Business structures, especially on large enterprises, are quite stable. This stability relates to real business assets behind these structures, such as production facilities and employees. Business processes express relations between these objectively existing business objects. This implies stability of these processes.
To scrap process entirely, one must sell or dismiss production facilities, fire workers and take other similarly drastic measures. But even in this case a company may have other production lines, which will still use similar processes. Even in large restructuring, processes, as a rule, survive by just partial rearrangement of their elements and relations. Total elimination of a process typically requires literal extermination of an organization, which s quite an exceptional case in economic reality where actives typically just change ownership and undergo an evolution, rather than experience literal destruction.
In BPM practice discarding of process is typically associated with less drastic scenario and merely implies a change in modeling methodology or utilized BPM tool rather than elimination of the process itself. In this case, scraping a process is an indicator of insufficient qualification of BPM team, which discards valuable process knowledge instead of careful reworking and preserving its value. Even in case of change of BPM platform, most processes from it can be well migrated to new BPM environment. As a rule, discarding of processes is a dream of a software vendor, which tries to sell a new BPM system and discard all previously accumulated BPM knowledge in organization as unnecessary garbage. Productive approach implies evolutionary reworking of processes instead of revolutionary scraping of them.
With present euphoria of digitization, we often loose a sense of reality. It is not so crucial when it concerns teenagers playing computer games. But it is far more dangerous when digital aberration impacts management. It is always useful to remember that behind BPM diagrams and processes exists real business, which they manifest. Of course, we should exclude degenerate cases (alas, quite often happening in practice) when a business model has no relation to actual business at all.
Leave A Comment