Piero Ponce: A process system is like a cake’s slice

A process system can be understood as an approach to manage an organization. However, there are other important angles that support operational activities. These are among others: quality, risk and knowledge management. In this sense, process management is like a piece of cake, which interacts with other slices at operational level and helps organizations achieve their goals.

Business Process Management

At the end of September of this year I attended a seminar in Vienna on this issue, organized by BOC Information Technologies Consulting AG. Some interesting highlights I took back home were as follows:

• A process management system needs a methodology for its implementation. This is often called Business Process Management (BPM) life cycle in the business jargon and consists of different steps which build a bridge between the organisational strategy and its daily activities.
• The government (public administration) also benefits when applying process management practices. The government may differ from private companies on its orientiation (public services vs selling products/services) and income generation (taxes vs profits). However, it shares the same ultimate goal: to satisfy customers through the services provided.
• One of the big challenges towards implementing processes is to understand “what does my customer really need”: It is thus crucial to gather relevant information from the ground and based on accurate sources.
• Information technologies have also strongly impacted process management in the last few years. Nowadays there are several software packages (BPM-tools) that support the documentation and automatization of processes.

Thus, business process management interacts with quality, knowledge and risk controll. But it also brings processes, people and technology together.

Written by: Piero Ponce

Twitter: @pieroponce