Business Process Is Not Information Management
November 15, 2011
We continue to run across some interesting stories about Enterprise Data. This one from Catherine Lamsfuss caused quite a debate at lunch. Here’s what we read:
As the amount of data within a business or industry grows the question of what to do with it arises. The article, “Business Process Management and Mastering Data in the Enterprise“, on Capgemini’s website explains how Business Process Management (BPM) is not the ideal means for managing data.
According the article as more and more operations are used to store data the process of synchronizing the data becomes increasingly difficult.
As for using BPM to do the job, the article explains,
While BPM tools have the infrastructure to do hold a data model and integrate to multiple core systems, the process of mastering the data can become complex and, as the program expands across ever more systems, the challenges can become unmanageable. In my view, BPMS solutions with a few exceptions are not the right place to be managing core data[i]. At the enterprise level MDM solutions are for more elegant solutions designed specifically for this purpose.
The answer to this ever-growing problem was happened upon by combining knowledge from both a data perspective and a process perspective. The article suggests that a Target Operating Model (TOM) would act as a rudder for the projects aimed at synchronizing data. After that was in place a common information model be created with enterprise definitions of the data entities which then would be populated by general attributes fed by a single process project.
While this is just one man’s answer to the problem of data, it is a start. Regardless of how businesses approach the problem it remains constant–process management alone is not efficient enough to meet the demands of data management.
“It’s not the process its the people that implement and use the process that matter” stated Jasmine Ashton in a final summary of the lunch debate. We had to agree. However, as we looked through the Polyspot data management description that Ms. Lamsfuss’ article pointed us to we had to agree that starting with a good technology implementation could go a long way towards helping the people follow the processes.
Constance Ard November 15, 2011
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