BPM and Change Management Process

Question

Hi,
We have a requirement to automate the change management process. Typical functionality needed is - input the change required, assign priority, organise risk assessment, change approvals, change implementation, send automatic emails to managers etc.
Is BPM a best fit to this kind of Change Management Process?
Thanks
Srikanth

Answer 1

Hi Srikanth,
It's a good question and I hope this helps.
My short answer is that "it depends...".
Yes, an Oracle BPM process will let your users enter the change required, assign priority, define the change approvals, and send automatically send emails to managers.
Not saying that this is the case here, but sometimes people confuse an application with what BPM does with a process.  Ask yourself if your candidate process for BPM has one or more of these characteristics:
Workflow - are there multiple people involved in the editing and approvals over some period of time?
Documentation - as work flows through the process, will you need to gather requirements / documents and associate these with the instance?
Seamless integration - are there systems and or databases involved that you need to integrate into the process?
Efficiency - do you want to ensure that your process continues to flow and escalates when a work item sits too long in someone's queue?
Governance - do you need to have an audit trail of the various people who were involved as a work item instance (a change approval in your case) flowed through the process?
Compliance - do you need to have the change management instances go through a process in a consistent and well documented manner?
Visibility - do you need to gather key performance indicators as instances flow through the process and do managers need to track these in business activity monitoring reports?
Hope this helps,
Dan