Business Processes Implement Decision Governance. How?

A business process describes how something is done by highlighting mainly the actions to take, their dependencies (including their sequence), the roles in the firm who do these actions, as well as what triggers the process to start, and how we know when the process ends.

This text is part of the series on the design of decision governance. Decision Governance refers to values, principles, practices designed to improve the quality of decisions. Find all texts on decision governance here, including “What is Decision Governance?” here.

Business processes implement decision governance in several ways. It is useful to know this as it helps you read business processes differently, and if you need to redesign governance, know what to change to have the impact you are looking for. 

• By showing who does what, processes show where decision rights and responsibilities are when work is being done. By changing who does what, you are changing the assignment of rights and responsibilities. This needs to make sense, or be coherent with what the organizational chart specifies, as well as policies that apply to the processes.
• Some of the actions in a business process will be clearly marked as decision points, which generate alternative paths throughout the rest of the process. Decision points will be assigned to specific roles, reflecting their decision rights and responsibilities. While that is obvious, the less apparent and more interesting question is what information leads to the decision point; to investigate that, you need to look at the path through the process, and preceding processes, and the outputs from actions along that path. What often happens is that this information is not clearly shown on the business process, yet is one of the most important things when trying to understand how the decision is supposed to be made in the process.
• Decision governance is also implemented within actions in a process. It is rare that actions are so simple that they give no autonomy, which in turn means that there are decisions being made when actions are performed. This implies that when you design decision governance, its implementation may result in changing how detailed the actions are specified in a process: if there is a decision made in an action, perhaps changes in governance require that action to be split into two, and the decision point clearly shown – possibly assigned to another role in the process. 
• Every process has a process owner, or the organizational role that is accountable for the design and performance of that process, as well as for securing resources for it. Assignment of ownership is a key decision in any firm, given the importance of the rights and responsibilities it comes with. Assignment of process ownership is part of the foundations in the governance of a firm.