This is the title of an article that I wrote with a few colleagues and that was published in the book ITSM global best practices, volume 1 and recently republished in the ITSM best practices Gold Edition which covers the best articles from a series of ITSM best practices books between 2003 and 2008. Here's what this article is all about:
Introduction
More and more IT organizations are utilizing the best practices described in ITILfor structuring and organizing IT processes. This is done, for example, in an attempt to improve the quality of the services provided, to reduce IT costs, to acquire ISO 9001 and/or ISO/IEC 20000 certification, and/or to satisfy relevant laws and regulations.
Although ITIL is a de-facto standard for IT service management, accepted throughout the world, it provides only a framework, not the detailed design that is needed to organizationally embed and automate the IT processes described. In other words, ITIL primarily applies to "tier 1" of the ISO 9001 process documentation standard (see figure 1).
At the same time, organizations and businesses have worked hard in recent years to map, modify and significantly automate their business processes. Today organizations are confronted with a multitude of changes in business processes as a result of internet and web-related implementations. In other words, as a result of a business environment that is changing at an ever-increasing rate. In addition to optimizing these business processes in order to improve their competitive position, organizations are also striving to improve quality and reduce costs with reference to the appropriate design and implementation efforts.
In the area of modeling business processes in particular, significant advances have been made in terms of standards both for modeling these processes and for automating processes using web-based (workflow) applications. A recent survey by BPTrends, described in the report "State of BPM", indicates that, in addition to general standards such as ISO 9000, SOX and CMM(I), organizations are especially interested in BPM-specific standards such as Unified Modeling Language (UML), Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) and Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (BPEL-WS).
Because business and IT management processes share fundamental characteristics, it is only logical for many IT organizations that are struggling to design, rapidly implement and maintain a detailed process framework based on ITIL, to align their efforts to the standards, best practices and tools already being used to design and implement business processes.
Objective and target group
The article presents a number of principles that serve as the premise for the structured design of IT processes. In formulating these principles, an attempt has been made to align with BPM developments. The design standards referred to in this article are supervised by existing independent organizations. They do not reflect the introduction of a new school of thought.
The objective of these IT process design principles is to improve the legibility, consistency and integration possibilities of IT processes. By attuning to the BPM standards, techniques already being used for web-based business applications can be used to automate IT processes.
The article is intended for IT architects, process owners, process advisers and IT specialists (both administrators and developers). The article may also be of interest to IT managers, organization advisers, technical consultants and others involved in the field of IT management. A pre-requisite for this article is basic knowledge of IT processes and ITIL.
Scope
The article will not provide an in-depth discussion of specific IT processes or aspects thereof, but will investigate the generic interface between IT processes and tools for process design. The topics will be reviewed from the perspectives of a process designer, process owner and process operator.
Outline
Firstly, the need to design IT processes will be discussed. Consideration is then given to how the design of IT processes is approached in most organizations these days, along with the typical problems involved in the design of detailed IT processes and their consequences.This is followed by a section introducing BPM standards such as BPMN and BPEL-WS. Next a number of principles are presented for applying BPM standards in IT process design and for addressing the problems identified in the previous section. The last section provides a brief summary and a few conclusions.
Are you interested? Post a comment and I'll help you to get a copy.
Regards,
Jeroen Bronkhorst
Posted
04-30-2009 5:55 AM
by
jbronkho