Will Business Analysts Be Out of Work When Introducing Automated Business Process Discovery

When optimising business processes or analysing business processes in order to produce a business oriented requirements specification, you need to analyse and produce a process map showing the as-is process situation. in order to do that you probably conduct interviews with stakeholders, read documentation, facilitate workshops and so on. As we all know that can be a time consuming task.

 

Why not let a robot do the hard work and produce the process map for you?

 

The answer to this dream is Automated Business Process Discovery, which is an automated approach to create a business process model. In short, you let an IT system analyse your data (anyone saying Big Data and BPM?) for instance audit trails, message systems, transactional systems, databases, integrations, service busses etc. The ABPD system then looks for patterns in your data and the output is process models created from scratch.

 

Advantages are, among others:

 

1) The processes found and modelled are the processes actually processed. How often haven't we documented the processes the business thinks (or wish) they have and not the process they actually are having?

 

2) Inter-department / inter-organisational touch points are included in the process model and those are often hard to document correct

 

3) Bottleneck analysis can be analysed on real life data

 

4) The events and handshakes between systems are analysed and documented

 

 

Will the business consultants all be out of work then?

 

No, I don't see that happening. What I do see is that in the near future we will start using ABPD as a tool for speeding up the process mapping task. I say "in the near future" because very few companies uses ABPD at the moment. When I say we will not all be out of work it is because:

 

1) ABPD only captures the structured automated processes. The processes not automated you still need to discover yourself.

 

2) ABPD gives you a button-up approach to process modelling while traditional BPM techniques gives you a top-down approach. My guess is that you need both approaches.

 

3) Grouping of the user interactions is still needed

 

4) Documenting the formal process and not the process that happens to be processed still needs manual documentation

 

 

At the end of the day we will use ABPD for accelerating process modelling, not for getting rid of business process analysts.

 

Comments

[Arozinat]

Nice post! Indeed ABPD is a tool for business process analysts (not replacing them). Perhaps you like this related post by Neil from mwd advisors: http://www.mwdadvisors.com/blog/2012/06/process-discovery-tools-workshops.html

[John Hansen]

Hi Anne

Thank you for the comment and the link to an interesting post :-)

I definitely agree with you that the business analysts will not be replaced, but I think in the coming years the business analysts will get more used to using tools in their daily work - I think that is a trend coming (riding on the back of the trend of big-data-analysis.)