About business processes
Business processes (BPs) are important
Business processes are at the heart of each organisation. They describe how organisations operate, i.e. their way of working, and therefore impact on how organisations perform.
Globalisation, higher competitiveness, more demanding customers, compliancy requirements, growing IT possibilities, outsourcing, etc. All those challenges put pressure on organisations to perform better. Hence, organisations are increasingly relying on their business processes to excel.
For instance, check out @PEXNetwork’s video on business process excellence.
Mature (i.e. excellent) business processes are important
Merely modelling and deploying a business process does not imply that it is also an excellent one, or at least a good one. This brings us to the notion of ‘maturity’.
Business process maturity is a measure to indicate how well your business processes can perform. You can decide to focus on the maturity of specific processes, or more generally, on the maturity of the overall management of all business processes within your organisation.
Higher maturity is reached by improving the capabilities (i.e. skills or competences) needed to perform well. For instance, how capable is your organisation to model its business processes in a graphical design, or to run them without errors, etc.?
Business process maturity models (BPMMs) are important
Process improvements are not easy to realise. As a result, Business Process Maturity Models have been designed to assist organisations on their journey towards more mature, i.e. excellent, business processes. They help assess and improve the organisation’s way of working, i.e. business processes, in a more systematic manner (instead of ad hoc initiatives).
By using a BPMM, you can assess (or evaluate) how mature your organisation is on all the required capabilities, and which steps are needed to become better. As such, they provide a step-by-step road map with goals and best practices.
The result of a maturity assessment (or evaluation) is expressed as levels (or scores). For instance, as a score on a scale from 1 to 5, with a higher score expressing higher maturity.
- Maturity level: the overall score on all capabilities together.
- Capability level: the score on a particular capability.
BPMM example for specific business processes: OMG-BPMM (see p. 66)
Given their business importance, many BPMMs exist...