Solving Business Problems - BPM

As stated in a previous blog, I am currently working on a BPM initiative in the criminal justice community. Since I could not sleep last night, I googled BPM and came across a free PDF download - BPM Basics for Dummies. A link to the download is available on my website currently under construction at BTMSoftwareSolutions.com. I decided to give it a read. It was only 78 pages long and you can always learn more. As it turned out, this morning I turned that reading into an email suggestion amongst our team on our current business process model. In a nutshell, this is what I stated.

Our current business process model does not capture one of the significant process outcomes of filing a criminal complaint a consumer (in my situation the criminal justice community is the consumer) expects, the fingerprinting of defendants. The criminal justice community has not been very efficient at ensuring that 100% of defendants alleged to have committed a crime are fingerprinted. They have gotten better, but more needs to be done. And studies show that even a portion of the prison population currently serving sentences are for crimes they were never fingerprinted. Without fingerprinting, criminal justice agencies (Police, DA, Courts, Probation, Prisons, etc) are making decisions sometimes without all the information about a person. Without this critical information about prior offenses, the safety of our criminal justice employees and also the community are impacted.

My suggestion was to indicate that processing defendants is a very important key performance indicator and a metric we can capture within our business process. Some current attempts to address the problem and increase fingerprint rates was to purchase more equipment for law enforcement agencies. But this approach does not address the root cause of the problem, the BUSINESS PROCESS, nor does it assist key stakeholders in monitoring their success in real-time on who has been and who has not been fingerprinted. By leveraging BPM with Business Activity Monitoring (BAM), metrics from within the process can be captured and displayed on a dashboard to users. Dashboards have drill down capabilities so those complaints where no fingerprints have been recorded, users may obtain more information about the defendant and the approrpiate measures taken to ensure fingperprint compliance.

This is part of what BPM is all about - being flexible and agile to changing business needs or newly identified process improvements. Once the process is discussed with key stakeholders, process owners and business/system analysts, the updated business process can quickly be implemented and performance tracking monitored.

Remember, modeling something that is already broken only speeds up gathering information that the process is broken. You want to measure the As-Is process to define a baseline of measurements. These measurements then can be compared to the To-Be process to determine the Return On Investment (ROI).