A stepwise approach

The great majority of organizations are not in a situation where they have the luxury of designing their processes from scratch. These companies must adjust and develop their existing processes to meet the challenges of service orientation described in chapter 3. For example, with a service-oriented approach, the emphasis is much less on decomposition and value chain flow, much more on collaboration and reuse of business capability.

In addition, the business models of these organizations, whether explicitly stated in the form of a business process model or whether implicit in the way the company operates, are dominated by the notion of the end-to-end value chain. However, it is unrealistic to expect that these business models and modes of operation can be replaced overnight. As we have repeatedly said, service orientation is much more a matter of evolution of best practices.

For all but a few companies, able to start out with brand new business models, the need is for stepwise process redesign. The need here is for delivering “quick wins” that increase return on investment in terms of increased business value or reduced business costs. At the same time, the idea is to evolve a set of services which are offered to the processes, as part of the longer-term goal of business agility. This evolutionary approach is a keynote of both our case studies: Queensland Transport (detailed in chapter 14) and Credit Suisse (detailed in chapter 15). So a balance is needed.