Service Oriented Architecture Field Guide for Executives

2.3. BECOMING PROCESS ORIENTED

Building a culture of establishing and continuously fine-tuning business processes is not easy. Drawing up a process flowchart is relatively straightforward. Putting that into practice is another thing. This is especially hard in an organization that is not committed to business processes.

In an organization that is generally process oriented, a new line of business, a new partnership, or a merger can create new goals for the business. Setting up a process to achieve these goals can be equally problematic. In other words, the level of commitment of a business toward process orientation is different from the quality of a specific business process.

How does an operation go from being ad hoc and disorganized to being process oriented? It can rarely be achieved overnight. The Software Engineering Institute (SEI) of Carnegie Mellon University grappled with that issue. The output of their work is famously known as the Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI). The model captures the way a business becomes increasingly process oriented. Although the model was originally designed for the software development industry, it is generally applicable to any business.

In CMMI, the quality of definition and management of a specific business process is called capability. According to the model, a process goes through five different levels of increasing capability:

Level 0: Incomplete or not performed. At this very early stage, the business may be just thinking ...