People-Ready Process: Collaborative Process Design

Learn how Microsoft's People-Ready Process vision aims at driving Business Process Management into the mainstream.

Microsoft's People-Ready Process approach advocates for Collaborative Process Design. We do not believe that requiring a single tool for everybody involved in a business process is the right approach. Business processes tend to be complex, and enterprises need to enroll everybody across the organization to enrich the understanding of those business process. Microsoft's strategy looks at bringing people together to tackle this complexity, but instead of giving everybody one tool (that likely would not fit all levels of skills and expertise), we want people to continue to use the tools that they are already familiar with to ensure that this collaboration across process design actually happens. For example, in modeling business processes, business analysts are very comfortable with Visio, the most widely used business process analysis tool in the market, and want to use SharePoint to collaborate with other analysts in modeling the process. Alternatively, Professional Developers and Architects are very familiar with tools such as Visual Studio and rely on its depth and flexibility to implement complex process-centric applications. Finally, process participants and business users rely on Microsoft Office to do their work, and expect applications to be delivered in the same context and experience. In the end, collaborative process design is a very effective way to tackle the complexity and achieve understanding of complex business processes.