Untamed Business Processes: When Even The Best Of Intentions Go Awry

A business process — at its highest level — is any activity that helps an enterprise achieve its goals. Packaged and industry-specific applications form the transactional backbone for most critical business processes in enterprises and small and medium-size businesses (SMBs); however, these are only part of the story. Enterprises need many other processes to meet their goals, and often, some of the processes not tackled through packaged apps get approached in tactically haphazard ways. Over time, these processes become laden and bloated with non-value added activity. In short — they become untamed. IT gets dragged reluctantly into the support and enhancement of these untamed processes. The results are not surprising. Weak architectural approaches spawn niche products, and the use of various business intelligence (BI), business process management (BPM), business rules, collaboration, and enterprise content management (ECM) tools that are applied like Band-Aids work chaotically to make untamed processes more efficient. Business process and applications (BP&A) professionals must take a more proactive and strategic approach to addressing these untamed business processes.