Lecture 9 - Understanding & Improving Business Processes 1 Flashcards
Basic concept: What is a business process?
A business process is a collection of interrelated activities (such as producing something),
initiated in response to a triggering event (such as a new order from a customer),
which achieves a specific, discrete result for the customer and other stakeholders of the process (such as a product delivered to a customer).
Essence: Why do we need to improve processes?
Improving processes, not just developing &
implementing systems: Because we know that IT in itself is just a cost – it is only when you change processes and do things differently that IT is valuable
Which model would be usefull to look at, to understand the “process performance”?
You should revisit “IS business value research” - Under performance, there is a field called “Process Performance”. These are related.
What is the biggest lesson in lecture 9? Hint: Thinking different
We start by thinking about how we can improve the business process to achieve business benefits – and not about how the system might look like.
How is it possible to get an overview over the companies process?
Scope, Analyze, Design:
Establish process context, scope, and goals: Define business processes. For each process: What is the scope, content, key characteristics regarding current implementation,
goals for the new process?
Understand the current (as-is) process: Modelling of current process and identify factors that
has impact on process performance.
Design the new (to-be) process: Finish the assessment of the current processes, identify, evaluate, and chose improvements, and define key characteristics regarding the new implementation.
What is the definition of a Business Process?
“A business process is a collection of interrelated activities, initiated in response to a triggering event, which achieves a specific, discrete result for the customer and other stakeholders of the process.”
What are the main benefits of having an overview over processes?
- How complicated some projects might be
- That IT people can’t do it alone
- The Co-specialization of enablers
- How projects include both high level strategic concerns and low level practical details
What is important you know, when you cover the business process flow?
Mission & Strategy, Goals & Objectives, Enablers
What are the criteria for key concepts of processes?
Information is needed: It is something that the organization needs information about
More than one: There is more than one instance (e.g. there are multiple accounts)
Different: The instances can be separated from each other (e.g. we know the difference between all accounts in the bank)
Used by processes: Processes operates on the concepts (e.g. there is a process that creates new accounts in the bank)
Refers to the essence: Not the implementation (“what, not how”) so it is not a report, form, list, query, screen, metric, or other depiction of things and facts.
Note: The key concepts are essential e.g. for developing a BI system or choosing and ERP system, because they tells us what kind of information we need to have in the system
Can you name a list of things, we can analyze, to see which process we should improve?
Difficulties: How difficult would it be to improve the process?
Customer value: Is the process closely related to our customers?
Easy wins: Is the process complicated – or are there easy wins?
Management commitment: Is management committed to improving the process? Sequence: Are there any dependencies that implies that we should improve this process first?
Other issues: Are there any other issues that makes it attractive to improve this process first? Or business benefits
What is important, if: Assume that your process customers could select among several competing processes— what would make them select your alternative?
You can and must be really, really good at the various dimensions of a process, but you can only be great at one.
You absolutely must decide, before you get into analyzing and designing a business process, what the most important dimension is— The one that will differentiate your process from the alternatives
Product Leadership
Operational Excellence
Customer Intimacy
How to use: What is important to remember, when tailoering this chapter into a business?
The text is a method to be used in practice, so how to use the text is not that difficult, however the methods, as any other formal method, should be tailored to the specific situation.
Reflections: What should you beware of, when taking this chapters method to use?
The method is most appropriate for optimization projects – not for radical innovation.
That did Schryen (Lecture 1) describe for IS and Non-is investments?
Schryen (lecture1) described how IS and non-IS investments (complementary investments) should be combined to improve business process performance.
What have many of the previous theories focused about?
While many of the previous theories has emphasized that IT only creates value if it is used to change the organization – primarily the business processes – this text provides descriptions about how this might be accomplished.
