Business Process Management (BPM) has transformed the world we live in since the days of Adam Smith. From auto manufacturing, to insurance claim processing, to ordering a drive-thru burger, business processes have been analyzed and transformed for the better with strategic business goals such as:
Seriously. Burgers.Wendy’s Restaurants hired global consultants McKinsey to study the way orders were processed at drive-through locations. Detailed analysis of the chain of tasks comprising an end-to-end drive-through order revealed (among other things) that one key phrase in the order-taker’s voice script made a 7 to 10 second difference to order processing time:
Present Method of Operation (PMO) Script: “Hi, how are you today?”
Future Method of Operation (FMO) Script: “What can we get you today?”
It turns out that a seemingly trivial few seconds’ delay at the front end of the transaction process significantly impacted throughput, customer satisfaction, revenue, and cost per order. Business Process Management improvements typically yield 15% to 50% increases to product quality, productivity, and cost savings.
Organizations in every industry have many thousands of repeatable business processes characterized as a set of activities and tasks purposed to achieve a goal. Business Process Re-Engineering/Improvement (BPE/I) took off in the 1990s as organizations found opportunities to establish logical process order over activities that may have been unplanned, unstructured; and rife with errors, duplicated effort, and inefficiencies.
Business wisdom dictated that the biggest, gnarliest, most customer-facing processes in any organization be targeted for BPM makeovers first. Manufacturing, customer service and IT are perennial candidates for ongoing Business Process Management improvements.
Today, we live in the digital economy. The explosive growth of cloudification has generated new opportunities for BPM improvements owing to two important factors:
Corporate domain and Domain Name System (DNS) management operations stand out as an example for long-overdue business process improvement. Domain management has all the hallmark attributes of a necessary business process management improvement initiative:
Poor process can be squarely blamed for a growing number of high-profile domain and DNS security compromises such as the Sea Turtle attack, that have damaged large brands and organizations. Domain and DNS hijacking events invariably trace to a failure on the part of domain stakeholders to adequately monitor and secure their ever-growing domain portfolios and related DNS digital footprint. Security vulnerabilities abound when domains and subdomains proliferate in an organization, often managed across multiple registrars and managed DNS services. Legacy domains are forgotten, TLS certificates expire, DNSSEC keys fail, HTTPS errors persist, and Start of Authority (SoA) record gaps on the DNS all expose the business to threats.
External threats exist due to persisting internal causes related to obsolete business processes.
In organizations where operational ownership over the entire domain lifecycle is not clear, process gaps create security exposure. The DNS is unique in that it’s a ubiquitous and open system, visible to malicious parties able to monitor organizations for specific weaknesses to exploit. At the same time, internal IT staff lack visibility systems to understand their own infrastructure.
Given the widespread adoption of BPM initiatives in so many operational areas, it begs the question: why hasn’t domain and DNS management benefited from improvement to the same degree? Organizations themselves admit the unique issues hampering process improvement over domains and the DNS:
A prevailing attitude in many organizations suggests that domain and DNS management is under control. This thinking defies reality for DNS experts willing to take the time to investigate.
Business Process Management reviews and improvements are long overdue in organizations’ domain and DNS management operations. Our next article will show how the front-end of domain processing can be dramatically improved with speed, efficiency, improved security, and reduced cost.