Chapter 2 - Pete - Business Processes (SHORT) PDF

**Chapter 2 - Pete - Business Processes (SHORT) - v1.1** Welcome to chapter two. In this chapter, we\'ll cover the topics of business process management and how to apply it to your enterprise information system. Wait, what? Yeah, I know what you\'re thinking. Process management? We just learned ab...

**Chapter 2 - Pete - Business Processes (SHORT) - v1.1** Welcome to chapter two. In this chapter, we\'ll cover the topics of business process management and how to apply it to your enterprise information system. Wait, what? Yeah, I know what you\'re thinking. Process management? We just learned about all these amazing IT technologies, servers, databases, AI assistants. Why manage anything? Let\'s implement everything. Well, in response, let me quote a line from a well-known Hollywood blockbuster franchise. It\'s about researchers who enthusiastically cloned extinct dinosaurs in order to create an ill-fated theme park. Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn\'t stop to think if they should. And the same goes for us. Just because we have all these amazing technologies at our fingertips, doesn\'t mean that we must or even should use all they have to offer indiscriminately in our business. Let me give you an example. Imagine the kitchen of a busy restaurant. One day, the restaurant\'s manager realizes they have been lagging behind the times and decides to modernize the whole restaurant experience. Everything from online seat booking to optimizing the kitchen\'s efficiency. He ruthlessly implements a complex enterprise information system, forcing the entire restaurant workflow to adapt itself to procedures not really optimized for that specific industry. Imagine guests being forced to reserve exclusively via an unoptimized app because the old school telephones were phased out. Entry only with QR code. Communication between kitchen and waiting staff now works exclusively via a WhatsApp group. And laptops have been installed at every kitchen stove with the line cooks now required to protocol every ingredient they throw into the hot searing pans with their greasy fingers. It doesn\'t take much to see that such a heavy handed implementation of technologies would be, excuse the pun, a recipe for disaster. Before we adopt any new technology in our business, we should first ask ourselves, how can this technology help us? In which specific cases can it improve our efficiency and where might it hinder our company\'s operations? And this is where BPM, or business process management, comes in. Businesses are often thought to operate in a hierarchical structure. The line of command reaching from the CEO at the top to the lowliest employee at the bottom. But if we want to improve the day-to-day functioning of our business, it might be better to focus not so much on the vertical hierarchy of the company, but rather in all the processes which are happening throughout the company all day long, every day. Specifically, we\'re talking about business processes. We can define a business process as an activity or set of activities that accomplish a specific organizational goal within the company. In other words, everything that happens during the normal operation of a business. But in practice, it\'s best to think of business processes not as tiny, unrelated actions, but rather as complex sets of activities, all happening in a very structured manner. In the case of a restaurant, a business process would refer not so much to the dicing of a single onion by some overworked groundsman, but rather to the entire process of making a huge pot of French onion soup. The long sequence starting with the acquisition of the raw ingredients to finally placing a steaming bowl of soup in front of the guest. And so the heart of the matter is, only if you understand the nature of all the complex processes in your organization, why they have been implemented, how exactly they work, how they interact with yet other processes, in what way they involve the employees, how error prone or sturdy they are, are they as efficient as they could be? Well, only then are we able to identify the specific places and ways in which modern technologies can objectively and measurably improve the performance of our business. We need to first understand our business processes in order to improve them.