Business Process Design

The following is an overview of what 'business process design' means. One definition is to

"redesign our business processes in order to achieve dramatic improvements in their performance".
• [from "Reengineering Work: Don't Automate, Obliterate"; Hammer, Michael - Hammer and Company; HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW, Jul/Aug 1990, p. 104]

Companies embark on business design projects to try to streamline business throughput, to reduce expenses or overall completion time, or to maximize output. The goal is to continuously improve how the organization produces its deliverables.

The activity of designing business processes (also called 'process modelling') is not new - there are articles and studies dating back to the 1940s and earlier about workflow design. However, even in the systems that the ministry has built in the last decade, there has not been a concentrated effort to look at an overall business area and design the way people will work to effectively achieve business objectives.

As you might know from the October 1994 ministry reorganization document, the Business Design Branch has been formed to develop effective, integrated business processes for use in the field. This focus is new to the ministry, in the sense that the ministry is committing significant resources to concentrate on designing effective business processes.

Business Process Design Techniques

How is business design done? There isn't a definite answer to that yet, for our ministry. Standards and techniques (and... processes!) still have to be developed. To give a general example, one business design technique that looks at current business processes is a workflow chart, such as the following:

The above chart shows that although the process time for accepting some kind of business goods is only five minutes, it actually takes a full day to complete the process. For example, perhaps the person who accepts the item works some distance from the next person in the chain, and mail delivery takes a day. This chart can then be used to try to determine where significant improvements could be made by reducing cycle time (i.e. time where an item is not actually being worked on). In the above example, that could mean situating Employee 1 and Employee 2 close together so the cycle time reduces from one day to immediate.

The above technique is useful to make efficiency improvements in existing processes. Business design also can include fundamental reshaping of how an organization does business. The term reengineering was used by Michael Hammer to mean "using the power of modern information technology to radically redesign our business processes" [ibid.] (italics mine). There is a huge difference between efficiency improvements and radical redesign.

Request more information from Bill Holland or Jeremey Janzen; see the process modelling guidelines the Data Administration group has developed.