Empower Business Users with Collective Learning to Model Their Business with IBM Blueworks Live and IBM Industry Models

Introduction

Business stakeholders often face what amounts to a blank canvas on which to paint their enterprise initiatives. To a fledgling artist learning his trade, an empty canvas can be a formidable obstacle to overcome. Journeymen often learn their trade by mimicking or looking for inspiration from great artists. Looking for inspiration, choosing the scene, the paint, the type of canvas, where and what to sketch, and even the first brushstroke leads to a plethora of choices. Each choice leads to different outcomes.

The purpose of this tutorial is to explain how business stakeholders can take advantage of the collective learning of IBM Industry Models in strategic ways. You can use IBM Industry Models intuitively, with little or no training, as reference value chains, business operational policies, business decisions and business processes.

To support this discussion, the tutorial focuses on the IBM business process modeling and collaboration tool IBM Blueworks Live and the IBM Industry Models, specifically IBM Banking Process Models (and IBM Information FrameWork). However, the concepts apply equally to industry models available in any industry - insurance, telecommunications, healthcare or others (either IBM or non-IBM industry models).

"Blueworks Live is the ideal tool to facilitate our process optimisation journey. It is the tool used for both documenting processes and storing that documentation, which enables reuse. This means that the time and cost associated with process discovery are significantly reduced, as it is a matter of revalidating previous work, rather than starting from scratch each time we want to work on a process. Both our business and IT users love the ease of use, the version history and control, and the collaboration functionality, which enables collaboration across offices and multiple physical locations. The artifacts are understood by business and technical users alike.

The uptake of use of the tool has been driven by the users, with users leaving traditional tools such as Visio in droves, and expressing a much stronger preference for Blueworks Live over any other mapping tool they have used previously."

Blueworks Live Addresses Challenges for Business Stakeholders

Blueworks Live can assist different categories of business stakeholders in solving the following types of business problems, as described in Table 1.

Table 1. Blueworks Live addresses challenges for business stakeholders

The Business and IT Chasm

There is a large chasm between how business stakeholders go about solving business process problems and how they best can be supported by IT. For IT practitioners, the onus is to do more to engage business stakeholders in their business process management (BPM) initiatives. They need to work alongside business stakeholders on their terms and in their timeframes, to assist their endeavours, adding rigour and implementation knowledge.

Can IT practitioners help Line of Business (LOB) stakeholders to achieve operational excellence by business modeling as they start their business transformation journeys? Can IT bring its collective learning - the accumulated knowledge of IT involvement in business projects spanning multiple industries - to the forefront and help business stakeholders execute on their strategies?

Can IT provide relevant, codified domain expertise that can help business stakeholders achieve insight and bring about meaningful change - to allow them to increase agility, to reduce cost, to increase revenue, to increase efficiency or to provide a more differentiated customer experience?

Unfortunately, despite best intentions, industry models traditionally have been neither simple enough nor intuitive enough for business stakeholders to leverage. Business stakeholders often model processes in ad hoc ways with ad hoc tools - drawing and graphing tools, presentation tools, spreadsheets, and a variety of modeling tools. Often they go no further than generating simple process maps with little supplemental information. Because business stakeholders have typically had to engage with IT to take advantage of models, they have found their costs too high and have elected, in general, to ignore them.

It has typically been left to business-savvy IT teams that understand business models and technology to determine how to take advantage of industry models. IT practitioners should aim to get more business users to take advantage of industry models, to move initial business modeling out of the realm of IT, and to help LOB stakeholders to become more self-sufficient.

LOB stakeholders often find it difficult enough to install and configure software on their desktops. This challenge becomes more complex when there is a need to provide it to groups of business stakeholders so that their processes and data are in synch and can be used collaboratively. Then, after the base software is installed, stakeholders face the almost impossible tasks of installing the right version of industry models and ensuring that it is kept current!

This level of commitment to tool management is far too burdensome for all but the most dedicated business stakeholder. Instead, business stakeholders tend to ignore the advantages of industry reference models and build their own from scratch, irrespective of accumulated industry knowledge. This approach results in models that might be poorly thought out or represent viewpoints that are based solely on the experience of the team, reflecting a potentially narrow knowledge base.

The Paints, Brushes and Canvas: Blueworks Live

Blueworks Live is a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), cloud-based collaborative business modeling environment aimed at LOB stakeholders. It is a zero footprint tool available though a web browser that can be used with no IT involvement. It focuses on scenarios where LOB users can collaborate in areas such as process discovery, where they work together on scenarios to model business processes, model business decisions, create capability maps and business policies, or document process models.

Traditionally, business teams begin modeling a process as part of process discovery, creating a high-level process sketch and documenting the intent or goal of the process. They might lock themselves into war rooms for several days. Using tools (such as sticky notes, butcher paper, whiteboards or presentations slides), they document as-is and to-be models. This interaction requires teams to discuss, write down all key points, and convert these points to diagrams and models. This exercise can be a challenge in logistics, time and cost, especially where team members are not colocated. Information leakage, or information loss, often occurs because key information is not transcribed accurately and completely, or is at differing levels of detail.

The core value propositions for Blueworks Live to business stakeholders centres around collaborative capabilities, ease of use, and the ability for LOB stakeholders to work independently from IT practitioners. Blueworks Live can help with business-led change initiatives by providing a shared real-time repository for process information. It provides intuitive tools for continuous improvement and collaboration, which helps business stakeholders to get started quickly. It provides the ability to annotate a significant amount of supplementary information to the processes, decisions and policies, such as risk, cost, time, systems, inputs and outputs.

Models can be created by business teams and then elaborated downstream by IT-centric teams. Also, importantly, Microsoft Word and Microsoft PowerPoint documents can be automatically generated from these models. The documents save time and effort for LOB users and business analysts by transcribing models into formats that can be used for review and communication. The generated documents avoid information leakage and are a time and effort saver for any busy executive. Participants can generate documentation at any stage of the workshop. If reference processes are preloaded before the sessions, participants can review the documentation prior to the workshops. For example, if a team is working on an account-opening scenario, business stakeholders review the Know Your Customer/Account Opening processes in IBM Banking Process Models before the workshop to understand what is typically in a value chain and in reference processes and activities.

Finally, don't underestimate the organisational change management aspect supported by Blueworks Live. There is tremendous value in increasing participation and discussion among business teams that are affected by a process change. For example, providing affected workforce members early information of a potential process change empowers them to provide input and gain additional insight. It allows those effected to become part of the solution and feel a level of ownership in the proposed change.

After a process modeled initially in Blueworks Live has been automated in IBM Business Process Manager, the changes to the model are then managed in the automation tool. When live, the implementation model becomes the source of truth. The model's first few layers of decomposition are used to communicate the process with the business.

Paint by Numbers with a Tutor: Industry Models

Introducing industry-specific models that codify IT collective learning as industry domain-specific reference models is another important initiative in industries such as banking, insurance, telecommunications, and health. These reference models - such as the TM Forum Business Process Framework in telecommunications, IBM Banking Process Models in banking, and IBM Insurance Application Architecture (IAA) insurance models in insurance - all provide assets that can assist business stakeholders in their modeling efforts.

Note that in this tutorial, we focus on the use of the IBM Banking Process Models to illustrate these points. IBM Banking Process Models contain a number of key capabilities, but we focus only on aspects particularly relevant to the scenarios described in this tutorial.

IBM Industry Models for Banking consists of banking data models, process models, and service models. IBM Information FrameWork (IFW) is currently used by more than 400 global clients in retail, corporate and private banking and financial markets. The aim of IFW is to enable business stakeholders to scope and customise their banking requirements and to facilitate business focused development and implementation of solutions. It includes, more than 500 business processes, 2000 business activities, and 3000 business events.

IBM Banking Process Models contain two sets of business process models - at the analysis level, the Analysis Process Model (APM), and at the design level, the Orchestration Process Model (OPM). The analysis models are particularly important to LOB users, and the design models are more relevant to those looking at implementations. In addition, APM models can also be aligned with higher level abstractions - for example, value chains and business components models.

The IBM Banking Process Models currently provide banking processes in multiple formats including Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) 2.0. BPMN is a standard developed by the Open Management Group. Models compliant with this standard can be imported into tooling from various vendors. From an IBM perspective, the APM can be imported into IBM Blueworks Live, IBM Process Center, or IBM Rational Software Architect. The OPM is aimed at design-level work and can be loaded into IBM Process Center or IBM Rational Software Architect.

Applying Collective Learning to Blueworks Live

Consider an example scenario where a business stakeholder logs into her Blueworks Live account where a space has been created to hold functional decompositions of processes and their respective value chains (for example, a payments value chain) from IBM Banking Process Models that have been imported. Figure 1 shows examples of the spaces in Blueworks Live.

The ability to decompose from the more abstract to the more concrete enables just enough information for the task at hand. Executives need to be able to abstract and simplify a model to a level that allows them to make strategic decisions. Decomposition allows business architects and business analysts to model at a detailed level more focused on everyday execution. Blueworks Live facilitates decomposing spaces, processes and decisions into finer levels of granularity.

Figure 1. Business domains

IBM Banking Process Models provide 19 value chains that cover many major banking business domains. These value chains can be depicted as discovery maps in Blueworks Live. Discovery maps provide a simple entry point for business stakeholders. The importance of value chains cannot be underestimated. Communication is enhanced if business stakeholders can converse in terms significant to them, such as payments, mortgages, and lending. It allows then to focus on the lifeblood of their organisations.

An IFW value chain that was imported, such as Know Your Customer/Account Opening could contain at its highest level a set of account arrangement phases such as Offer, Activate, Administer, Review and Close. It could also contain a set of management capabilities such as operation and credit risk management, monitoring control, and customer insight. Each of these capabilities could contain several business processes in their own right. For example, the Offer phase could contain the following business processes: Provide Arrangement Proposal, Administer Customer Details, Administer Product Selection, Determine Specialized Product Requirement, and Review Proposed Arrangement Status. Each of these processes could be composed of layers of business subprocesses and activities that can be further decomposed to get to a layer that is meaningful from a business activity perspective.

Individual value chains such as Know Your Customer/Account Opening can be accessed through their own Blueworks Live space. In the example shown in Figure 2, a graphical representation of KYC/Account opening and a process blueprint (KYC/Account Opening Value Chain) are provided. An executive process stakeholder in a bank is typically expected to "own" this space. For example, the executive process stakeholder would document goals and objectives of this process area. Any initiative related to the KYC/Account opening is authored in either this space or in a subspace.

Figure 2. Blueworks Live space

Drilling down into the KYC/Account opening Value Chain shows a discovery map that provides a process outline in the left pane as a tree structure and a set of capabilities in a grid in the right pane. It is possible to drill down into the discovery maps to nested processes. Figure 3 shows how you can start with a value chain, and then open discovery maps and process diagrams in Blueworks Live.

Figure 3. Relationship between value chain, discovery map and processes

At any stage, it is possible to get a view of the information about the process or the activities that have been imported with the industry models. Figure 4 shows an example where documentation is available with the Administer Inpayment process in the IBM Banking Process Models.

Figure 4. Documentation imported from IBM Banking Process Models

For an example in another industry that is part of IBM Industry Models, see Figure 5. The Claims Management for Individuals value chain is from the IBM Insurance Application Architecture (IAA) model. Figure 5 shows the P&C Claim Management (Individual Insurance) Value Chain that was imported from IAA into Blueworks Live.

Figure 5. Example insurance process

Project Scoping in Blueworks Live

Value chains can be used for initial scoping of a project in IBM Blueworks Live. For example, in Figure 6, the New Bank KYC/Account Opening Value Chain is used. Figure 6 shows the colour coding that is used in an initial walkthrough of the process in Blueworks Live to determine specific processes or activities that are in scope or not in scope or that need subsequent review.

The use of the industry models helps ensure that everyone understands the meaning of the business terms. For example, terms such as "customer on-boarding," "account opening," and "loan origination" are often used loosely. The common model helps ensure an exact definition is kept. Also, teams might not necessarily understand the extent of processes in a value chain, and might not take into account many important processes and activities unless they use industry models.

Figure 6. Scoping technique

Business Policies: The Missing Link?

Key elements in a well-developed business strategy are business policies. You can think of business policies as business rules in the making - not just any business rules, but core business rules that are make-or-break for the business success of the strategy.

Business policies provide an important level of abstraction to business executives to help define and manage key aspects of their business. Although there is not a one-to-one relationship, a business policy can represent multiple business rules. Figure 7 shows business policies linked to processes, milestones, and activities in Blueworks Live.

The ability to author and trace business policies, decisions, or rules to business processes is an important capability to provide business stakeholders. Business operations teams represent a key group that can take advantage of business models. Traceability to operational policy aids in identifying potential gaps in operational policy, for example, where no policy exists for a key business process or business decision.

If organizations don't keep processes aligned to business policies, they can end up tinkering with processes for no real gain or lose sight of alignment with their business strategy.

Often, a knee-jerk reaction starts by modeling the current as-is business process, then documents the business issues, and automatically moves to the to-be business process. An important step that is often overlooked is examining the business policies of an organisation to confirm that any new process complies with the policies. If a gap of business policy is identified, then it is addressed at an executive level before modifying the to-be process.

Figure 7. Viewing policies

Business Rules

What is a business rule?

A business rule is a criterion used to guide operational business behaviour, shape operational business judgements or make operational business decisions. Business rules are only indirectly about system design or behaviours. Your business would need business rules even if it had no software.

In Blueworks Live, you can document and decompose business rules. Business stakeholders collaboratively design and review business rules in a simple tool and link them to processes and policies. Figure 8 shows how to describe a business rule in Blueworks Live for Determine eligibility for product sale. The business rule is composed of two rules - Assess citizenship and Assess customer history. Assess citizenship is itself composed of two rules - Determine if Visa Holder and Determine if citizenship known. The Assess customer history decision is documented in a decision table that takes into account several criteria: Recent Customer, Bank Account and Transaction History.

Figure 8. Rule decomposition

Metrics: You Are What You Measure

As a business user, you might want to understand how a key process in your organisation compares against the same process in other companies. For example, how long does a mortgage origination in your company take compared to your key competitors? Every company uses its own terminology to describe processes and metrics, but industry organisations offer common metrics in and across industries.

Industry and cross-industry metrics are available from organisations such as the American Productivity and Quality Center (APQC). You must join the APQC to obtain the metrics. These metrics are provided in a process decomposition that is called the Process Classification Framework (PCF). The metrics help you benchmark your organisation and its performance against others in your industry and across industries. IBM has been a major contributor to the PCF.

Blueworks Live provides many PCF example templates that can be imported into a space, as shown in Figure 9. Actual metrics are not provided in these templates and must be manually entered from APQC or other sources.

Figure 9. APQC templates

There are a number of key metrics that are part of activities and processes. These include cycle time, cost, wait time and whether or not the activity is seen as a value add to the customer. Aggregating these metrics across a process allow end-to-end metrics to be derived, which help business users determine where process optimsation is required.

The Blueworks Live analysis mode that is available when you click the Analyze button allows business users to select data to display as part of the review cycle, as shown in Figure 10.

Figure 10. Filters in analysis mode

The subprocesses in the analysis mode in Figure 11 show Wait Time, Cycle Time and Value Add metrics.

Figure 11. Viewing key metrics in analysis mode

Process Modeling with the IBM BPM Lifecycle

Artists often begin with many sketches, false starts and alternative approaches in their sketch books. Perhaps they create detailed sketches on some key points of interest - a contour of a petal, the iris of an eye. At other times they only sketch the essence of the scene. At some stage when they are confident about concepts, they move onto the main canvas and begin the painting. They might or might not choose to transpose the sketches, confident that they have learned what they need to know. The main canvas becomes the focus, and all further painting and refinement typically happens there.

The same is true when moving from process sketching with business people to an IBM BPM implementation. After just enough knowledge and thinking has been gained through the communication of an optimised future process, an executable implementation model is designed and created. Visibility of the running processes draws out additional understanding, for example, how much time is spent on an investigation task. Further refinement of the process in subsequent implementations moves the model away from the process sketch. IBM technology for refining the process includes Process Designer, which is part of IBM BPM.

Be wary of spending too much time process modeling in IBM Blueworks Live. Do enough to derive the value and consensus that you are looking for. The value is subjective, and is a field for Six Sigma and Lean practitioners the world over. Simply automating an existing process might mean that you do a bad process a lot faster. You might decide to apply lateral thinking to achieve the business outcome in a completely different way. Or, you might decide to reduce resources, systems, and ambiguity.

After you move to implementation tooling, IBM BPM (and the Process Center, the IBM BPM repository of processes) becomes the master of record. Consider avoiding manually updating the IBM Blueworks Live model to reflect the more refined implementation model. The value derived from such an action is questionable. After the painting is created, you do not see the painter going back to update the sketches.

However, it is possible to set up Blueworks Live and Process Designer so that links can be maintained between them. In Process Designer, you can subscribe to Blueworks Live processes to view the related process and information.

Industry Model Overview

There are a number of key initiatives concerning the formation of industry models. Several key IBM and industry initiatives are summarised in Tables 2 and 3. However, this is far from an exhaustive list. Many industry model initiatives are focused on integration and messaging standards and don't include process models of any significant descriptions.

Table 2. Industry initiatives

Table 3. IBM Industry Models

Conclusion

The value of industry models is increasingly understood by the technical community. However, their adoption by those outside the group has been limited. This challenge is due to the complexity of industry models, their orientation towards a technical audience and the complexity in using industry model tooling.

However, Blueworks Live is a tool that is squarely aimed at business users. It focuses on helping business people stop, think and communicate, in order to determine what the key aspects of a business model could be: the business processes, business policies, and decisions. Blueworks Live provides a browser-based interface that requires no other footprint on a business stakeholder's desktop.

It's all too tempting to move too quickly and automate a process (however bad it may be). Blueworks Live is a vital tool to support business users in making the right business decisions to achieve their business outcomes and to communicate their vision, before automation begins and the IT teams get involved in earnest.

Using industry models with Blueworks Live makes them consumable to business stakeholders. Industry models provide access to domain-specific collective learning that business stakeholders can take advantage of on their BPM journeys.

No longer does the fledgling artist have to start with a blank canvas and wait for inspiration to strike.

"The Blueworks Live tool appealed as a simple and easy-to-use tool for both diagnosis and documentation of business operating models. The added value was in exposing all aspects of the business operating model (not just process and technology), delivering value to a much broader set of business stakeholders."

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the following people for their reviews and feedback:

• Eric Herness, IBM Distinguished Engineer, CTO for IBM Business Process Manager and IBM Operational Decision Manager
• Kevin Finn, IBM BPM specialist
• Niall Jordan, IBM IFW lab
• Scott Simmons, Lead Banking Solutions Architect for IBM BPM team
• Marc Fiammante, IBM Distinguished Engineer
• John Stapleton, ANZ Bank
• Paul Gallen, Westpac New Zealand
• Sandra Moorhead, Senior Manager, Business Transformation, Westpac New Zealand
• Dublin IFW and IBM Blueworks Live product lab teams

Resources

• Sign up for a free trial of Blueworks Live
• IBM Business Process Management product page
• IBM Operational Decision Manager product page
• IBM Blueworks Live
• IBM Business Monitor product page
• IBM Industry Models
• Banking Industry Architecture Network website
• TM Forum website
• Open Management Group Business Motivation Model
• American Productivity and Quality Center website
• Business Rules Community website