Organizations have an unprecedented number of opportunities available to change and improve their processes. Advances in organizational research, mature supporting information systems, and complementary service offerings allow them to create compliant processes, improve their performance, simulate, automate, and monitor them. But one key challenge remains: You need to find your processes first.

During the BPM Day seminar on June 27th, part of the discussion focused on strategies for the identification of processes. Keith Swenson picked this up in a blog post here. We propose that process modelers seek out a rainy day scenario first, in order to discover as many process variants as possible early during their process modeling efforts. You can read our advice here:

zur Muehlen, M.;  Recker, J.: Asking the Wrong Questions: Process Discovery on a Rainy Day. BPM.com, July 3rd, 2007. Available online at http://www.bpm.com/asking-the-wrong-questions-process-discovery-on-a-rainy-day.html

Business projects all circle around the notion of change and improvement. Improving their business processes is on top of the agenda for all chief and senior executives. Increasing effectiveness and efficiency of current business structures depends on a solid understanding of current and future business processes and their contribution to current and future business needs.

Business Process Management (BPM) is the set of concepts, methods and tools surrounding the definition, implementation, execution and improvement of organizational processes. The demand for BPM is stimulated by opportunities related to ongoing process performance improvement, process outsoucing/offshoring and the interest in process standards such as ITIL and SCOR.

Not surprisingly, global analysts such as the Gartner Group have identified Business Process Management as the number one priority of CIOs for a number of years.