Dubai Health Authority
            

From process management to process maturity

At the time of establishment, DHA was keen to standardize the quality of health care in the emirate of Dubai in line with the highest international standards and best practices. DHA was also mandated to advance public health and prevention, ensure universal access to healthcare and foster innovation.

DHA adopted the Business Process Management (BPM) platform to ensure that new processes are fast and efficient, reliable, and quality-driven. DHA took this forward and captured its current process maturity status to see how clearly defined and controlled processes are, and how well employees understand and follow procedure. To add to this—as part of its commitment to ongoing operational excellence—DHA is keen to benchmark functional performance against organizational process maturity goals and engage staff in continuous process improvement.

“At DHA, we intend to take process excellence to the next level by embedding it in the daily practices of our business and IT users. So, we decided to develop a Process Maturity Framework and corresponding index—individually customized to DHA. This we visualized in a dynamic dashboard for business units to view and benchmark themselves against.” says Dr. Fatima Alsharaf, Director of Corporate Quality and Excellence Department, DHA.

Defying complexity with a Process Maturity Framework

In 2018, DHA started measuring its process maturity using an approach that assessed each business process individually against a set of predefined maturity criteria. This had proved not to be feasible for two reasons: Firstly, because the process structure was continuously under pressure to ensure post COVID-19 resiliency; and secondly, because there was no consistent “data” that could be extracted. In fact, thousands of different processes used a variety of different conventions and scripts.

“The Process Management Team under the Corporate Quality and Excellence Department introduced a pioneering framework in 2022 to assess and measure the level of process maturity across all business units using a different approach,” Dr. Fatima Alsharaf explains. This involved DHA utilizing the ARIS system and its features to configure certain conventions and scripts in a way that supported assessing the business units using process attributes rather than hard “data”.

Now, DHA has built a framework that provides a horizontal, integrated, and holistic view of how the process structure is managed within the business units. The framework consists of the following 6 domains or pillars: Strategic fit, modeling, deployment, adaptability, performance, and optimization. These have 25 criteria associated with them as displayed below. Now, business units can be compared, processes managed better, gaps revealed and opportunities to strengthen process capabilities identified.

“ARIS gives us a reliable infrastructure for building and continuously enhancing our operational maturity, and it was fast. The development stage took 8 weeks” says Yahya Ezzeldin, BPM Expert, DHA.

Deriving value from the Process Maturity Index

With all the process metadata now in an extractable and measurable form, the next step was to visualize the Process Maturity Index. This happened fast because ARIS was super easy to use and enabled the process team to develop customized reports and dashboards in-house. “The dashboard combines the maturity criteria to create an overall maturity score for DHA as a whole,” explains Yahya Ezzeldin, BPM Expert, DHA. “Using a straightforward index ranging from 0 to 100 (Level 1-5), this score enables us to evaluate each of our processes. In addition to an aggregate overall score—which is already at level 4—we can also segment the results across divisions and corporations.”

With their index, DHA is capturing significant insights into its process automation percentage, RACI allocation for each process, process validity, the status of operational controls, process measure fulfillment and more. “ARIS creates a perfect foundation towards establishing a strong and agile process maturity index in DHA. It powers a transparent environment that enables continuous screening of the processes and their capabilities against maturity goals,” said Omar Nasralla, Head of BPM section, DHA.

And the organization’s achievements haven’t gone unnoticed. Recently DHA received an intellectual classification certificate for their solution issued by the UAE Ministry of Economy.

The democratization of process excellence: a tool for everyone

The value for DHA’s index in terms of continued operational excellence is clear. But what makes it sustainable is its usability and adoption by those in the organization: The ARIS tool doubles up as a collaboration portal allowing teams to bring up their scores, benchmark them against DHA’s maturity pillars and compare their performance with other departments. This has helped business units to further identify process gaps and highlight areas for improvement. And it’s anchoring process excellence into the DHA’s culture of operations. “Our maturity index helps us keep process excellence front and center as we leverage Dubai’s healthcare potential and—because it’s so engaging—it’s a tool for everyone both now and in the future;” says Omar Nasralla, Head of BPM Section, DHA.