 Business Process Management (BPM) is a disciplined approach to identifying and managing the internal processes required to improve efficiency within an enterprise. A number of BPM application suites are positioning their offerings as human-centric, with many focusing especially on document-intensive processes. A popular term for this integration is Human-centric BPM. The goal is to better align people to processes and support the business user to drive the process.
Work of course is “social” in nature, especially for knowledge workers who have to share information and ideas, seeking to build value in a collaborative and iterative way. Social networking tools are therefore naturally making inroads into the business world. Increasingly sophisticated social networking tools and collaboration platforms provide a way to link shared workspaces and conversations with business process management.
This is clearly a step forward toward integrating human interactions with business processes but it still falls short of true human-centric business modeling. After all, the basic approach is still a linear process defined as a sequence of events – deriving from the industrial age production line. The best BPM systems allow assigning events to particular roles in the organization, which helps with resource allocation. However, the overall model is still mechanistic and fails to address the underlying organic nature of organizations as social systems.
By comparison Value Network Analysis (VNA) is a role-based, networked approach that really does put people and the roles they play at the heart of value creation. The ValueNetworks.com application provides a standard way to define, map, and analyze the participants, transactions, and tangible and intangible deliverables that together form a focused business activity or value network. It is at its essence about understanding how work really gets done in a dynamic human environment, revealing the underlying value creation capacity of internal or external value networks. Rather than imposing a standardized process model, value network methodology reveals processes and workflows by allowing the role-based network to express itself.
Both human-centric BPM and value networks can be seen as human-intensive processes that reside in separate domains of understanding – one process-based and system-oriented and the other role-based and network-oriented. Both acknowledge and positively support the impacts of human interaction and decision making. Value network modeling however taps into the more natural way that people interact to create value. When human decisions and interactions make or break the process (and when don’t they?) then value network modeling is a faster and more effective way of aligning people and process.
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