Aerial shot of South Kensington campus at night.

Nimbus is the name of Imperial College’s Business Process Management System (BPMS), which brings together the College's Processes into a format that is visual, governed, easily understood and shared with others via the web.

Overview

Nimbus is a visual process mapping tool that is designed for use by College stakeholders. Every process mapped in Nimbus is owned and governed by a Business Process Owner, who works with the Business Process Authority to ensure that the documented process is correct and fit for purpose, before being published to the wider College community.

What benefits does the BPMS offer to the College?

  • It presents College processes all in one place and makes them accessible via the web.
  • The simple, unambiguous diagramming style requires no training or introduction in order to be understood.
  • College members can navigate across end-to-end processes, regardless of which business area carries out specific parts of the process.
  • Each process is governed and owned by the right person in College. The viewer can see who owns a process and when it was last approved.
  • Process diagrams can be enriched with helpful information, such as work instructions, templates, policy documents, business controls and web links.
  • Process maps can be presented within an online knowledgebase, to support role-based training, onboarding and compliance.
  • Process documentation can be maintained as part of ‘business as usual’, to avoid having to re-discover our processes every time we want to change them.
  • Process maps can be enriched with analysis information to aid optimisation, such as volumes, metrics, known pain points, automation opportunities and ‘as is’ and ‘to be’ process design.
  • All of the information captured with the BPMS is exportable as data that can be used for analysis (e.g. to understand the different human roles, IT systems, handovers and resources that interact with our processes).