Practical BPM: BPM System Organization

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By Rashid N. Khan

There are many ways that a BPM system can benefit from organizational information to determine recipients of tasks. Business processes deal with people, job functions, reporting relationships and groups. Employees initiate claims and expense reports. Their supervisors approve them. If the amount exceeds certain limits, the department managers must also approve them. Once the approvals have been secured, the claims processors act upon them to disburse funds. Thus, even in this simple every-day example, there are people (the employees), job functions (department managers), reporting relationships (supervisors) and groups (claims processors). Knowledge of the participants, their roles, relationships and group membership is essential for the successful implementation of BPM solutions. An organization chart application allows a BPM system to capture this organizational information so that it is available for use by BPM systems.

Some BPM systems allow users to define roles and relationships by using a simple roles table, while others provide rudimentary scripting capability so that custom scripts can be used to determine the recipient of workflow steps, thus alleviating the need of an organization chart application. These scripts rely upon the existence of network directories or employee database tables to determine information needed for selecting recipients. However, roles tables and scripts become difficult to manage and maintain as the size of the organization increases. For large deployments it is ideal to have a way to graphically define a company’s organization chart using an organization chart application.

An organization chart application allows a company to graphically define its organizational structure. This includes specifying the departmental structures, job functions, users who perform the job functions, and the definition of groups within the organization.

Job Functions

These objects represent distinct job functions and the individuals who perform these functions. Since the organization chart is created as a hierarchy, the relationship of the job functions also explicitly specifies the relationship of the individuals who are assigned to these job functions.

In every organization there are individuals who have more than one job function. If a person can have multiple job functions, his name will appear in multiple locations in the chart. In this situation it will be impossible to determine who the supervisor is of such people, since each job function he or she occupies could report to a different individual. To avoid this confusion, the organization chart application must provide the capability of specifying a primary job function. An individual can have one primary job function and multiple secondary job functions.

Job Function Groups

It is common to have several individuals perform the same type of job in an organization – a company may have five buyers, three application engineers and four clerks. To accommodate this it is always possible to design an organization chart with multiple job function objects, but this can make the organization chart unnecessarily large without adding any additional value.

Job function groups are designed for this purpose. A job function group is physically represented as one object in the organization chart. However, it can include any number of individuals. Even if there were 20 buyers, they could all be represented by one job function group.

Sub-Charts

It is not practical or advisable to represent an entire company with a large number of employees in a single organization chart. Not only would this be practically impossible, it will be difficult to manage and find job functions and people in one large chart. The organization chart must provide a sub-chart object that can be used to represent divisions, departments, sections, sub-sections or other entities of an organization. Each sub-chart can embed an organization chart of its own to represent the entity. By allowing charts to embed sub-charts, and sub-charts to embed other sub-charts, complex organization charts can be defined in a modular building block fashion. Furthermore, by providing means to control edit privileges to individual charts, an organization chart application can offer a means of distributing the management of these charts to individuals within each chart, or to those who have the say in the structure of the organization.

Groups

While groups are not represented in an organization chart, they are used widely in organizations to define cross-functional teams created and assigned to perform a specific task. Since these tasks often end up becoming a part of a business process, it is important for a BPM system to provide a method of defining and maintaining groups. This again is the role of the organization chart application. The organization chart application may allow companies to define groups with the following attributes:

1. With individuals: In this case the members of the group are static. If one member leaves the company the group has to be redefined.
2. With job functions: Instead of defining a group using individual names, it is defined by creating a list of job functions. This has the advantage that if a person leaves the company or changes job responsibility, the job function belonging to the person is assigned to the new person. The new person then automatically becomes a member of the group. The definition of the group is therefore dynamic as long as the organization chart is maintained.
3. Consisting of other groups: A group may be composed of other groups. In this case, the definition of the group is dynamic and depends on the definition of its constituent groups.
4. Consisting of charts: A group may consist of all the members of a chart. This again is a dynamic definition. If the chart is modified, the membership of type group changes automatically.
5. Composites: These are groups that can consist of individuals, job functions, groups and charts.

Organization Charts and Directories

Virtually every company contemplating the use of a BPM system already has a computer network installed, since a network is an essential prerequisite for the deployment of a BPM system. Networks use directories that allow network administrators to establish accounts for users, their passwords, access rights and other relevant information. This information is saved in a network directory. Users log on to the network using their assigned user name and password. In some cases the network directory may also contain information such as the job function, supervisor, email address and departments of each user. This information overlaps with the information kept in the organization chart for the BPM system and raises issues about maintaining or synchronizing the organization chart information with the directory information.

The ideal solution, of course, would be to use the network directory information to build the organization chart. Companies already have invested in creating and maintaining these directories as their employees join and leave the company. Having only one repository of all organization chart information eliminates the need of maintaining two different directories or implementing elaborate synchronization techniques between the two. The BPM system could simply read organizational information from the directory and determine the names of users, their job functions, departments, group memberships, email addresses, reporting relationships, and also authenticate the users at login using the directory. There are, however, several problems with this approach:

1. Network directories were designed by network developers for use by network administrators to manage complex networks. They were optimized for this purpose and their scope was also limited. Network directories were never developed for business process management that have some similar, but many different, requirements. Some of the obvious requirements of business process management that cannot be satisfied by current day network directories include the following:
   • Network directories were designed with a user being the primary node of information. The directory consists of a list of users. These users are assigned properties such as the groups they have access rights to, email addresses and job functions. On the other hand, an organization chart for business process management has job functions as the primary node of information. A company creates job functions and then assigns people to these job functions. The job functions have a relationship to each other. This difference between these two requirements causes many issues when trying to use network directories as a substitute for organization charts.
   • Business process management requires a person to have multiple job functions for reasons already noted. Network directories only provide one job function per user.
   • While most network directories support the concept of groups, none of them support the concept of job function groups described above that is very useful in business process automation.
   • Most network directories contain only very rudimentary information about each user: such as user name, passwords and simple relationship information. Organization charts used for BPM must provide many other pieces of data such as availability, salary, phone numbers, supervisor’s name, department name, buying authority and others.
2. Network directories were designed for network administrators. The user interface, therefore, for most directories is fairly complex and suitable for only skilled IT administrators. However, the organization chart used in business process management contains employee information that is best managed by HR staff or business managers for whom the user interface of most network directories is fairly difficult to use.
3. The IT department of a company controls network directories. Since it controls access to the corporate IT resources, the IT department is reluctant to relinquish control about the management of directories to anyone other than a select group of network administrators, and rightly so. However, the organization chart of a company is determined by the business managers. They must have access to the tools used to maintain the organization chart for business process management and other purposes.
4. Every network directory has its own proprietary information schema and interface for accessing information in the directory. This means that a BPM system will have to interface with a variety of different directories using different schemas.

Other Requirements of Organization Charts

Organization charts have some other requirements when they are used for business process management:

1. Each person or resource in the organization chart database must be uniquely identified. This is because in a large company, it is possible to have more than one person with the same name. The unique identifier is generally caller the "user name" or "short name," and it is used as the key to store information internally about the person.
2. While internally the BPM system uses the "user name" to identify a person, when this information is presented externally to other individuals as a part a business process, the person must be identified by their "long name" or full name, or workflow participants will not be able to distinguish or identify who a person is.
3. Since a BPM system deals with the automation of business processes, it almost always needs much more information about participants than applications such as email or document management systems. For automating a business process, a system might need information such as location, department, salary, phone numbers, fax numbers, digital certificates, etc.
4. Sequential groups require members of a group to be assigned an order so that routing to the group will follow the order. Weighted groups require each member of a group to be assigned a weight that is used to determine the distribution of workload. When groups are defined in an organization chart, it is also important to be able to assign orders and weights. These are requirements of an organization chart that are not commonly provided by directories.
5. An organization chart application must provide some mechanism for searching for users or job functions. Search capability is useful in large organizations to find a person or job function.
6. An organization chart application is designed for use by HR staff or business managers. As such, it must provide chart-locking capability so that any individual chart or sub-chart may be accessed only by individuals who have been given access to the chart. This feature allows divisions and departments to manage their own organization charts.

Summary

The agility of the organization’s business processes is dictated by the quality of the brain that governs these processes. The organization chart enables the BPM server to be aware of the human resources available in order to involve people in business processes using routing techniques.

Useful Links

This article is an excerpt from Rashid Khan's Business Process Management: A Practical Guide. Order your copy here:
http://www.bpmenterprise.com/yDQ

About the Author:

Rashid N. Khan is the founder and Chief Technical and Strategy Officer of Ultimus Inc., a pioneer in business process management and workflow automation. Prior to establishing Ultimus, founded Sintech Inc., a leader in advanced software for mechanical testing. Rashid sold Sintech to MTS Systems in 1989, where he worked for a five years as a vice president and general manager. During this period he took the company through ISO 9000 certification. This experience made him aware of the need for business process management and workflow automation. Rashid obtained two undergraduate degrees from MIT in computer science and political science. Khan is the author of Business Process Management: A Practical Guide, has published numerous articles and spoken at a number of events. Contact Rashid N. Khan at info (at) ultimus.com or visit http://www.ultimus.com.

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