2014-06-12

Special #worldcup2014 - is football (soccer) a #BPM application?

This blogpost is using yet another opportunity to explain #BPM for masses via the most popular sport.

Warning: despite of the various efforts (including via BPM.COM),  there are still no commonly-agreed BPM definitions, hence I use my definitions of BPM (which is a trio discipline, architecture/practice and tools) from the blogpost http://improving-bpm-systems.blogspot.ch/2014/01/definition-of-bpm-and-related-terms.html and my book www.samairn.biz/terminology

Game is a process – as its participants are following a predefined set of rules – see an example with the chess game http://improving-bpm-systems.blogspot.ch/2010/02/practical-process-patterns-gaap.html

A football match is a core business process in the football (as a sport industry sector). This process must follow business rules which are defined by a governing bodies (FIFA, UEFA, etc.) and managed by a referee team.

The goal of this core business processes is to win a match.

To achieve this goal, various football activities must work together thus they must be coordinated (just to remind that business process is an explicitly-defined coordination for guiding the purposeful enactment of football activity flows).

Coordination has two closely-related sides:

1) Process template – plan and preparation for a particular match

2) Process instance – a match itself as, we, the spectators, see it.

Each team has its own process template per match (probably) which is owned (ideally, of course) by the coach.

A referee team for a particular match is the owner of this particular process instance. The referee team monitor the execution of business rules. Also, these rules can be monitored automatically with modern digital technologies (e.g. a goal-line technology to be used at first time World Cup for first time).

Various coordination techniques are used (see all of them at http://improving-bpm-systems.blogspot.ch/2014/03/coordination-techniques-in-bpm.html ): goal-based technique, role-based technique (players have well-defined roles), template-based (e.g. for standard situations), rule-based (already mentioned), event-based, etc. Majority of these techniques are tuned during training (e.g. José Mourinho @josemourinhotv teams are good with standards situations - process patterns).

As the coordination between players is much decentralised then knowledge-based coordination techniques are very important.

During the match, a coach is controlling his/hear team and he/she has a limited centralised coordination, e.g. by resource allocation, levelling and balancing.

After the match, a coach may adjust (optimise) his/her template based on measuring of player's performance.

Thus, coaches use (ideally) all 6 BPM functions:
  1. Modeling
  2. Automation/implementation
  3. Execution
  4. Controlling
  5. Measuring
  6. Optimisation

Happy BPMing at World Cup 2014!

Thanks,
AS

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