Business Process Manager at VWDS

Who am I?

Hey folks, my name is Joaquim, I’m 25 years-old and I’m from Lisbon, Portugal. Born and raised. After graduating from university, I joined VWDS in May 2022 as a Business Process Manager (BPM), in the amazing Information Security Compliance Team, led by our one and only CISO – Sara Loja. 

My academic background is composed by a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree, both in Computer Science and Engineering. So, basically, one could say that my professional interests could pass by programming or finding answers to my doubts in StackOverflow. Well… until the end of my third year of university, I truly believed that it could be my real passion and something that I would for sure invest to be successful in my professional path. Months passed, my master’s degree began, and I found myself with a bigger perspective of the many possibilities that my course could give me. At the end, after many courses, homework and a concluded master thesis, I realised that my degree does not simply rely on the technical aspect of IT. Besides that, we can also take the enterprise route in order to keep growing as an Engineer and thrive in the IT world. After all, IT is much more than coding: the reality is much wider and challenging to any company in this industry.

What am I doing in VWDS?

The Business Process Management (BPM) field is a great example in how we can apply many different aspects and ideas and build a solid foundation that matches the company goals, including everything that we know in the IT context and many other domains that contribute to our own personal and professional development.
And for the million-dollar question: what is exactly BPM? Business Process Management is an IT-related discipline I first heard of in my master’s degree (eventually, it became one of my main areas of specialization).

• BPM gives an engineering perspective of all the tasks, methods and tools associated with an organization life cycle by discovering, modelling, analyzing, validating and optimizing its business processes.
• Essentially, in a company like VWDS, BPM coordinates information, systems, architectures, roles and relationships in order to create outcomes that benefit the company.
• Business processes are composed by activities connected to each other by a logical workflow, usually represented by using a diagramming or a BPMN (business process model and notation) tool. Consequently, each one of these activities must be performed by the right person, considering many aspects that are defined and documented (e.g.: time, costs, KPIs, …).

In VW Digital Solutions we have dozens of processes from different areas and some of them you probably didn’t notice, even considering the fact that you perform them every day. For instance, the management of the physical accesses to the offices, the management of an incident that happens during your working days, the payment process of your pay slip in the end of each month, or even all the activities that were part of your onboarding process in VWDS. These are all part of different business processes that are all well described and defined with a workflow.
And this is why I find BPM interesting: it allows us to have a panoramic overview of all the engines that help our company achieve its goals.
As part of the Information Security Compliance team, having business processes workable and documented is a very important milestone that contributes for the correct management of information and their protection against possible threats that could compromise its confidentiality, integrity and/or availability.
The last three aspects can also be reinforced with the classification of information in the means of defining retention periods (CSDs), or confidentiality labels (e.g.: internal, public, secret, confidential).
In a short note, the correct protection and management of data is also achievable by the management of policies and other important documents or means of information at VWDS, something that our team is also addressing and willing to improve as much as possible.

Final Notes of a VWDS BPM?

So, as you can see, the IT field has a lot to offer. And as it keeps growing every second, it makes it almost impossible for us to keep up with the trending topics and the new demands of the business.
This is just one example, but there is still a lot more to explore in this giant universe of IT.
Cheers!