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.
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.
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.
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