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Business Processes

Five dimensions of process, five levels of maturity, and an honest read of where an organisation actually sits before anyone proposes a system.

Why a process model, and not a process map

A process map describes one workflow. A process model describes how every workflow in an organisation relates to the others, which is what you need before deciding where automation is worth buying.

The model below is the one the group uses in assessments. Its point is diagnosis rather than description: it shows which dimensions are mature, which are not, and where the gap between them is costing money.

Five dimensions

Strategic. Why the organisation exists, where it intends to go, how it allocates resources, and how the operating model is arranged to support that. The outcome is direction, stated explicitly enough that the other four dimensions can be measured against it.

Transactional. The operational backbone: high volume, repeatable, and the place where cost per unit is decided. Order fulfilment, financial postings, supply chain, personnel transactions, case handling.

Interactional. Collaboration between people, inside the organisation and across its suppliers and customers. Onboarding, service interactions, requests and approvals, knowledge sharing. Usually the least measured of the five, and frequently the most expensive.

Transformational. How the organisation changes itself: modernisation programmes, operating model redesign, automation adoption, portfolio governance. Strategy says what the model should be, and this dimension is what actually rebuilds it.

Compliance. Operating inside law, regulation, audit and security. Risk management, retention, legal hold, data protection, security operations. The outcome is trust, and it is the dimension where failures are visible from outside the company.

Five levels of maturity

Each dimension moves through the same five levels: ad hoc, repeatable, defined, managed, and intelligent, where the last one means AI assisted rather than AI purchased.

What makes the model useful is that the levels differ by dimension. Level five in transactional processes looks like event-driven, self-optimising execution. In interactional processes it looks like conversational assistance and predictive routing. In compliance it looks like enforcement that runs continuously rather than an audit that runs annually. An organisation is rarely at the same level in all five, and the distance between its highest and lowest is usually where the money is going.

Why this comes before tooling

Almost every automation disappointment we are called into traces back to the same sequence: a tool bought for a level four ambition, installed on a level two process, in an organisation whose compliance dimension was never assessed at all. The tool works. The process around it does not, and the tool is blamed.

Running the assessment first costs a fraction of the licence and changes what gets bought at least as often as it confirms it.

Where this sits

The processes themselves are described under document and process automation, and what they run on is under platforms.

An assessment against this model takes days rather than months, and it ends with a baseline instead of a recommendation to buy something. That order is deliberate.

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