Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Achieving a business goal
The most important part of the business process definition is achieving a goal. It's the sole
reason for the process' existence; without it, the process has no purpose at all. This should
never be forgotten.
The business goal of a process shouldn't be disruptive or impossible to accomplish in any
way in the selected business process perspective. Each business process definition must
define a clear goal and all the activities must be defined in order to contribute to achieving
said goal.
Mixing goals and perspectives is a common mistake that you need to avoid when you mod-
el your first business processes. For example, when defining the process of building a car
in an automated factory, we might use the same process to define the steps a robotic arm
should follow to make a simple weld, overcomplicating the process. When this happens,
it's recommended to split the business process definition into multiple well-scoped pro-
cesses for the sake of understandability and maintainability.
One way of achieving this difficult task is to create a brief textual description of the pro-
cess' main responsibility, its ownership, and the concrete goal that it was designed to
achieve. This brief description can be used to train new people to understand why the pro-
cess is useful to the company. You will also end up with a self-documented process that can
be used by the company to improve quality levels.
