Posted by: peter in Peter Borner, change, bpm on
Sep 30, 2008
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 business
- The 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 and
- Delivers 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!
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.
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.
