BPI Project

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A BPI Project (Business Process Interoperability Project) is a programmed endeavor designed to meet an objective specified by a BPI initiative.

By inheriting an initiative's objectives, a BPI project can remain on track to achieve cross-boundary interoperability while addreessing problems caused by local information silos. In essence, BPI projects are a practical way to divide the work of a broader initiative into manageable pieces.

[edit] BPI project guidelines

A distinguishing characteristic of BPI is the need for guidelines to help organizations achieve interoperability. Guidelines are valuable because—at least in the early stages of BPI—initiative participants are likely to collaborate across boundaries to establish standardized data and procedures, and to store them in a centralized repository. This need for collaboration can be streamlined by giving BPI projects a similar anatomy. Widely-accepted project guidelines also make it easier for management to evaluate BPI projects, and for consultants to propose them to their clients.

Generally speaking, a BPI project contains the following elements and related questions that need to be addressed.

Identify the process to be automated

• What is the specific objective?
• At which points will the process start and finish?
• What essential human labor is required?
• Is this process consistent with the initiative from which it is drawn?

Create a workflow

• What tasks are to be performed?
• Which tasks will be performed by humans, and which by computers?
• Has the flow been reduced to the least number tasks?
• Has each task been reduced to the simplest steps?
• Is the flow fully documented?

Determine the need for collaboration

• Which data and procedures are already available in a centralized repository?
• Which data and procedures need to be standardized and stored in a centralized repository?
• What degree of collaboration is needed? With whom?
• If necessary, how will collaboration with competitors be handled?

Calculate a return on investment

• How much will it cost to carry out the process with BPI?
• How much does it cost to carry out the process now?
• Do costs include the following items?
  • Human labor, such as
    • Knowledge transfers, including faxes, telephone calls, emails, letters and instant messages
    • Meetings and face-to-face discussions
    • Computer work, including data processing, word processing, spreadsheets, web searching, and electronic presentations
    • Physical work, including business travel, commuting, reading, filing and other physical activities subject to automation
  • Computer hardware replacements, upgrades and maintenance costs
  • Software replacements, upgrades, maintenance costs and middleware

Address security issues

• Is the process secure? Unlike processes contained in information silos, BPI processes extend across boundaries and, because they are based on standards, can be quickly and economically linked to other processes. This ease of interconnectivity must be taken into account when a project is designed. If an organization grants accees to its information to its customers, vendors or business partners, for example, it must also address the security issues that are raised.

Create Automated Tasks

• Collaborate to develop standard data and procedures
• Use software tools to automate each task
• Test and implement

Other

• What other projects can this project link to?
• What other processes can this project link to?
• What future processes does this project enable?
• Does this process raise the need for another initiative?

[edit] See also

• Business process interoperability
• Project management
• Information silo, the antithesis of BPI
• Universal Enterprise Infrastructure