Will IT Be the Tamer of the Feral Business Process Problem?

(Newswire.net — September 5, 2018) Chennai, Tamil Nadu — The term ‘feral’ refers to animals that were once domesticated, but now live freely in the wild. Examples include goats, cats, dogs, horses, and even pigs.

Feral animals come up with their own methods of survival, but often are a nuisance to the existing ecosystem to the point of drastically changing them.

Don’t laugh, but business processes can follow a similar path. Business processes are supposed to be controlled, supervised, and well…domesticated. They exist for a clear purpose: to accomplish business goals and process data through a set of steps. But when business processes go feral, lots of problems come up.

Unfortunately, IT leaders tend to be the ones stuck with dealing with the problems of feral processes. But first, let’s start with a look at how to identify a feral process.

4 Signs You Are Dealing With a Feral Process

1. It has no owner

When someone comes to IT to complain about a process, the first question should always be “Who owns this process?” If you get a lot of silence at that point, you’ve got a feral process on your hands. If no one is willing to stand up and be the owner, there’s very little hope for improving it.

2. It doesn’t meet its purpose

Domesticated animals are supposed to serve a purpose. Goats give milk, dogs give companionship, and pigs give bacon. But when out in the wild, the animal’s only purpose is survival. Similarly, business processes that aren’t actually meeting their purpose are not useful. If your process for onboarding new employees only ticks off a checkbox for HR (i.e. surviving on its own) and doesn’t actually help new hires get everything they need to be productive, then the process needs to be brought back.

3. It can’t be traced

Domesticated animals are ideally relatively easy to keep track of, but you never know where a feral animal is at any moment. If your marketing manager has no visibility into the status of her requests for new content, that process is feral.

4. It is undocumented

Everyone breathes a sigh of relief when a loose dog has a collar with the home address. But when you encounter a feral dog, you don’t know anything about its history. Similarly, there is no documentation around feral business process; they simply run as they always have been and evolve as needed. You may ask the different sales managers to describe the process and each one has a different version because it was never written down, let alone followed.

Why Is IT the Dog-Catcher for Feral Business Processes?

Whenever someone in an organization has a problem with a process going a little too wild, one of the first calls they make is IT. Whether they want IT to recommend some off-the-shelf tools or create something custom, business leaders see IT as the dog catchers to keep track of processes that have gotten loose.

In reality, the responsibility should lie with the owner of the process to manage it better, but that’s not a good enough reason for IT to turn its back on the job. Advancements in technology have produced dozens of tools that can be used to both catch and contain stray processes.

How Can IT Be Prepared?

Since business leaders will continue to come to IT to find solutions for their feral business processes, IT needs to equip itself with tools that can solve the problem when the time comes. Learning about new trends and software options is the first step in being able to meet this undeniable need. Similar to how the role of the dog catcher has changed over the decades, IT can learn new tactics to rein in wild processes and restore some order to the business environment.

By learning about business process management (BPM) platforms, IT leaders can preemptively find the right solution to the feral business process problem.