Routes of Adoption: Process Awareness

If your business process is not currently very well understood or is not documented, it is very useful to first capture and document. We call this Process Awareness.

In this route of adoption of BPM, business processes are first modeled. Process models are useful because they help promote process understanding and drive strategic clarity.

First, by aligning, collaborating, and reusing business models, organizations are able to reach common understanding across departments and teams. Some of the benefits of process models include:

• Visualize and explore business processes
• Enable better business decisions
• Bridge the IT and business gap
• Promote process adoption and knowledge sharing

It is only through this common understanding of the business processes that organizations can create the strategic clarity that is required to undertake any process automation or improvement initiatives.

In order to capture the business processes, you may use Microsoft Office Visio, a market leader in business process analysis. Visio is one of the easiest to use and most broadly used modeling tool in the world. But its capabilities are not just business process modeling. Microsoft Office Visio makes it easy for IT and business professionals to visualize, explore, and communicate complex information. Instead of using complicated text and tables that are hard to understand, they can use Visio diagrams that communicate information at a glance. Team members don't have to use static pictures, but instead can create data-connected Visio diagrams that display data, are easy to refresh, and dramatically increase the productivity of business users.

People across the organization can use the wide variety of diagrams in Office Visio to understand, act on, and share information about organizational systems, resources, and processes throughout your enterprise. Visio is able to create process intelligence by connecting to sources of data and using that data to create dynamic models that serve as process dashboards.

Finally, because most process modeling is not done in isolation, business users can collaborate to tackle process complexity. Teams can leverage Office SharePoint's collaboration and document management capabilities during the process design lifecycle, using capabilities such as Team Sites, document versioning, and check-in and check-out of documents. In addition, professional developers or architects can use Visual Studio tools to visualize business processes, contributing to the enrichment of the business process and to the collaboration with their business-size counterparts.