Business Process Mix

In general I have come to a realization that every organization needs to have an optimal ‘business process mix’. Firstly, what is a business process ? A business process can be defined as a sequence of elemental steps, which are required to ‘get a task done’. In terms of computer science, a business process is essentially an algorithm, i.e. a well defined sequence of steps which is required to transform an input to a desirable output. 

I believe for that for the ‘de-risking’ of day to day operations of an organization, having well documented business processes is essential. This helps in making the organization less dependent on a particular individual / resource for it’s day to day operations. This helps in increasing employee / management confidence in running a sustainable organization. A sustainable organization is one which is ‘fault-tolerant’, i.e. which has built-in redundancy. This means that the absence of a resource will not overly affect the core operations of the system / organization. A sustainable organization always tries to make itself redundant. It clearly identifies the core-strengths and functions performed by it’s resources, and tries to duplicate / cross-pollinate these functions all throughout the organization.

It seems to me that smaller organizations have a much higher need for documenting business processes, than larger organizations. This is because smaller organizations, by definition, have fewer resources and hence the responsibilities per resource increase. This increase in responsibilities leads to higher risk, per individual resource. This increase calls for a more aggressive business process documentation approach in smaller organizations, than in larger organizations. On the other hand, I have heard that it can take forever to get anything done in larger organizations, due to the highly structured processes. This can also be called as the ‘meeting for a meeting to organize another meeting’ syndrome. In such cases it would seem that it is important for someone at the top ( or the bottom, or at any layer in the hierarchy ), to be able to see through all the layers of management from top-to-bottom, and devise newer / more streamlined business processes.