journal of public affairs education - NASPAA *The Global Standard ...

Introduction of Government Process Modeling With Rockwell Arena SoftwareWhen agencies and nonprofits become players in networks of strategicalliances, the same principle applies. What ultimately matters to citizens isthroughput — not how the outputs were produced. Service-orientedarchitecture (SOA) is the art and science of designing automated processes thatcross organizational boundaries within strategic alliances. The purpose of thisarticle is to report the experiences of an instructor and MPA students whileusing Rockwell Arena software to create models and simulations of “business”processes for individual organizations, and the larger potential networks ofstrategic partners. The key assertion of this article is that MPA students shouldbe made aware of the importance of designing and automating the “businessprocesses” of agencies and nonprofit organizations, and that using RockwellArena software to do this is both valuable and feasible. Arena is a majormodeling and simulation software application with an intuitive visual interface,and is used in industries, businesses, and government agencies. The followingsections of this article include a background, explanations of Arena software andof the assignments, a discussion, and conclusions.BACKGROUNDAs Public Affairs scholars and teachers we tend to emphasize organizationalstructure and departmental functions rather than business processes. Scholars inBusiness Administration programs tend to place more teaching emphasis on theimportance of business processes, partly because of a strong interest inoperations research, logistics, and supply chains. “Functions” are specializedactivities that usually are performed within single departments. Processes aresequences of activities that usually span multiple departments and perhapsmultiple organizations (Harmon, 2007). This distinction is important becausethe optimization of functions at the expense of the design of processes canconstrain the throughputs of an organization (Dettmer, 2007). Spencer (1999)observed that reengineering rejects the paradigm of separating tasks by function,by using technology to join tasks into connected, coherent processes. Hence,process orientation is a major challenge to the paradigm grounded in AdamSmith (2003), Max Weber (Andreski, 2008), and others. Our students need tosee beyond bureaucracy and its functional subdivisions of work, to the inherentpossibilities of process orientation, and beyond that, to service orientation.J. F. Forrester and J. W. Forrester (1969) anticipated the preparation of a newkind of manager with skills in modeling and organizational design. Theycompared the design of organizations to the design of aircraft, noting that it isunlikely for an airplane designed without modeling to be flown successfully.Herbert Simon (1969) advocated the development of design sciences within thesocial sciences. Shangraw, Crow, and Overman (1989) made the tie between theNew Public Administration and the design (and redesign) of organizations.More recently, Anderson et al. (1994) noted that public managers need to384 Journal of Public Affairs Education