Thoughts about Business Process Management

Here is my random thought's list about Business Process Management. Please don't expect it to be complete, new thoughts always comes and at random time and in random order. I will try to update it as new thoughts will come.

In general some person or group of the persons in the organization understands the full business process. When business process is automated then people are starting to rely on the business process executed by the Information System. At some point the system becomes too complicated and people starts trust business processes executed by the system. Employees leaves and new comes and at some time it's obvious that nobody fully understand what was intention of currently running business process, or some parts of it. Once you have reached that state, people is starting to be scared to change anything and keeps doing work in the same, sometimes inefficient way. Business conditions are changing permanently, but Business Process are not changing as fast and they should. My points are:
* business processes should be well understood by people who are working with system and organization's management.
* they should be collected out of smaller easier to understand subprocesses (if that can be achieved).
* all business processes should be graphically presented and documented in simple terms and short sentences.
* business language should be used to describe process, technical terms should be avoided as much as it could be.
* should be regularly revisited and updated as needed, without a fear of changes.

In my humble opinion, It's better to have a well understood, easy to change and maybe not perfect business process instead of huge, sophisticated process and be dependent on it without understanding what is going on and why organization is following some steps.

Worst possible Business Process or Workflow Management system is an embedded system. Embedded system will be considered and used by this one system and probably will not be able to work with other Applications and Information Systems or external data. Business Process and Workflow management system most of the time acts and integration tool between different systems and should be deployed ad used as such. It's better to have one scalable, performant system and integrate with other tools and systems used in the organization.