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Below
you will find a brief description of the courses I teach.
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MIST 5750/7690: Business Process Management
Business processes, the activities performed by people or technology, to get products and services to customers, have always been the heart of a business. This course will develop your business analysis skills for modeling, analyzing, managing and changing businesses focusing on business processes. The emphasis will be on using information technology/systems (IT) to manage and improve business processes. Developing these business analysis skills will be essential for IT and non-IT professionals and managers who want to succeed in the changing business environment!
Business Process Management (BPM) is a systems management approach that defines an organization as a collection of processes focused on customer satisfaction, managing process using well-defined measures, and continually improving processes. Business Process Management System (BPMS) is a platform for developing and running information systems. BPMS is a new style of IT environment that focuses on moving more control of IT activities back into the business areas and improving business-IT collaboration. BPMS enables the BPM approach. This course will focus on both BPM the management approach and its enabler, BPMS technologies. BPMS are enabled by IT services-oriented architecture (SOA) framework that is fast becoming the norm for most companies. Software code will be generated for a SOA or web services environment.
More and more business application products sold worldwide are service-oriented, software as a service business model. However, this BPMS_SOA environment is leading to an even bigger change! We have powerful development tools (BPMS), supervised by small one-three-person teams of business analysts, will create most business systems without programming. Large programming teams working to months-long schedules will fade away. The emerging research is clear that managing by process or adopting the BPM approach and adopting BPMS technologies leads to improve business results. Many argue that BPM will be the dominant management paradigm of the 21st century.
No matter what your current or future desired roles are, BPM is going to be critical to them. The future skills that will critical to IT and non-IT professionals and management at all levels will be business analysis skills. Analysis skills used to identify business process problems and opportunities and use people and technology to solve problems or make opportunities happen. This course will improve your process analysis and management skills as outlined in Course Outcomes.
This course focuses on implementing
IT-Facilitated Business Processes. The primary outcome is to enable students to
implement and manage a business process using business process management
software. Students will apply four core models that guide the development of
process-based systems: Business Process, Business Decision, Service-Oriented
Architecture, and Business Data Model.
Business
processes, the activities performed by people or technology, to get products
and services to customers, have always been the heart of a business. There is an exciting
paradigm shift happening within the information systems (IS) field to better
support the management of business processes. This means a new breed of information
systems is emerging as are new approaches for developing them. There are two major areas for change that are
driving the creation of a new breed of information systems. They are the desire
or need to:
(1)
manage
business process and business rules as separate resources but are closely
connected; and
(2)
decompose software or
programming code into reusable modules, call services, and managed by a service
oriented architecture (SOA) infrastructure.
These changes lead to the creation of
process-based information systems as opposed to traditional data-based driven
systems. Similar to what happen with
data 50 years ago, the business process is separated and managed by a Business
Process Management System (BPMS) and the business rules (business logic), are separated
and managed by a Business Rules/Decision Management System (BRMS/BDMS). Within this new type of system, the
application is the business process actually executed by the BPMS. During execution, the different services
assigned to activities in the business process are executed and may be a task
(application logic), rule/decision, database or human service. The SOA infrastructure manages and mediates
services used in the business process. Students are introduced to BPMS in MIST
5750 using RunMyProcess.
It is now possible with these
powerful process-based systems development tools for business analysts to create business systems without programming. Large programming teams working on
months-long schedules will fade away.
The key word here is “business analysts/architect”; the future skills
that will be critical to IS and non-IS professionals are business analysis
skills. Analysis skills are used to
identify business problems and opportunities and to use people and technology
to solve problems or take advantage of present opportunities. This course will improve your analysis and
development skills as well as prepare you for the changing IS paradigm.
This course offering is currently somewhat
unique in that only a handful of universities (mostly, outside the US) offer a
BPMS implementation course for undergraduate credit. The reasons for this are
varied but, rest assured, it is how business applications are and will be
developed going forward. Whether one calls this MDE (model-driven execution), EUBA
(end-user business applications), process-based or something similar, the
objective is to create flexible, agile, transparent and manageable business
processes that are easy to implement, incrementally improve, and provide
responsive business intelligence.
The view of this course is that these
concepts are best understood and learned by doing, not reading about them,
although you will certainly do some reading! By implementing increasingly
“real” business processes; and not toy problems and examples (although there
will be some of these as well). Seventy percent of your grade will be based on
projects where you will be developing process-based information systems.
So, if you want to be at the leading edge of
how business applications (and their underlying processes) are viewed, defined,
justified, implemented, managed, changed and monitored for (continuous)
improvement, then this is the course is likely for you. You do not need an
understanding of programming but some programming would be useful. What you do
need is a willingness to learn new ideas, install and use technology with a
small footprint but significant capabilities, and perhaps set aside some ideas
regarding how to go about defining and implementing IT-enabled business
applications for process owners and users.