies. In response, many companies are in the process of undergoing a digital transformation. Digital transformations can happen on a small or large scale, but here are a few examples:

• Launching change initiatives, process innovation, and process excellence
• Changing business models
• Incorporating new technology
• Switching to a customer experience focus
• Improving strategy through coordination between business and IT
  
  

These examples might use different methods to implement change, but they all face similar challenges -- and attempts to complete the transformation often fail due to a lack of employee engagement, poor understanding of the support process, lack of access to information, or misplaced IT resources.

Read More: Successful Innovation through Business Process Management

Addressing the Challenges of Transformation

Business leaders try to address these changes with initiatives under various labels (process innovation, process excellence, operational transformation, just to name a few). But actually, most of these buzzwords are a variation of Business Process Management (BPM), which puts an organization’s processes in the spotlight.

Digital transformation is a necessary step in the evolution of many businesses today. By focusing on the processes a business needs to have in place in order to implement changes (and those they may need to remove as being outdated), digital transformation can be achieved more efficiently and effectively.

Successful BPM initiatives must understand the overall business objectives being addressed, have measurable process goals, and clear roles for participants accompanied by the necessary information to conduct their activities. The processes themselves should be optimized for cost and efficiency, should control risk in a sustainable way, and be compliant with all laws and regulations.

Business process management offers a proven way to better coordinate change across organizations, and process modeling is a critical component therein.  As organizations seek to realize their desired organizational future state they require more than maps of processes: they need models that define both how their processes are interconnected and additional models and connections that illustrate how the high-level objectives will be met.

Enterprise-wide modelling

Yet, for the enterprise to achieve the benefits of a process model, more information is needed than the simple paths of the process map drawn as a figure with Visio. Individual process models should be linked together with common terms, shared system services, and more.  As we will see, these data and connections will arise from additional analysis beyond process ‘mapping,’ a rich set of cross-linked data and linkage comes from models including value chain, RACI, risk and controls, process optimization, and process simulations. Because process models are fundamental inputs, all of these analyses should use process modeling as an organizing principle.

Enterprise wide business process modeling surfaces and develops connected process models across an enterprise’s business. With this broad scope of process modeling, the definition of terms for activities, events, and data are standardized enterprise-wide. Through participants, the process becomes directly connected to the organization. Master data management dictionaries are coordinated with the definitions and the processes incorporate shared services and technology infrastructure. From value-chains to process intelligence, these enterprise process models can be used as the guiding principles for digital transformation and process excellence.

If you want to learn more about enterprise process modeling and how it can help with your digital transformation, you can download the entire whitepaper here.