Establishing business process governance should be a foundational part of an organization’s business process management (BPM) planning beginning with the first BPM project. Putting in place the building blocks for a business process governance model helps an organization establish a vision for the overall BPM effort. Governance also avoids difficulties when the organization seeks to scale  from the original BPM projects to a more transformational BPM program.

During the BPM journey, certain common challenges are likely to emerge. Having adequate business process governance in place (aided by the capabilities of IBM Process Center) helps in managing and addressing those challenges.

The typical challenges stem from one of three sources:

• Many authors
  How will you promote reuse and achieve synergies between several design and development teams working in parallel to deliver BPM projects?
• Many processes
  In a modern enterprise, there tend to be hundreds of process models, in various modeling tools with each modeler employing different modeling style,  and each model possessing multiple versions. Proceeding in such an environment puts pressure on an organization’s capability to keep its automated process solution lifecycles short and responsive, and obscures the BPM stakeholder’s ability to provide a clear overview of where the projects are heading.
• Many assets
  As the number of process projects increases, the number of assets and interdependencies increases, leading to increased complexity, insufficient process reuse, increased complexity, and loss of disciplined governance.

Besides providing answers to these challenges, business process governance also aids in addressing the following situation:

• Promoting a new relationship between business and IT
• Consistency in measuring delivered business value
• Establishing consistent, data-driven decision-making processes
•  Achieving regulatory compliance through process understanding, design, and  consistent execution

The following sections introduce the concepts that comprise the suggested IBM  business process governance model, including:

• Establishing strong executive sponsorship
• Establishing BPM guiding principles as a foundation for a BPM operating model
• Establishing a BPM Center of Excellence
• Establishing and filling the BPM key roles in the BPM operating model
• Establishing the business process governance framework

The first step in business process governance is to establish strong executive sponsorship.