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Chapter 2. Importance of Process Design
The design of your processes is critical to the project and to your business. It must
be done well. You should expect to refine your processes on an ongoing basis.
Since FlowMark provides data in the audit trail on process performance, you can
more easily find the weak points in the processes. Since the “process flow” is now
in FlowMark and not buried deep in a large application, it is easy to make the
changes necessary to achieve the improvements.
2.1 Function, Performance, and Capacity
FlowMark will automate your processes, make them reliable, and see that they run
quickly. If poorly designed processes caused you to move to workflow automation,
keeping the same process design will merely automate the problem. It is important
that you have quality processes defined before you start prototype testing with
users. They need not be perfect, but quality should be evident.
On the other hand, you may already have good processes defined. But you can
use FlowMark to speed the flow from user to user, call the correct application so
the user does not need to remember how, pass data from user to user so it does
not have to be repeatedly entered, and see that the business rules are followed
exactly as defined even when the users do not remember the nuances of particular
exception cases.
Process design touches everything: the way people work, the speed at which things
get done, the results the customer sees (or never sees), the performance and
capacity of the FlowMark server and database, the demands on the LAN, and the
underlying application.
There are no hard-and-fast rules. There are always business reasons to do things
in a different way. But, especially for new users, guidelines can be helpful. As you
gain experience, you can modify these to fit your own business. Included here are
some ideas about capacity and performance. It is never too early to begin thinking
about performance. As you are designing, everything you create influences the
performance of your business application.
Some of your processes may fit easily within these guidelines, while others may
not. If those that fit are the most frequently used (the ones with the highest volume
of instances or activities), your design should work just fine. However, if you do
things that have a negative impact on performance or database capacity, even a
little bit, and they occur many times per hour or per day, the cumulative impact on
your system can be serious. Sometimes it is not so much what you do, but how
many times you do it, that determines the real impact.
It is important to understand the workload volumes in your system. It helps to do
some basic math:
the number of instances per day times the number of activities
per instance times the number of users
. The result can be enlightening. Additional
hardware can often overcome performance and capacity limitations. Sometimes
that is the right answer.
It is impossible to teach everything there is to know about processes here, but
there are some frequently asked questions to think about.
Copyright IBM Corp. 1996, 1998 3