Enterprise Composer offers a seamless and efficient way for every Visio® user into the world of professional business process management (BPM) systems and process automation. By using Enterprise Composer
, Microsoft® Visio can create executable processes fully compatible with BPMN
2.0 standard from OMG®, which is the global de-facto etalon for modeling business processes and can be used both by businesses and IT. Every BPM practitioner working with Microsoft® Visio now can import BPM models created in most popular BPM suites directly into Visio® and can export models created in Visio® for further execution on all compatible BPM platforms implementing BPMN
2.0 standard.
Microsoft® Visio is one of the leading tools used to design business diagrams in companies of different sizes and specialization. Full support of BPMN 2.0 is among the prominent and widely acclaimed features of Microsoft® Visio 2016. However, Visio® itself does not support exchange of BPMN diagrams with other tools. The new release of Enterprise Composer removes these limitations entirely. Users can draw BPMN models in standard Visio® Professional and then exchange them transparently with any other BPMN tool not leaving their familiar Visio® environment.
“BPMN IN ACTION” event organized by The Object Management Group (OMG) will present real-time exchange of Visio® BPMN diagrams with other process modeling and execution tools by using Enterprise Composer.
Date: Monday, December 10, 2018
Time: 5:00 pm 7:30 pm
Place: Hyatt Regency Lake Washington at Seattle’s Southport,
Seattle, Washington, USA
Traditionally, most business processes are in possession of workers or groups of workers, in other words, process stakeholders. Every worker holds in memory, experience, notes or corporate regulations certain course of action to follow in every particular situation. This implicit or partially formalized set of rules comprises a business model of a company. The model is subject to change by mere verbal discussion and agreement between workers and management, happen business environment evolves or new challenges appear.
Situation is entirely different in a digital organization. Digital systems do not have any implicit awareness on business aspects, just an explicit algorithm to do exact functions, for which they were designed. Therefore, a digital business system is a manifestation of a business process or of a group of processes by virtue of its design. Creation of digital enterprise is imminently model driven act of implementation of enterprise architecture out of digital systems as its elementary business blocks. Digital enterprise is a continuum of coordinated digital processes.
Despite impressive success, AI is still in its infancy in respect to its literal involvement into high level business processes. Concurrently with the increase of the role of AI in principal business contexts, there will grow demand for BPM in coordination and structuring of AI for business purposes.
As in any other business domain, BPM is suitable and responsible for proper AI positioning in business. Without precise BPM governance, AI bears excessive risks for a business as any important but poorly managed and not transparent part of ongoing operations in an organization.
Real business model of organization is ultimately unlimited in its depth. Going from highest management levels, it descends to individual departments, client relations, production units, technical code of equipment and controllers etc. In vast majority of cases, it is impossible and senseless to build a complete model covering all and every fine detail of the business.
Omitted lower layers of the model create (pseudo) random fluctuations during execution of the model. Real execution paths of a process never follow its model exactly. However, in case of the correct model, we can expect to see that an ensemble of execution paths statistically converges to the model as to its average path over a significant set of observations.
Too often digital transformation boils down to just implementation of certain digital platform or software titles. But software alone does not give any transformation as such. Vast majority of software solutions does not take care about peaceful coexistence and interaction with other similar solutions. Instead the goal is, as a rule, to eliminate competition. It often creates toxic and artificial alloys of randomly picked and poorly interoperable titles in IT landscape and business as a whole.
This explains ever growing demand of enterprises for universal business transformation technologies and skills capable to deliver smooth integration and evolution of existing business practice into digitally empowered and improved organization through efficient cooperation of workers and information technology into modern well managed business.
To succeed on this way, digital transformation must rely on architecture of business change. Carefully capture as-is processes, find a potential where digital components can improve these processes, draw expected to-be processes, estimate potential ROI and risks. These elementary BPM skills are too often absent or neglected, which leads to high rate of failures in transforming a business.
It is another story that customers always do their best to break this clock’s precision in every possible and impossible manner: change their mind ten times a day, disappear at the moment of delivery, break supplied goods and claim a refund etc. And yet, customers highly appreciate flexibility of a company in response to their instant whims.
We must not confuse agility of customers with precision of the company in response to agile client demands. Company can achieve accuracy and flexibility in serving clients only through rigorous process approach with detailed mapping of all possible client scenarios.
Naturally, this detailed work-through may yield dozens and even hundredths of complex client processes and variations. But none of these processes will be agile alone. However, a coordinated ensemble of these processes will ultimately deliver responsiveness, flexibility and precision, which agile clients value so much.
Another even more typical and closely related reason is that a company creates abstract to-be processes and strives running them while ignoring objective reality. Again, essential mapping of as-is processes is neglected for the sake of an imaginary abstraction often borrowed from a book or ready framework and disregarding crucial aspects of the specific organization.
Not seldom, externally enforced processes are even artificially simulated by workers to satisfy inadequate management requirements. It creates additional inefficiency due to a friction and time loss by workers to observe such a fake compliance. Fictitious processes are not less destructive for an enterprise than double books.
To avoid such situations, companies must always begin their BPM journey from scrupulous mapping of existing process landscape and take all care for timely actualization of business model throughout its whole life cycle. It can be achieved only through wide collaboration of analysts, managers and process owners in a contemporary transparent BPM environment.
Suppose you decided for a short trip outdoor and intend to pitch a tent for a night. With some skill and common sense, you can arrange pegs and pins, spread a canvas and have a reasonable shelter for a while. Should you hire an architect for this purpose? Probably, not.
Suppose now that you decide to build a house. You can affordably buy some bricks, tiling and cement. With a bit of luck and advise you can compose these into a sort of walls and a roof. However, there will be a risk that the construct will eventually collapse right on your head. Detailed architecture and professional builders are always advised to avoid a trouble.
Enterprise architecture is a comparable challenge. If you keep a stall, drawing an architecture for it might be an overkill. But running a decent corporation without well developed process architecture will eventually lead into disaster. Remarkably many skyscrapers on a business landscape collapse just by missing their architectural foundation.
Despite its growing power, IT is and will always be just a technology. As a technology, IT has its own logic of functioning and evolution. Even despite functionality and design of IT are largely shaped by demands of business, still principles and internal alignment of IT remain in a primary technical scope.
If left alone or followed as a beacon, IT will drive a company from its true business goals into a virtual world of elusive digital harmony. This danger is getting more and more real in the course of rapidly increasing role of digital governance and real time reporting. As a result, management tends to see the whole business through an IT prism creating a potential for a noxious aberration.
Deviation of a company from an artificial digital focus is an essential factor of self-healing evolution towards true business goals. The gap between business and IT is an objective and important safety distance, which protects business from dissolving in a digital ocean.
The ability to capture a consistent view of an organization through precise mapping of relevant notations is a cornerstone of all subsequent BPM implementation. The goal of BPM is not a replacement of existing processes and technologies but their skilled alignment, which should ensure most effective and transparent interaction of the existing corporate infrastructure at minimum cost and modification.
Unfortunately, too many BPM initiatives go as vendor driven disruptions, revolutions, breaks through and other scenarios similarly dubious in terms of attractiveness and suitability for a continuous corporate growth. BPM is merely about bringing a harmony into established business structures, which is a skill too rarely found or distinguished as a demand.
