ECONOMIC PROCESS MODELLING
LINQ is more than BPM. It’s EPM.
THE DEFINITION
Economic Process Modelling is the discipline of decomposing a business process into its constituent information, actions, systems and people, then attributing their contributions to revenue, cost, risk, optionality and information value.
The outcomes show you how the way you work creates, and destroys, economic value in your organisation.
Most organisations know what their processes cost. Almost none know what they are worth. EPM shows you where value is created, destroyed and left on the table, so transformation and AI decisions rest on economic evidence.
Doug Laney established information as an economic asset. EPM is the natural next step: if information has value, so do the processes that create, use and discard it.
WHAT EPM PRODUCES
Score a process and it renders as a landscape of value. Bars above the line create value. Bars below destroy it. The gold cap is value you produce but never collect.
This is the artefact executives make decisions from.
Steps that cost more than they contribute. Invisible if you only measure throughput.
Value the process creates but never collects. Usually data being thrown away.
The wrong resource doing the work. A person doing a system's job, or the reverse.
THE DEFINITION
Process mapping asks
"How does this work?"
Maps steps and handoffs, but never what they are worth.
Activity-Based Costing asks
"What does this cost?"
Traces resources, but ignores revenue, risk, options and information.
EPM asks
"What is each part worth?"
Values every working part, then redesigns so the process is worth more.
THE ANATOMY OF A PROCESS
Each behaves differently economically, especially under AI.
Data that enables a decision, or is produced by one. Quality and timeliness shape everything downstream.
Human or automated decisions that move work forward. Is the value in speed, or in judgement?
Technology extending capacity. Value must exceed total cost plus any judgement it displaces.
Judgement at the point of work. Where the judgement premium is high, people are irreplaceable.
THE DIFFERENTIATOR
Each component is scored comparatively, for directional clarity rather than false precision.
Does it help earn value from a customer or market?
What does it consume, or slow without benefit?
Does it create economic risk, or protect against loss?
Does it keep future choices open, or limit them?
What reusable data does it produce?
THE AI DECISION
The default AI roadmap
A list of technology placements with no model of what they are worth. A step can be automated and still be net negative if it carried trust or judgement.
The EPM reframe
EPM asks where AI creates the most economic value, and identifies where human presence is itself the valuable component.
The highest-volume automation candidates and the highest-value transformation candidates are rarely the same components.
THE METHOD
A capability you own, not a report that goes stale.
Choose a process where real economic value is at stake.
Map the information, actions, systems and people, workarounds included.
Score each part against the value lenses that apply.
Chart where the process creates value and where it destroys it.
Substitute, amplify, eliminate or resequence.
WHO IT IS FOR
A defensible line of sight from strategic intent to operational reality, and a shared economic language that replaces departmental opinion.
Costing tells you what a process spends. EPM attributes revenue, risk and option value, so investment cases rest on evidence rather than a slide deck.
Every process generates information and most is discarded. EPM shows which processes create value from data, which waste it, and how to capture more.
LINQ calculates effort, cost, capacity and value as you model. A recommendation stops being a narrative you must sell and becomes an economic case.
See where value concentrates and leaks across the full process, so a pilot result can be credibly scaled into a business case.
Reframes the question from where can we apply AI to where does AI create the most economic value, and where it should not go at all.
THE PLATFORM
LINQ calculates time, cost, capacity, workload, carbon and value for every part of the flow. A process map becomes a living digital twin.
Clone a model and compare current and future state side by side, before any budget is committed.
Build a portfolio of quantified models showing which initiatives deliver the most value, and why.
PROOF FROM THE FIELD
recovered from inefficient processes
and 8,000 hours saved per year
process steps collapsed
saved per year
saved from procurement per year
in operational savings
"Without LINQ, the process of understanding the value of the opportunity to transform our business would take up to 10 times longer."Strategy Analyst, Vix
EPM CASE STUDIES
Change the measure and you change the decision.
Government · Payroll
A national schools payroll governed as a system replacement rather than a value delivery process.
Government · Energy
The business case assumed benefits followed automatically from installation.
Transport · Ticketing
The contract looked like cost control, but the performance regime was too weak to protect value.
Retail · Supply chain
Scaling an unproven vendor-to-shelf process destroyed more value than early revenue created.
Aviation · Resilience
Protection existed but was under-valued, and one fault propagated cost far beyond the system.
Utilities · Public safety
Notification and vulnerable-customer support stop being overhead and become the highest-value components.
Service · AI
Where AI creates value in a contact centre, and where human judgement is the asset.
Government · Identity
A value delivery programme governed as a system replacement project.
Energy · Risk and recovery
Valuing every component by the risk it controls restored a catastrophically damaged asset in 14 months.
These are EPM analytical interpretations. Events and outcomes are drawn from public inquiry, audit and historical sources. The value profiles and diagnoses are LINQ's interpretation, offered as illustration.
RESOURCES
Cutting costs is not enough. Doug Laney on why the best transformations focus on the real value processes create, not just how efficiently they run.
Read on CIOCost savings tell only part of the story. How EPM reveals what each step creates, protects or quietly destroys, and why the general ledger cannot show it.
Read on CIO
CREDIBILITY
EPM was not built to sell software. It was developed with Doug Laney, who spent more than two decades as a VP Distinguished Analyst at Gartner, coined the term big data, defined the three Vs of data management, and created Infonomics, the subject of his book Infonomics: How to Monetize, Manage, and Measure Information as an Asset (Routledge, 2018).
EPM is the direct extension of that thinking. If information has economic value, then the processes that create, use and discard it have economic value too.
Start a conversation with our team, or build your first model today.