Over the past decade, open innovation has begun transforming the way global companies develop new products, as executives increasingly recognize the benefits of exposing internal R&D to outside ideas. Now, some organizations are going even further by applying open-source thinking to improve a range of core business processes. Aided by rapidly changing technology, these leaders are looking outside the gates to develop faster and better solutions to a variety of strategic, operational, and organizational problems.
Open up: Knowledge brokering offers companies an analogous capability. Pioneered by product designers in companies such as the design consultancy IDEO, it is grounded in the adage that the best source of new ideas is old ideas.2 Creative product designers can take a subassembly (say, a hinge or a motor) from an existing product and apply it in a completely new context. We’ve observed companies using processes in much the same way. They do so by forming project teams that initiate conversations with knowledge brokers—people willing to discuss their experiences to serve the teams’ needs—and then combine the external ideas with internal ones to improve these companies’ business processes.

Plan: The business leaders create and own the business performance objectives of the organization. Senior leaders need to first understand the requirements of their customers, stockholders, workforce, suppliers, and communities. They need to understand their competition. They need to understand the environmental, economic, technological, social, legal, and political environments that they do business within. Senior leaders need to consider all of these elements as they design a Business model and business Strategy map that will meet the customer and business requirements. Business Leaders then translate these requirements and business environment issues into business performance objectives. Business Leaders then create business plans and associated resourcing plans that will cause the organization to achieve these business objectives. The Business Leaders establish business performance metrics to measure the business’s capability to meet these business objectives. Many organizations create a Balanced scorecard to organize and communicate business performance metrics.

Business processes are what organizations do. Whether documented or not, whether designed or not, whether understood or not, nothing gets done until someone (or "the system") does it – that is what business processes are all about. They are a combination of business operating procedures, business rules, business data, and supporting technology. Yet, many business processes are undocumented, misunderstood, not optimized, not followed, error-prone, and inefficient.

This training workshop presents business process analysis techniques, methods, and tricks to help Business Analysts model, analyze, and improve manual and automated business processes. You will learn how to model business processes using context, data flow, activity, and swim lane diagrams to show work flow, transformations, and scope. Creating the model increases your understanding of the business processes and business rules involved. This activity is often even more revealing to those who live with or in the process. With this foundation, you will learn how to analyze the models and extract requirements for business process improvement or information technology solutions. These techniques can be used to identify problems in the current (AS-IS) situation or to predict behaviors in a proposed (TO-BE) solution.

Business process management (BPM) is a management approach focused on aligning all aspects of an organization with the wants and needs of clients. It is a holistic management approach[1] that promotes business effectiveness and efficiency while striving for innovation, flexibility, and integration with technology. Business process management attempts to improve processes continuously. It could therefore be described as a "process optimization process." It is argued that BPM enables organizations to be more efficient, more effective and more capable of change than a functionally focused, traditional hierarchical management approach.