Blog Entries tagged 'change'

United at last in BPM?

peter@peterborner.com — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0100

Are vendors that describe themselves as System-Centric, Human-Centric or Document-Centric being very short-sighted and missing the point of BPMS value?
Gartner's latest report "People, Processes and Information: United at Last in BPM" says that vendors that describe themselves in one of those buckets as being very short-sighted and missing the point of BPMS value.
At Axispoint we have found that an organisation new to BPM is unlikely to have the right set of skills and experience on hand, a sub-optimal methodology will deliver sub-optimal results and poor communication causes frustration and distrust bringing about resistance to change. The best way to deal with this complex challenge is to adopt a holistic approach. Unlike traditional application development, implementing BPM necessarily involves changes to business process, and invariably to culture, not just to the technology.
People, Processes and Information must be truly united for BPM to be successful.

What are the roadblocks of change?

peter@peterborner.com — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0100

John P. Kotter, in his latest book A Sense of Urgency [Harvard Business Press, 2008] cites two reasons why, by his calculation, 70% of Business change either fails to deliver or is never instigated in the first place. These two reasons are complacency and false urgency.

He believes that complacent people do not realise they are complacent and that they believe someone else is responsible for solving the challenges the business faces. Kotter goes on to describe complacent people as tending to avoid leading and trying to maintain the status quo. He describes false urgency as being created by people who are very active but not necessarily in meeting the challenges of their company. They tend to be stressed, tired and feeling the weight of too much expectation. They typically spend too much time in meetings where people are more interested in making themselves look good than in meeting new challenges.

Kotter describes true urgency as being fueled by the belief that the world contains great opportunity among the challenges.

If you, like me, are proactively seeking new challenges, have gut instinct and determination to take a challenge head on and win then I reccomend you read this book and find out how to remove complacent and false urgency from situations where urgency is required... How to find opportunity in a crisis.

It is time to play the long game!

peter@peterborner.com — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0100

We seem to be in a downward spiral. I hear people all around me firmly focused on short-term recessionary issues. How often have you heard a conversation that starts "I've never known it so tough. I have had to cut my cost base by 40%, lay 25% of my staff off and my pipeline has dried up"? Put two like-minded people together and it doesn't take much to get to the bottom a deep recessionary hole. Why do Managers, Directors, Financiers and the media feel it necessary to talk themselves into a recession?

I am taking a more positive approach. I firmly believe there is a future for businesses in the UK. You just have to be positive and stretch your view from the immediate to the medium term. The key factor that is helping my business grow in todays market is the strength and creativity of my team. We are working hard, looking for creative innovative ways to be more efficient and to strengthen our pipeline. We are constantly looking to hire strong sales and delivery people. We are also in accquisition mode as there are a number of firms that are struggling and are therefore under valued.

I m looking forward to riding the recovery wave.

BPM Delivering ROI within the first 90 days?

peter@peterborner.com — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0100

As a regular reader of Dennis Byron's excellent BPM in Action Blog, my interest was peaked by his latest entry (http://www.bpminaction.com/blog/2008/10/bpm_viewpoint_what_new_aiim_st.php) where he discusses the new AIIM study on BPM (http://www.ebizq.net/news/10483.html).

As a centre of excellence for BPM our aim is to deliver value as early as possible in any engagement. Typically we look for processes to attack in the initial iteration that can start to deliver an ROI within 90 to 120 days. This is clearly in line with Dennis' advice in his blog post. My view is that, learning to walk before you run is a key success factor in all BPM projects. After all, a lean, agile, reliable approach that has early success will never be a job loss or balance sheet writedown issue!

If have published a number of solution briefs for those of you looking to introduce BPM into your business. You can find them here: http://www.axispoint.co.uk/dl-white-papers

Organisations need to be lean and agile, and to execute reliably (right first time).

peter@peterborner.com — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0100

Organisations can derive these benefits from technological solutions, but can they meet these short term needs (downsizing for lean-ness and moving towards centralised control for agility) whilst also addressing long term strategic aims that prepare them to exit recession better equipped for the future than they were when they entered?

I believe that they can. This is having one's cake and eating it, and a solution to this dilemma is Business Process Management.

BPM is getting a lot of attention. Forrester Research estimates that BPM license, services and maintenance revenue will grow from the $1.2 billion we saw in 2005 to more than $2.7 billion by 2009 "an adoption trend vendors and practitioners alike can't ignore".

BPM has come a long way from the workflow systems of the 1990s; those old workflow systems managed document-based processes where people executed the workflow steps of the process.

Today's BPM systems manage processes that include person-to-person work steps, system-to-system communications or combinations of both. In addition, BPM systems include integrated features like enhanced (and portable) process modeling, simulation, code generation, process execution, process monitoring, customisable industry-specific templates and UI components, and out-of-the-box integration capabilities along with support for web-services-based integration.

All of these ingredients translate to increased interest today in BPM suites because they bring businesses a higher level of flexibility for business processes while reducing risks and cost. Think of BPM suites as offering a way to build, execute and monitor automated processes that may go across organisational boundaries.

But the key here is higher level of flexibility and reduced cost. Lean and agile. Just what we need now, in turbulent times, and to set ourselves up for the future.

Do firms with strong IT capabilities achieve stronger company growth?

peter@peterborner.com — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0100

My premise is that firms achieve growth through the use of information technology to scale their business processes more effectively than their competitors. So how do we measure the strength of a firms IT capability?

I use an "IT Scorecard," based on an original framework developed at Microsoft, to measure and track IT capability in five key business functional areas: sales and marketing, finance, operations, empowered professionals, and IT infrastructure.

Typically a firm that does well on the IT Scorecard has a high capacity for business process scalability. That is, their processes tend to be able to scale to meet the needs of a rapidly changing business environment. For example, through good process knowledge and standardisation they can more easily manage the complexities involved in growth; they are able to streamline their operations and achieve grow without significant additions to headcount; they are flexible and able to respond quickly and take advantage of new opportunities and they have good visibility into their critical business processes.

Interestingly, firms that have a high capacity for business process scalability often do not realise that they have this capability. However, results can be off the scale for firms that understand their capabilities and embrace the business process scalability they have developed because they are able to identify the specific process changes needed to drive each business lever and then quickly and efficiently implement those changes in their BPM system.

Is BPM winning at the expense of the 600lb Gorilla?

peter@peterborner.com — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0100

I read yesterday's article in Silicon's online magazine entitled "SAP sales drop as credit crunch looms large" with interest. It is clear from the article that the current economic climate is hitting the 600lb Gorillas hard. SAP shares are down 16% (the biggest drop for 12 years) and Oracle are down 7.6%. Shares in Microsoft, Cisco and EMC are also reportedly down.

The article reports that Henning Kagermann, SAP co-chief executive, said of the third quarter: "The market developments of the past several weeks have been dramatic and worrying to many businesses. These concerns triggered a very sudden and unexpected drop in business activity at the end of the quarter."

My experience is that there is a tendency to increase spending on IT during times of economic downturn. This is because smart business leaders see it as an opportunity to streamline and position for the future. The Businesses that "get it right" are those businesses that ride the recession and come through it stronger and better placed to handle the up-turn.

So, if the major Hi-Tech firms are seeing a downturn, where is this investment going?

I would hope that firms are looking towards pure play Business Process Management technologies like Lombardi, PegaSystems, K2.net, Global360, Appian and Savvion because coupled with a strong iterative approach they can provide quick wins and give business visibility and ownership to make a difference in the current fiscal year. If a major SAP deployment goes wrong it can very easily become a job loss/annual report write down issue. Through fast, agile BPM projects, the lessons learnt in the initial deployments can lay the foundations for larger "Building the Future" projects that deliver significant longer term benefits.

Can we achieve effective/efficient processes?

peter@peterborner.com — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0100

Businesses want to improve their processes for a number of reasons ranging from increased efficiency and increased effectiveness through to increased visibility and improved collaboration.

Increased efficiency is about ensuring all the steps in a process are necessary. Can we drive down costs by streamlining the process?

Effectiveness is the process of driving Business value? Can we making more money for the company? Can we deliver better service?

It's a moving target, things change! Credit crunch, Globalization, Compliance, etc., all have an effect on business processes so it is important to build a platform for continuous improvement.

To achieve this we need to:

Examine current processes (The Operational Walkthrough)
Model current processes (the "As-Is")
Model and Simulate proposed efficient/effective processes (the "To-Be")
Implement the improvements
Measure and adapt for continuous improvement.

Having the ability to measure performance and adapt for continuous improvement is key to stealing the march on your competitors. It's not about doing everything perfectly. It's about having the edge over the competition, delivering that extra level of customer service.

The big mistakes come when you try to boil the ocean and try to solve everybody's problems all at once. A better approach is to understand what people are trying to achieve right now and help them model their business processes, help them produce new, more effective and efficient, business processes so that they can move forward by aligning IT and the Business.

Why do IT Projects fail?

peter@peterborner.com — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +0100

From long and bitter experience of both infrastructure and software projects I am firmly of the opinion that all failures of IT projects come down to two things, poor planning and a lack of business involvement and commitment.

My experience shows that successful projects create a mutual dependency between IT and the Business. I have seen that this requires an unprecedented amount of team work, at least 60% of this effort involves change management and getting organisations to think about process in the business. So if you fail to get the Business and IT working together from the outset, your project will most likely experience problems, cost overruns, etc.

I am eager to gather your input. What does your experience of IT project delivery tell you about why some projects succeed and others fail so dramatically?

How important is Information Management?

peter@peterborner.com — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +0100

Yesterday I watched an excellent webcast by Jonathan Steel, CEO of technology researchers at The Bathwick Group where he discusses the results of a survey into the importance of Information Management to a range of companies. Jonathan states that the survey found that 75% of respondents said that good information management is a key to profitability. Bathwick's research into Smart Companies also found that good information management is a key to profitability and productivity.

I found it interesting that 60% feel that they are doing an adequate job and only 30% feel that they are doing a good enough job at information management. It was clear that respondents felt that they are doing a good job given the tools that they have but 85% said that they would be able to reduce costs by having better information management solutions and 75% said that they would also be able to sell more because they would have better insight into existing customers and potential new customers.

The big issues reported by companies in the survey were:

Combining multiple data sources to provide a single operational view of the businessThe ability to capture all data in the first place because data exists outside of the core systems, on paper, in local spreadsheets, etc.Being able to efficiently report for compliance

The alarming fact that is, that 37% of companies report that they have critical data out on desktops across the enterprise leading to the inability to produce a single operational view and an inability to see all the data that pertains to a customer in a unified view.

Emphatically, respondents see the need to create a more integrated solution. In the Enterprise space 90% of respondents said that this is something they specifically need to do and 25% said that they are trying to do it. However, 50% feel that it is either prohibitively expensive or will require a lot of consultative input.

As a leader in the field of Business Process Management I am often asked to deliver a solution that:

Orchestrates information flow, Integrates with existing back-end systems (to maximize current investment),Provides a single operational view with up-to-date status of all in-flight business processes andDelivers a Return on Investment within the first 90 days.Perhaps the 50% of respondents that feel a solution to their problems is prohibitively expensive are looking in the wrong direction!

Process is only good process if it makes sense and works!

peter@peterborner.com — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +0100

There are some processes that we must follow legally and they are forced into an organisation through the compliance route. How often, though, does this implementation of process, in the name of compliance, cause resentment because the process has not been properly thought through? For example, I have been reviewing the "Know Your Customer (KYC)", "Anti Money Laundering (AML) and EU's "Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (MiFID)" regulations. I have noticed that most financial institutions state that their processes are compliant with these regulations. However, their processes appear to be mostly paper based, highly manual and require large multi-page paper forms to be completed. Add to this extraordinary level of bureaucracy the overhead of trawling back through the forms every time a sanctions list update is received to ensure existing clients haven't suddenly become "undesirable" and you can see why it is now so difficult to do business with a financial institution anywhere in the developed world.

The implementation of business process is often perceived as a negative because it is seen as a control mechanism that does nothing but add overhead. However, implementing the right process can create a quicker, more streamlined and compliant business. Using the right tools can provide the additional benefit of visibility in to the status of all in-flight processes thus building a platform for continuous improvement.

Communicating the benefits of the new process can lead to a better tolerance for process efficiencies. However, if the process is not well designed, is onerous or adds a burden of bureaucracy then it won't matter how much benefit the organisation gains from the process, it will not be fully adopted by its users.

In my experience, involving the business in an operational walk-thru so that they understand the shortcomings of the "as-is" process and own the "to-be" process will lead to better process design and hence a stronger uptake by the process users.

BPM -- All Mashed-Up?

peter@peterborner.com — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +0100

There has been much talk over the years about the ability of the various business process management (BPM) offerings to create an orchestration layer that provides the communications layer necessary to bring order and controlled flexibility to horizontal processes.

I think that most proponents of BPM would agree that it is clear that you cannot succeed in BPM without communication. BPM can be thought of as a reaction to the changing communication patterns of modern businesses because problems with processes often reflect more horizontal than vertical integration issues. This change is a result of new ways that businesses and the people inside those businesses communicate with one another to increase agility and lower costs.

Are we starting to reach the time where horizontal collaboration tools like BPM are mashed-up with vertical specific, "run-the-company" processes to create flexible application frameworks that allow companies the capability to embrace all major forms of IT-enabled collaboration, with enterprise security policies and business processes, without major disruption to how the Business gets on with the job?

For example (and I apologise for the shameless self promotion) my company, Axispoint, is currently working on a project to provide a GRC solution for a client. The solution will be a mash-up of the various risk engine and sanctions list provider services, etc. and will be built on a BPM framework to provide control and visibility into the in-flight processes. I haven't found others that are using mash-ups and BPM technology in quite the same way. I would be interested to hear from anyone that is working on these solutions.

Are you getting value from your IT projects?

peter@peterborner.com — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +0100

How often do you see projects that fail to get deployed or where the implementation costs are greater than the value the solution provides?

It is perennial concern, one that most large IT departments seem unable to resolve. I have, in my career, produced endless business cases, cost justifications and ROI projections. I have championed project management methodologies and striven to place emphasis on the value of the initiatives in comparison to the project costs but in my experience there is a high chance of failure to deliver real value from IT led projects.

I am happy, to report, however, that times have changed!

Since joining Axispoint some two years ago, we have built up a global Business Process Management practice. We focus on opportunity cost and have developed a highly iterative methodology that is designed to start to deliver an ROI within 90 days.

Opportunity cost is a big issue for most companies as the amount of IT projects is always greater than the resources available to deliver them. So when projects are ill-conceived, you end up wasting time, effort and budget; valuable resources that could have been used to deliver a more useful project.

Successful projects create a mutual dependency between IT and the Business, requiring an unprecedented amount of team work and process definition. Too often, I see the business stakeholders in a project delegate the modelling process to IT - this is a disastrous move and one that will suffocate downstream innovation.

You hear a lot of people banging on about bridging the gap between IT and the Business but it is clear that using a cost based model simply drives a wedge between the two and makes business alignment more difficult. The goals should be:

To get buy-in by getting the Business involved and helping them understanding the overall cost and effort much more regularly.
Ensure your Subject Matter Experts define and map the business processesInitially focus on one process, iterate and deliver early. You should aim to get your first process into production within 90 days.

Does the way you manage change have a critical effect on your business?

peter@peterborner.com — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +0100

CIO Magazine's recent poll of top ten CIO concerns concludes that the fast moving pace of technological innovation means change is a guaranteed part of the CIO's remit. They argue, the most significant management issue that CIOs have to face this year is change management - business process change, changes in organisational cultures and the impact of that change on their staff and their organisational culture.

Why then, are most CIO's slow to embrace Business Process Management Technology? There are numerous case studies across many verticals that show BPM delivers results. BPM technology, properly implemented, has shown consistent improvements in process compliance and ability to deliver an agile platform for improvement.

Can we de-couple economic growth from increased consumption of natural resources?

peter@peterborner.com — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 00:00:00 +0100

Unquestionably, you can improve your value to your organisation by helping cut unnecessary use of power and raw materials. There are several ways to achieve this. Two significant strategies are:

Move towards zero travelVirtualise your infrastructure

Telecommuting not only cuts waste, it also promotes a better working life for individuals and it also means that office space, and all the associated expenses, can be slashed. Technology that supports telecommuting varies in price and performance. At the high-end you should be investigating technologies like Cisco's TelePresence. More affordable technologies include Cisco's MeetingPlace, Microsoft's Live Communications Server and, for those of you not wishing to make a capital investment, Saas offering like WebEx.

Opportunities for consolidation and server virtualisation can reduce the number of machines in use and reduce the number of data centres you require. However, if you consider the ratio of servers to desktops in your organisation you will see a significant case for implementing desktop virtualisation. Moving to desktop virtualisation will bring power savings and security benefits that far outweigh the savings gained from server virtualisation.

What better strategy than a combination of cost saving with improved corporate, environmental and social responsibility?