Still wide open – the business/IT pide

Organizational change in the management structure is a prerequisite for the success of Game Enterprise BPM but is not a sufficient condition. Several business process management books describe the main challenge in enterprise BPM as the still-wide-open business/IT pide. There is still a gap between process understanding and ownership in Game Enterprise BPM and how automated process are modeled and perceived in departmental workflows of Game Silo BPM. Principles, goals, standards, and best practices defined in Game Enterprise BPM do not trickle down into everyday work in Game Silo BPM.

One of the biggest reasons for this pide is the fact that there is no direct link between the models and tools used in top management to depict the business strategy, IT strategy, and business architecture and the high-level value chain and between the process models and the models and artifacts used in enterprise architecture and from there, even software architecture.

Figure 3: Gap between business architecture and IT enterprise architecture in strategic BPM

So, traditionally, organizations use specific business architecture or enterprise architecture tools in order to depict AS-IS and TO-BE high-level reflections of value chains, hierarchical business processes, and capability maps alongside application heat maps.

These models kind of hang in the air, they are not deeply grounded in real life. Business process models expressed in event process chains (EPCs), vision process models and other modeling types often don't really reflect the flows and collaboration structures of actual procedures of the office. This leads to the perception of business architecture departments as ivory towers with no, or weak, links to the realities of the organization.

On the other side, the tools and models of the IT enterprise architecture and software architecture speak a language not understood by the members of business departments. Unified Modeling Language (UML) is the most prominent set of model types that stuck in IT. However, while the UML class and activity diagrams promised to be valid to depict the nouns and stories of the business processes, their potential to allow a shared language and approach to depict joint vocabulary and views on requirements rarely materialized.

Until now, there has been no workflow tool vendor approaching these strategic enterprise-level models, bridging the business/IT gap.