Engineering perfection: the human body

The human body is perhaps the most intricately designed masterpiece of engineering, made solely to perfectly operate the various components needed to sustain an individual life. Within the body is an uncountable orchestration of components that, when seen individually, appear “functional” in nature and are closely linked in a chain of bewildering logical order triggered by internal and external events, otherwise known as stimuli.

Over the course of a full 60 seconds, the body does the following (source):

1. It interprets visual information
2. It sends nerve impulses
3. It produces saliva
4. It keeps you hydrated
5. It keeps your heart beating
6. It cleans your blood
7. It uses your energy
8. It sheds skin cells
9. It grows hair
10. It blinks
11. It inhales and exhales
12. It pumps blood
13. It produces millions of blood cells
14. It repairs bones
15. It prevents cancer

It’s quite a remarkable set of activities of which we are not even aware, and it happens _mostly_ involuntarily, for that matter. The body requires your support only when it can’t do it involuntarily (e.g. when the body requires water, it will send you a signal to drink water). If our brain’s executive functions would focus on all of these involuntary activities, we would never get out of bed!

Let’s look closely at how homeostasis (or equilibrium) in the body is restored in humans. The cardiovascular system is responsible for several things, including the organism’s homeostasis. The organism takes several involuntary (automatic) actions to make it possible for it to be in a state of calm, “In a very real sense, the cardiovascular system engages in resource allocation because there is not enough blood flow to distribute blood equally to all tissues simultaneously” (source). Depending on our state, these logical faculties, or individual components, mitigate stress and achieve a state of balance so that other components are not disturbed by the stress of our actions.

The body is engineered with tremendous components responsible for our body’s ” operations ” (i.e., the cardiovascular system). The body takes advantage of all existing, purpose-driven components. Nothing in the body is engineered without a purpose, and each of them are inextricably interlinked with one another. Executive components of the body (i.e. found in the brain) are responsible for encouraging a decentralised decision-making environment where all components decide on the most efficient and effective means of delivering their promised results.

The body’s engineering is a perfect example of how processes can be sequenced logically so that the organism thrives. Businesses can also be engineered in the likeness of the body, and several have been in the past.

Competent business architecture is largely responsible for this. Let’s explore an aspect of it: business process engineering.

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What is a Business Process Engineering?

Introduction

Business process engineering (“BPE”, “BPR”) is a multidisciplinary practice that merges various disciplines in management, information systems and industrial engineering to improve the processes of both manufacturing and service environments. The business process (re)engineer is ultimately responsible for:

…the fundamental rethinking and radical redesign of business processes to achieve dramatic improvements in critical, contemporary measures of performance, such as cost, quality, service and speed (Hammer and Champy, 1993).

Business process engineering is about the:

…analysis and design of workflows and processes within and between organisations. Business activities should be viewed as more than a collection of individual or even functional tasks; they should be broken down into processes that can be designed for maximum effectiveness, in both manufacturing and service environment (Davenport, 1993).

A hallmark of business process engineering is stated: “Processes are observed, developed, modified, maintained, and removed.” BPE treats all activities inside the organisation as belonging to a set of coherent, logical and useful processes that are acted upon to ensure the organisation reaches its goals. Business engineering is a practice that deploys a concerted effort with management personnel to improve the organisation’s delivery. To achieve that, business engineers “devise new ways of organising tasks, organising people and redesigning IT systems so that the processes support the organisation to realise its goals” (Sherwood-Smith, 1994).

Business engineering originated in the early 1990s, when Henri Fayol postulated reengineering practises in businesses that would drive organisations “towards its objectives by seeking to derive optimum advantage from all available resources” (The Financial Times, 1994, p. 8). This critical observation inspired a new wave of understanding businesses in terms of processes, a departure from the old-school functional perspective to more process-driven approaches. The functional school made sense, but it did not provide the competitive advantage needed to streamline contingent and connected activities.

Organisational complexity resulted in tremendous delays and persistent struggles with efficiency and effectiveness: many processes intervened with others, people’s roles were not transparently designated or understood, global supply chains arrested organisational flow, market conditions slowed innovative practices, and organisations compromised regularly. The hierarchical nature of functionally-driven organisations produced a lot of barriers, and work was not easily divided or understood. Hammer and Champy (1993) proposed that “BPR can help organisations out of crisis situations by becoming leaner, better able to adapt to market conditions, innovative, efficient, customer focused and profitable in a crisis situation.” Competition is intensifying the need for business engineering.

Goals of business process engineering

Business process engineering seeks to devise refined ways of simplifying tasks, organizing people, and using IT systems to produce processes that better suit the organisation’s goals.

The relatively unanimous agreement about the central tenets behind BPE is:

1. radical change and assumption challenge;
2. process and goal orientation;
3. organisational restructuring;
4. the exploitation of enabling technologies, particularly technology (Vidgen et al., 1994).

BPE takes advantage of decision support systems (DSS) and total quality management (TQM) because these approaches are process-driven. BPE concentrates on significant business processes that must be tweaked, modified, or changed for organisational flow. There are some differences between TQM and BPE, mostly because BPE targets top management. In contrast, TQM focuses on incremental improvements and involves many staff from several hierarchy levels. BPR is a concentrated effort that focuses on improving business processes from the top down. Of course, there is support from the bottom up to ensure that the change recommendations and implementations enacted from the top down are appropriately accepted.

What is a business process?

Axel Vanhooren, an eminent business architect, defines a business process as:

a set of logically grouped, structured activities or tasks; that produces something specific of value for the benefit of the organisation or customer.

An important characteristic of a business process is that it must:

1. have business-sense;
2. triggered by customers (internal or external stakeholders);
3. and be constructed end-to-end.

A business process can be distilled into three different kinds: information process, industrial process, or knowledge process. Each has its own engineering discipline behind it.

The granularity and complexity of the process depend a lot on the techniques used to produce it. Processes can be structured, partly structured, loosely structured, or fully structured. Identifying fully structured processes can be beneficial for repetitive clusters of tasks that may be automated.

A business process can be linearly constructed or cyclical. Linear processes may produce a lot more side effects. They begin and end at a definite point with little time spent resolving side effects or waste.

According to Vanhooren (2016), a good process design is built on sound logical practices, coherent and consistent, and, most importantly, “Good internal organisation of the process logic.” A reusable business process is recommended for bug reduction, maintainability, and development speed.

A definition of done for a solid business process is it is (Vanhooren, 2016):

1. Effective & Efficient
2. Performant and capable
3. Shares information
4. Is robust
5. Measurable
6. Maintainable
7. Manageable
8. Configurable
9. Traceable

The business process lifecycle

Vanhooren described a promising depiction of a business process lifecycle. It’s certainly a bit more detailed than the commonly held business process lifecycle from business process management (BPM): discover, (re)design, implement, monitor.

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Nevertheless, there are some milestones to note in Vanhooren’s process lifecycle that contain the main elements of the cycle described by BPM above. However, there are some slight differences, such as the concept of a maturing, growing or transformation of a business process. In this activity diagram, Vanhooren depicts the business process lifecycle as a cyclical activity whose maintenance undergoes a cycle of implementation assessment, evaluation, re(engineering), and validation before the process can be implemented (installed) at the various interest points (process management, training & coaching, operations, support, or maintenance).

Several activities can occur at any one time in a business process during its birthing stage until it is fit for validation. A business process may be engineered, re-engineered, or improved completely through the following actions:

• Improve
• Optimise
• Adapt
• Expand
• Connect
• Restructure
• Replace (parts)
• Upgrade
• Merge
• Split
• Migrate
• Port
• Re-Engineer

Once a process undergoes validation (and if it does not require the decommissioning of an older process), it will be implemented, and a subsequent assessment will be carried out. If the evaluation of these assessments exposes unexpected consequences of implementing the business process, the process will be revised, and through this, it will mature, grow, and eventually transform into a process that best suits the business’s objectives.