THE PHIOS APPROACH - PROCESS REPOSITORIES

An overview of the problems of business process management and how the Phios Process Repository tools can help address these problems.

The most valuable information in an organization is least likely to be captured by today's enterprise or web-based business applications: "know how" - practical knowledge about business activities, about who does what and when, and how to do things faster and better. This is the market vacuum Phios Corporation targets - the support of business professionals in the discovery, publishing, and management of key business activities critical to their performance and that of their organizations. With Phios technology, these professionals can leverage previous successful practices and creatively alter, extend, connect, and review business activities to improve their business operations.

The Problem: Managing Business Processes

In the last decade or two, all forms of business data have been transformed through initiatives like decision support systems, information resource management, data repositories, enterprise resource planning systems, and—most recently—knowledge management. It is difficult to find a large, successful enterprise that has not made significant progress by updating and integrating their data company-wide. For example, many companies now have extensive customer histories available on-line for the service representatives who help customers on the phone. Some derive significant additional benefits from "mining" their corporate data for detailed insights into customers and products which are most profitable.

Compared to their use of data, however, most companies today are still very primitive in the ways they manage their business processes. Processes are inconsistent across applications, locations, functions, and divisions. Few people understand how their work relates to the overall processes in which they participate. Although process maps, task documentation, and job aids exist in raw and isolated forms, most knowledge about how things are—or should be—done is stored in incompatible, disconnected and obsolete ways.

Why is this a Problem

This informal and haphazard management of processes has a number of undesirable consequences:

Customers receive inconsistent and often inadequate service from different parts of the company, sometimes compromising the entire corporate brand image.

Management must continually struggle to manage the "horizontal" interactions between people in different parts of the company who don’t understand how their work fits into an overall corporate process.

Best practices and other ideas for improving how things are done are discovered and shared haphazardly, and often repeatedly re-invented in different parts of the company.

Installing new computer systems, such as electronic commerce or enterprise resource planning, is often extremely difficult—due primarily to organizational rather than technical problems.

In general, the problems of continually adapting to a rapidly changing world—new competitors, new products, new technologies, and new business models—are getting more and more important, but the tools most companies have for dealing with them are increasingly inadequate.

Needed: Better Process Management

In the same way that information technology has already helped most companies manage their data more effectively, we believe that the next big opportunity for information technology is to help companies manage their processes more effectively. We define process management as:

Systematically understanding, tracking, and improving the business processes that matter.

In fact, we believe that many successful companies in the 21st century will devote as much attention to managing their processes as they currently devote to managing their products.

More and more companies today are already beginning to make the changes in culture and managerial mindset needed to manage in this new way. For instance, the very process of implementing an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system often requires a company to think more explicitly about their business processes than they ever have before.

As more companies move in this direction, they are beginning to realize that—in order to manage their processes more effectively—they need more systematic ways of managing their process knowledge: What things need to be done? Who is responsible for them? What works well and what doesn’t? How do other companies do these things? What are innovative new ways of doing these things?

It is, of course, possible to manage this kind of knowledge in the ad hoc, haphazard ways most companies do today. But to manage this well and consistently requires specially designed electronic knowledge repositories.

The Phios Approach: Process Repositories

The Phios mission is to be the leading supplier of these electronic knowledge repositories that help companies better manage their business processes. These "process repositories" include both software tools and knowledge content to help companies explicitly define and manage their own processes and find state-of-the-art knowledge about how other companies do similar things.

We define process repositories as:

Consistent, easy-to-use collections of process knowledge, used for multiple purposes.

For example, in addition to just storing process maps, these repositories can be used to organize process documentation, "best practice" libraries, measurement and benchmarking data, software configuration and change data, linkages to relevant web sites, and many other kinds of knowledge. In some cases, these additional kinds of process knowledge will be actually stored in the process repository. In other cases, the repository will only store links to information that is physically stored somewhere else (e.g., on separate web pages or in a document repository)

We view process repositories as a critical component of a company’s knowledge management strategy. Unlike most other approaches to knowledge management, process repositories focus on "know how" rather than "know what". However, these repositories can also be used to organize many kinds of "know what" by categorizing them according to the business activities for which the knowledge is relevant.

The history of the Phios approach

The Phios Process Repository approach is based on more than seven years of research at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Drawing on research in computer science, organization theory, and coordination science, these MIT researchers developed a pioneering process repository, the "Process Handbook." This repository includes knowledge about over 5000 business processes and activities. It also includes a variety of software tools to edit and view this knowledge base.

We at the Phios Corporation have exclusive license to all of the intellectual property resulting from the Process Handbook project. This license includes the software, the repository contents, and all patents covering our approach to process representation. In addition, the researchers who led the project at MIT are co-founders of Phios and serve on our board of directors.

Phios continues to develop and innovate this knowledge into current and pending releases of the Phios Process Repository, an integrated suite of process management tools. For further information on the Phios approach to process management, please see our white paper.