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Business Process Management (BPM) and Its Role in Technology Management

Venkata Sai Ram Kowdi

Department of Information Technology, Westcliff University.

Professor Moice Dixon

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Introduction

Organizations constantly restructure for various reasons such as to improve internal

process efficiency, customer experience by adapting to a new technology. Business Process

management (BPM) is a an end-to-end process which facilitates this transformation by

streamlining a structured approach to manage, optimize and automate business processes. An

end-to-end process like BPM would not confine to a specific department such as the IT, but

expands to various organizational units such as finance, human resources, customer service and

operations. BPM primarily relies on design and evaluation to help organizations improve their

design for strategic goals and improve decision making as well as technological adaptation. This

paper discusses the role of BPM in an organization also its comparison to ITIL and COBIT

frameworks. Furthermore, the paper explains the real-life business scenarios where BPM would

be the most effective.

Understanding BPM in Technology Management

BPM (Business Process Management) is a systematic methodology that is useful to

discover, model, analyze, improve and optimize the processes within an organization. As an

analogy, if a business is a machine which has a lot of gears - these gears would represent various

processes within the organization such as taking customer orders, assigning a delivery partner,

delivering the product, resolving support tickets, etc. BPM would help businesses to manage

these processes to run efficiently. BPM cycle consists of five crucial steps - Design, Model,

Execute, Monitor and Optimize. Design would start by an outline or a blueprint of how the

process should work in an ideal condition. For example, an ideal scenario and outcome clearly

defined of how an order is processed from first to start. Model would mean to visualize the
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process such as to draw a flowchart. Execute would put the process into action using systems of

tools such to use a software that is designed to allocate delivery partners. Monitor would track all

the deliveries and track how well the process is working. Optimize would make improvements to

the process to prevent or resolve bottlenecks. This cycle would continue to run and iterate with

new optimization plans to keep up with new problems and technology integration.

Technology Management in BPM is to integrate technology to support the business goals.

For example, every time an order is placed, it would be delivered to the customer. With BPM:

An automated system logs each request including timestamp. The orders are continuously

monitored and when the order takes more than expected time in any of the steps (preparing the

order, assigning the delivery partner, picking up the order, and to delivery the order) it is

assigned to a support technician automatically. BPM can help identify the delay and suggest any

fixes which would increase efficiency and service quality. Customers would appreciate a product

which proactively improves their delivery time and has a solution ready to communicate with the

customers.

Examples of Modern Technologies that are used with BPM are Robotic Process

Automation (RPA) - This mimics a virtual assistant which would handle mundane tasks such as

data entry. For example, the bot could be trained to read, extract, analyze data of thousands of

invoices and can feed it into the database without manual entry. Another such powerful tool is

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) - While virtual assistants/bots created

through RPA strictly functions based on the given instructions, AI/ML Models are heuristic

which means they can learn from past data and help in decision making. For example, to add to

the previous example, fake invoices would be detected using AI/ML. These detected invoices
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might be given to a separate RPA virtual assistant which might handle this scenario. Many

modern tools may work hand in hand and it is not always a single technology used with BOM.

Comparing BPM with ITIL and COBIT

BPM is a way to handle all the workflows within the company irrespective of the

organizational units such as HR, finance, IT or marketing. It also continuously improves to make

them faster and cost-effective.

ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) is a set of best practices that are

applied to manage IT services. It orchestrates the specific job details like telling IT employees to

how to do their job properly such as handling tickets, fixing broken systems or launching new

services. For example, if a ticket is logged for a system that is crashing several times. ITIL would

provide clear steps on how the ticket should be logged, assigning the tickets, steps to resolving

the tickets and preventing it from happening again in the future.

COBIT (Control Objectives for Information and Related Technology) is more focussed to

handle business goals rather than technological goals handles by ITIL. It is more about

governance, leadership, risk and compliance. It is primarily designed for CIOs and managers to

make sure technological goals are aligned with business goals.

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Feature BPM ITIL COBIT

Focus Area Improving and automating Managing IT service Governing and aligning
business processes across the operations effectively IT with business
company strategy
Users Operations teams, department IT service managers, CIOs, auditors, IT
heads support teams governance teams
Approach Bottom-up, operational Operational and Top-down, strategic
improvement service-driven and
compliance-focused
Flexibility Highly customizable and Structured and Very prescriptive, used
department-wide best-practice based for audits and strategy
Technology Often used with RPA, AI, ML ITSM tools like Risk dashboards,
Tools ServiceNow, BMC compliance tracking
Remedy systems

While they have their own roles and responsibilities, these practices can work hand in

hand. ITIL and BPM would be a great addition to enhance their existing process workflow. For

example, IT team that uses ITIL to manage change requests which has several process such as

evaluating, approving and applying the new update. BPM can be integrated which handles

individual steps for all these steps and would identify any delays and automate steps such as

generating reports and sending reminders to improve the process.

COBIT and BPM is also a great combination. For example, when COBIT is used for IT

governance to handle the risk control. In any case the risk control would take a more time than

usual, BPM would integrate tools to streamline data collection, assigning tasks to the respective

officers and create visualizations for the business leaders to handle the problems.
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Appropriate Scenarios for BPM Implementation

Business Process Management (BPM) is best used in organizations which have numerous

steps, people or systems that are required to work together. BPM would tie all of them together

for speed, accuracy, compliance and cost control.

In the banking sector BPM can be used to manage loan processing which includes several

teams and process to work together such as collecting the necessary documents, verifying

information, checking credit scores and necessary parameters to finally approve the loan. Usually

this process would take several days if it is done manually since each of this process would be

handled by a different team altogether. However, with the use of BPM each of these steps are

automated and connected. The BPM software would automatically arrange the collected

documents and use access control to send specific documents to the verification team along with

alerts placed in every step to prevent delay.

In HR departments, BPM can help the entire process of onboarding which usually has

several steps such as training, accessing required permissions for the team, setting up the local

workstation, installing the necessary tools and performance evaluations. A normal onboarding

process would require filling multiple forms to access different applications and security groups.

With BPM the process can be orchestrated in the form of workflow triggers. As soon as an

employee gets hired, the ID card would be generated, the IT equipment would be ordered to the

office, the training modules would be assigned with the given deadlines, the security group

requests would be placed, and tools would be installed.

As many companies are moving to the public cloud architecture to make use of cloud

computing such as AWS, GCP, and Azure. BPM would be extremely useful to manage the cloud

resources efficiently. For example, a company might run hundreds of VM’s (Virtual Machines) in
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the cloud which they might forget to shutdown when they are not in use which potentially wastes

a lot of money. BPM would track all the VM’s performance and if VM has been idle for week an

automated rule would send a warning and if there isn’t any response, it would automatically

shuts Dows the VM to save costs.

BPM is not limited to one industry or an organizational unit but a universal tool that

would make complex business operations more efficient and cost-effective.

Conclusion

Business Process management is not just a tool but a strategic enabler that would help

organizations to operate more efficiently. Unlike ITIL and COBIT which are primarily used for

IT governance and process management, BPM is widely applied to all the departments and

functions. It is a valuable tool in to manage technology and technological workflows. BPM

delivers on execution of any process and improve them continuously to improve performance,

minimizing risk and to deliver a long term value.

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References

Anand, A., Fosso Wamba, S., Gnanzou, D. (2013). A Literature Review on Business Process

Management, Business Process Reengineering, and Business Process Innovation. In: Barjis, J.,

Gupta, A., Meshkat, A. (eds) Enterprise and Organizational Modeling and Simulation. EOMAS

2013. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, vol 153. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-41638-5_1

Betz, Charles. (2012). Ongoing Confusion of Process and Function ITIL®, COBIT®, and

CMMI®: Ongoing Confusion of Process and Function.

De Haes, S., Van Grembergen, W., & Debreceny, R. (2020). Enterprise governance of

information technology: Achieving alignment and value in digital organizations (3rd ed.).

Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25918-1