Today most companies have a clear mission statement, an articulated vision and clear goals traceable from this vision. Often an operating plan is supporting this and everybody in the company should be able to say what is he or she is doing to support it. If asked someone would respond: “I’m working in sales, focusing in my department on emerging market, and specially on the low end-end, etc.…”. This categorisation is curious, where people would mention functions rather that processes. May be questions are biased, where during a training intro, the instructor asks the participants to present themselves, “Give your name, your department, role and what you’re doing”… what about a question like “ Give your name, the process you’re involved in, to which extend, your role and the type of process?”.

Actually, this is the result of decades of cultural heritage where processes are absent from company’s culture, language and day-to-day. This is the symptom of strong anchored functional silos where everybody recognises himself as member of a team delivering a function rather than supporting a process.

Functions versus process are may be a lost battle, as people prefer more established terminology to describe their work.

For companies having a defined, documented processes supporting the mission statement and vision, may be operated and monitored, and even more; a company rated 3 to 5 in the BPM maturity level, such company should consider transition from the functions group into processes groups. I’m not saying that there is a one-to-one mapping. This could be achieved with a co-existence of functional groups with a process layer on the top or below, where the same person presenting herself would say “ I’m Kim working in sales team supporting the order-to-cash process and especially in the contract realisation”

It is a long journey, as many companies do not have any notion of their process maps; when it is the case, staff may do not have any idea on how they are contributing to these processes.