Within a single IBM Blueworks Live account, Spaces provide a way to organize your modeling artifacts. Spaces are like folders and are organized hierarchically. Each Space has its own access control list that allows you to restrict access to artifacts to specific users and groups.
One of the first tasks of an IBM Blueworks Live Account Administrator is to setup the Space hierarchy for their organization. In my previous posting, I introduced the concept of top-level Spaces to initiate this Space hierarchy and add structure to your IBM Blueworks Live account. One of those top-level Spaces was an Enterprise Framework Space designated for published models.
In this article, I’ll review criteria to help you determine what kind of structure you should build for a Process Framework within your Enterprise Framework Space in IBM Blueworks Live.
Process Framework Structure
How you setup your Process Framework should reflect your business and the goals you have for a process-oriented enterprise.
Here are some questions to consider when determining potential approaches to structuring your Process Framework:
- Do you think of your business in terms of a customer value chain or customer journey?
- Is your enterprise divided into different lines of business? Are these independent pillars with minimal overlap?
- Do you have an Enterprise Business Architecture team who has built a Capability Model for your enterprise, representing the various capabilities within it?
- Is your enterprise spread across multiple geographies, for example different regions or countries?
- Would you like to follow a standardized framework for your industry?
The
following table describes some strategies for creating and naming the Space structure within your Enterprise Framework Space, based on your answers to these questions above.
| Enterprise Framework Structure Strategies |
| Customer Value Chain / Journey |
If your goal is to orient your process work around the customer, you can setup your Process Framework aligned to your Customer Value Chain or Customer Journey. Within this framework, you can have Spaces to reflect the important business functions shared across the enterprise.
|
| Organizational |
If your goal is to represent different business entities or functional groups within your enterprise, you can use an organizational approach to define your Process Framework. This could represent entities such as departments, divisions, business units, lines of business, wholly owned subsidiaries, etc. As you may want to harmonize operations across some units, though, you will also need an additional structure to represent these common processes and decisions. |
| Capability |
If your goal is to capture the capabilities of your enterprise and show the alignment of your business processes and decisions to those capabilities, you can setup a Process Framework that reflects these key business functions across your enterprise. |
| Geographical |
If your goal is to represent different operations in various geographies, you can setup a Process Framework that reflects these different geographies such as countries or regions. As you may want to harmonize operations across geographies, though, you will also need an additional structure to represent these common processes and decisions.
With a geographical structure, you will likely combine another structure strategy to define the Space structure within each geographical unit’s Space. It is advisable to use the same strategy for all geographies to maintain consistency and make artifacts easier to find and maintain. |
| Industry Standard Framework (APQC) |
If your goal is to use a worldwide industry standard for your framework hierarchy and to help you discover your processes, you can adopt a Process Classification Framework (PCF) provided by the American Productivity & Quality Center (APQC) to define your Process Framework. APQC provides both industry-specific and cross-industry PCFs. For more information about their Process Classification Frameworks, visit their website: www.apqc.org |
In this article, I reviewed some basic criteria for defining the hierarchy of a Process Framework to organize your published artifacts under your Enterprise Framework Space in IBM Blueworks Live. I discussed different considerations for defining the structure, such as Industry Frameworks, Customer Value Chains, Organizations, Capabilities, and Geographies.
Check back for my next posting where I’ll discuss approaches on how to set up a Space hierarchy for a Process Framework using each of these strategies.
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