Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
BPM stage 5 - monitoring
Once we have finished the major steps of stage 4 and we have a stable enough runtime, we
need to start concerning ourselves with the information that runtime gives us. Process exe-
cution can send many events to components that are external to the actual runtime. Those
components can be fed to a dashboard-like tool to allow us to monitor process execution
and actual performance metrics. This is a stage where the process simulation from stage 2
can be validated, and notes of the actual estimations should be taken for improvement of
process simulations in the next iteration.
These dashboards are really important for key people who want to see snapshots of how the
company is working in order to make the right decisions. As you can imagine, knowing the
number of processes and activities that are completed per hour can be really helpful for
planning, accepting new commitments of work from providers and customers, as well as
measuring the company's growth rate. This is just one example of the things that you can
do if you have the information available.
Monitoring is about real-time information analysis and display, but it should also be about
flexibility. You might need to add new sources and types of metrics as fast as possible to
measure them within the runtime. A related branch of studies called
Business Activity
Monitoring
(
BAM
) defines best practices for doing so. Tools for BAM must be flexible
enough to show information in such a dynamic manner. For example, a manager might
want to see aggregated data from different sources when he asks for something like this:
"The average time of completion of one or a group of processes related to client X ac-
counts in the last month."
We usually display this information in different widgets that are specially designed to show
very simple values. These widgets provide an overview about what is happening in the
company in just one screen where we can see multiple bar graphs, line graphs, and tables
that let us quickly see what percentage of processes are in different stages throughout our
process runtime environment.
The important thing about the monitoring stage is the externalization of information. These
metrics can provide you with different perspectives to know which are the best places for
improvement in your business processes and in your company altogether.
