ABSTRACT
With our apologies to George and Ira Gershwin, it doesn’t matter how you pronounce process but it does matter what you do with it. Business processes matter. As mentioned in Chapter 1, organizations are a conglomeration of business processes. ese business processes are, in turn, a collection of interrelated subprocesses, activities, steps, or tasks that accomplish or support a particular goal or purpose. In other words, a process is a specific temporal and spatial ordering of work activities, with a beginning and an end, and clearly defined inputs and outputs. Usually, you can decompose a business process into several subprocesses, which have their own attributes, but also contribute to achieving the goal of the process. A process can cross functional boundaries; that is, it could range over several business functions. As a company is an assemblage of processes, it makes sense to focus on improving processes rather than inspecting outputs.
