Integrating BPM with Public Sector
I woke up this morning to a grumbling neighbor whose power had been cut-off citing non-payment of his electricity bills. Turns out his electricity meter had stopped functioning for over two months, and his repeated letters and e-mails sent to the local electricity department to intimate them of this situation had been over-looked. But with hundreds of complaints pouring in, thousands of consumers rushing to pay on the very last days of the deadline and the innumerable administrative issues that haunt the employees - such mistakes on the part of these officials seem, more often than not, predictable.
I went back to my desk later, curious to see just how large the customer base for the country's electricity board would be. Turns out - it's at least (a whopping) 144 million customers across India; likely to be about twice the population of a country like the United Kingdom!
The administrative and organizational set-ups for such boards involving either services or legislation are growing increasingly complex. But, whether it is the electricity board or the judiciary system, what can be taken advantage of in such situations seems to be the fact that the magnanimity is under-lined by specific fundamental processes which are usually common across the consortium of these boards and branches.
So I'm just thinking aloud here....
If this were to be mapped into the world of proactive BPM - the key to efficient and consistent services would begin at first gaining the ability to clearly define and map these root processes across various functions carried out by these boards. While this exercise is executed, the order of the day would also be to look out for process patterns or functions that are generic in nature. These processes are pulled out and refined in a manner that could automatically add to the overall process efficiency. The focus would also be on translating them into more flexible and intuitive processes.
Arguably, the strongest ability of BPM would lie in the conversion of experience into tangible action. Using BPM, concepts like the rules engine could be put in place to clearly demarcate the rules that drive each process from the process as a whole. This could mean for instance (in a macro perspective), that some of the governments frequent policy changes could be applied across the board with only a few changes in the rules that apply to the application.
So a very generic example could look like the one in the image below (the diagram looks at very basic examples of processes that exist under any power cooperation). The processes in total could be sub divided into four or five layers beginning at the Core processes and trickling down into various levels of Sub processes. The segregated processes could be stored in a process repository to be accessed by the various electricity boards in the country, for example. The process orchestration could be done on a BPM platform while say an Enterprise Service bus could be used to allow the various services to be accessed. So while the processing logic is moved into a separate library, it could also be accessed as a service through the ESB.
However, what side would the odds be on when one looks at modernizing a system built on layers of complexity? Given the nature of public sector units many of the processes involved would depend heavily on government legislations. Also, with tens of thousands of employees many of who have been in the existing system for over a decade or two?
If you've been a part of similar implementations do chip in your experience and how you went about restructuring the system!
