Business Process Engineering

Business processes are what drives companies. People, data organization and IT tools are important, but unless those are implemented and maintained in the context of a specific business process, they can turn into expensive anchors that preclude timely responses to market change. In order to control modern, automated processes and lead the people who are integral, it is vital that business processes are fully documented and maintained. They are then used to define IT requirements and development plans that are precisely targeted to the needs of the business, leading to an optimal application portfolio size and scope, minimizing expense and maximizing effectiveness.

Business Processes are Paramount

Cognitive Solutions approach is to ensure that current business processes are fully understood and properly documented. This includes in-depth analysis together with interviewing the business process subject matter experts that result in documented processes (at multiple levels of detail) in a reusable manner for the business process owner(s). This process also assures the capture and dissemination of individual “tribal knowledge”.

The most important aspect is to ensure that the business process is defined independent of the supporting IT systems. By keeping the business processes independent of IT, we assure that legacy tools and systems are not business decision drivers, but actuators.

Once processes are documented, we identify solutions to ensure that the IT infrastructure implements the desired business process, no more and no less. This includes defining traceability between the business process, the IT system requirements and the IT design. It also ensures that change control processes sufficiently address all three in a coordinated manner and that there is a robust, long term roadmap process to guide evolution of the business processes (which in turn would guide the supporting IT systems) making it adaptable to changing conditions.