Every time we deploy a new version of an automated process, we are faced with the need for process migration. Birds perform migrations every year with great risk to their lives out of necessity. And just as those bird migrations, business process migrations are not without difficulties and risks.
There are several possible scenarios when introducing process automation:
The first scenario is the most straightforward of the lot. Introducing a new business process does come with a heavy load of change management to organize around this new way of working, but since no legacy process exists, no migration is needed. Unfortunately, this scenario is also the least likely to occur.
The second scenario introduces a first automated version of an existing manual process. One might think that no migration is needed in this scenario either, since no process data would exist in the BPMS. However, this would be shortsighted, because of the implicit process data existing in the organization, usually existing in the form of states of data within the systems participating in the process. Suppose a process would sequentially update data within three legacy systems. It could very well be that at the moment of deployment, for several process instances, the first two steps are already performed. For the newly deployed process, several instances could already be in a state which is not the start state.
The third scenario has two flavors. Either the versions can coexist or they cannot. The impossibility to coexist usually comes from legacy systems that cannot cope with both process version demands at the same time. For instance, when services or the underlying data model of a legacy system change so drastically that the old process service calls no longer have a meaning within the legacy system.
The fourth scenario is not really a problem for process migration, but rather a change management and training issue.
To tackle process migration in these scenarios, several approaches can be taken:
None of these approaches stand above the other. In each process migration, a risk versus cost assessment, combined with the principles and best practices of the enterprise, should help determine the course of action to take, and might even differ from process instance to process instance. However, it is a step not to be overlooked in any initiative of BPM.
Thought | BPM |