Because Process Matters » Business Process Analysis (BPA)

Q&A Series: The Evolution of EA

Sandra Moran — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 12:36:13 +0000

Next up in my Q&A series on EA, I am going to address how the EA market is changing and what vendors are doing to support user’s new expectations.

Question: What are some of the ways that EA is evolving and what changes are EA tool vendors implementing to support those changes?

Answer: In my last blog post, I talked about demonstrating the value of enterprise architecture to the business and the increasing expectation and demand for EA to demonstrate business value. The focus on value is a big part of EA’s evolution. I believe this is a result of both the desire to see a return on the EA investment, which many companies have already made, and the need to identify new ways to drive adaptability into the organization in order to remain competitive.

In this post, I am going to discuss one of the ways EA tool vendors are supporting organizations in this evolution through an increased focus on leveraging the information captured about the enterprise to drive more informed decisions. Leading EA tool vendors are increasing their capabilities around the use of the data to support better presentation of the analysis, investment options, and organizational impacts to decision makers throughout the organization. To enable these key stakeholders, architects need to support multiple points of view, different levels of detail and a diverse set of information. This data also needs to be presented to users in a format that can be easily understood and linked back to the objectives that drive each functional area.

For too many organizations, the manipulation of the data remains a highly manual process where strategy, organizational, and process models are rebuilt in spreadsheets, PowerPoint slides and documents. This not only wastes the time of highly skilled analysts, but also creates a maintenance nightmare as requests for additional information, refinements in the assumptions, or other alternatives are requested by business users, which inevitably starts the cycle of manual data manipulation again.

I believe the better approach is to drive the presentation of the information directly from the underlying enterprise data – supporting a combination of information from the architecture teams with relevant data from other systems. Graphical displays and drill-down capabilities deliver better clarity into the information to support more informed decisions. Changing an assumption, resource allocation, business process, or goal in one central location can cascade through all the dependencies and immediately be reflected across the enterprise model or compared to other iterations of the project – without the hassles and headaches of manual rework.

If you’re not working from a central repository, and your current EA toolset doesn’t include the ability to translate your enterprise information and business models into information that can be consumed the business users, you should be demanding more. Unlocking information to enable better decisions is one of the ways that EA delivers value back to the business.

In my next post, I’ll be discussing another trend in EA and EA tool evolution – where analysts fit within the organization and what impact that has on what you need from EA tools.

Q&A Series: The Value of EA and BPA In November and December, Gartner released the Magic Quadrants for...
Q&A Series: The Future of EA and BPA Today I’m continuing my Q&A series on frequent questions asked...
Metastorm ProVision – Have you heard all the buzz? Lately there’s been a lot of buzz surrounding Metastorm ProVision®....

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Q&A Series: The Future of EA and BPA

Sandra Moran — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 09:16:35 +0000

Today I’m continuing my Q&A series on frequent questions asked about enterprise architecture and business process analysis tools. Over the past few months there has been a lot of chatter around the future of EA and BPA. Here’s another installment on the future of this market and the best way to leverage these tools to drive positive change in your organization.

Question: Where do you think this market is going? Do you see other tools coming into play?

Answer: If EA initiatives are successful, you can think of their output as a road map for where to focus resources and energy to close the gaps between your organization’s strategy and its ability to execute toward those strategic goals. The natural extension to EA is to take those initiatives and operationalize them. In other words, take the EA concepts and turn them into project plans that organizational leaders drive into their teams. For some, these initiatives may require organizational change, reallocation of resources, or business process improvements and system integration through tools like business process management (BPM).

An organization that learns to leverage the synergy between EA and BPM will be able to more effectively prioritize projects based on this higher level context for change and therefore, identify which projects have the greatest ability to help the organization execute against its strategy. BPM projects funded without the strategic context EA provides may have an incremental impact to the business. However, this approach fails to provide executives with the perspective they need to make more informed decisions about where investments should be made based on their relative impact against strategic goals.

Even with BPM’s extraordinary ROI, some projects have significantly more value than others. As I have yet to meet a company with unlimited resources, enabling your company to make decisions that focus the resources you have on the projects that have the greatest impact to your goals is extremely valuable. Companies who combine EA and BPM technologies are in a better position to close the gap between strategy and execution by focusing on initiatives that matter and seeing to their rapid operationalization. If you’re still not convinced, I encourage you to read Gartner’s recent report, “Make EA and BPM Work Together to Deliver Business Value.”

Where do you think this market is going? Feel free to leave comments below and we’ll discuss!

Q&A Series: The Value of EA and BPA In November and December, Gartner released the Magic Quadrants for...
Impacting Business with Enterprise Architecture: What the Future Holds for EA Efforts Cliché as it may be, I can’t stop myself from...
The Future of Social BPM Over the years organizational development processes have evolved to meet...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Q&A Series: The Value of EA and BPA

Sandra Moran — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 10:27:25 +0000

In November and December, Gartner released the Magic Quadrants for Enterprise Architecture (EA) and Business Process Analysis (BPA) respectively. We thought we’d discuss some of Gartner’s observations about trends in both EA and BPA along with many questions we’ve heard from our customers and prospects over the years. We are thrilled about our leadership positions in both of these reports; however, I can’t help but think that many of our customers who use our tools could be getting far more from their EA investments. While EA and BPA tools are maturing it seems like many decision makers in large organizations don’t have a clear, holistic understanding about the value they can bring to the table. Over the next few days I’ll be taking a deep dive into some of the most popular questions organizations have about EA and BPA.

Question: What sort of value do organizations achieve from Enterprise Architecture?

Answer: Almost every article, blog post, seminar, and book about enterprise architecture (EA) includes some mention of the need for enterprise architects to demonstrate move value to the business. The truth is that few architects get much practical, actionable advice on how to do that. Many business leaders don’t really understand the value of various frameworks and taxonomies and have a difficult time understanding the attention to detail that architects focus on when developing their modeling methodologies. Not only do business leaders not understand, but many are unwilling to take the time to learn. I’ve seen business mangers glaze over when architects start talking about something as simple as their modeling assumptions.

The most successful companies embrace architecture as a way to instill a discipline that drives the translation of business strategy and vision into the enterprise to facilitate the change needed to reach the broader business goals. Architecture also defines the path for an organization to evolve as it implements those the necessary changes. In today’s hyper-competitive global economy organizations cannot depend on a few “individuals” to instinctively make the right decisions to manage and execute this type of large-scale change. Especially when companies are focusing on objectives like improving customer experience and consistency across all channels of communication, the focus on individual contributions can actually impede the success of the broader goal.

To expand on this point, take a minute to read a recent blog post by HP’s Terry White, which cites research by Dana Gartner, president and principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and Jeanne Ross, Director and Principal Research Scientist at the MIT Center for Information Systems Research. Among other important things it suggests that to fully realize the value of architecture, “there’s a cultural shift that takes place in an organization, when it commits to doing business in a new way, and that cultural shift starts with abandoning a culture of heroes and accepting a culture of discipline.” Organizations have to strive for a higher level of maturity and embrace a new culture of discipline before they can fully realize the value of architecture.

This is not to say that organizations with less maturity don’t derive value from EA. Organizations have demonstrated millions of dollars in savings with architectural initiatives focused on Application Portfolio Management, IT management, compliance and improving the effectiveness of key processes. So my answer to this question is the value that organizations can achieve from EA initiatives depends on the business problem you are asking your architecture team to solve. Companies who view EA as an essential discipline for business transformation derive significantly more value than companies who take a more narrow view.

In fact, many of our customers who have taken the time to connect with the business teams have also seen an increase in their penetration and acceptance by the organization. However, keep in mind that this requires constant coaching. Realization of a deeper value of transformation can be accelerated when architects become more skilled at identifying key business leaders that understand the value of leveraging best practices, standardization, process optimization, or other capabilities enabled by good architecture. I recently had a conversation with one of our larger customers, one of the world’s largest financial institutions, who told me that he needed to have 150 conversations with key business leaders to open the door to another 150 conversations that he needed to have to drive the kind of value his team was able to deliver.

What do you think? Stay tuned for our next question in this series and feel free to let us know what questions you’d like answered.

Who Drives an Enterprise Architecture Initiative? Who drives an enterprise architecture initiative? Does it come from...
Achieving Operational Excellence In my post last Monday, I discussed that if you leverage...
Thoughts from Gartner Enterprise Architecture Summit Last week, Gartner’s US Enterprise Architecture Summit in San Diego...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Countdown: 31 Days Until the OpenText BPM User Summit!

Elizabeth Edwards — Fri, 07 Oct 2011 15:11:47 +0000

Let the countdown begin! There are only thirty-one more days until the OpenText BPM User Summit and we couldn’t be more thrilled. This year we are combining two powerhouse organizations – Global 360 and Metastorm – to give our customers the best user summit to date.

During the summit we will be unveiling the new OpenText BPM vision, as well as a lot of new, promising product and solution innovations. We are excited to have Clay Richardson, Senior Analyst for Forester Research, kick-off our user summit with a thought-provoking session on Social BPM and the powerful value it has for organizations. This year we have assembled a remarkable lineup of speakers across a variety of industries who will be sharing their best practice techniques, lessons learned and other helpful tips and tricks to expand your business improvement projects. A full list of our summit speakers is available on our online agenda, here.

In addition to the summit agenda, we have several key sponsors that will be showcasing throughout the event, including Microsoft and ICCM Solutions. There are also some great pre-summit workshops on November 7^th designed to give you all the resources to maximize your investment. Check out some of Metastorm and Global 360’s training classes and register, here.

If you haven’t registered for the 2011 OpenText BPM User Summit, why wait? Not only will you be the first to hear everything OpenText has in store for you (from both the OpenText BPM executive management team and product managers), but you will get priceless information from peers to help you advance your business improvement efforts.

Still have some questions or concerns? Leave a comment below or reach out to me directly at elizabet@opentext.com

________________________
As Vice President of Global Field Marketing, Elizabeth Edwards oversees OpenText BPM’s worldwide marketing program initiatives for demand generation, online marketing, customer marketing and lead management. She has a multi-faceted background in business-to-business, high-technology marketing including customer service, database marketing, online marketing, direct marketing, advertising and strategic events. Elizabeth has planned and run the Annual Global User Summit for 10 years.

7 Reasons You Want to Attend the OpenText BPM User Summit! For the past nine years Metastorm has hosted its Global...
Countdown to the 2010 Metastorm Global User Conference – 29 days! Don’t miss out on learning about the new innovations that...
Countdown to the 2010 Metastorm Global User Conference – 5 days! Wow, time really flies – I can’t believe that the...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

OpenText Metastorm Named KMWorld Magazine Trend-Setting Product of the Year

Process Matters Blogger — Fri, 16 Sep 2011 13:26:59 +0000

We are thrilled to announce that for the 7^th consecutive year, OpenText Metastorm’s enterprise portfolio has been named as a Trend Setting Product of 2011 by KMWorld Magazine!

KMWorld recognizes OpenText Metastorm for demonstrating clearly identifiable technology breakthroughs that service a full spectrum of constituencies, especially customers, while seamlessly integrating into enterprise-wide environments. This year there were over 800 products assessed by KMWorld’s judging panel, which included editorial colleagues, analysts, system integrators, vendors, line-of-business managers and users.

We believe this award continues to symbolize our deep commitment to developing industry-leading EA, BPA and BPM software and solutions that transform the way organizations do business. We are honored to again be listed as a Trend-Setting Product of 2011. Stay tuned – we have some great product announcements around the corner!

Want to learn more about the OpenText Metastorm business transformation platform? Check out our solution page, full of white papers, case studies and solution sheets, or get a free trial of Metastorm ProVision or Metastorm M3!

Metastorm Enterprise recognized in KMWorld Magazine Today Metastorm announced that KMWorld Magazine has named the Metastorm...
Insights from OpenText: What Metastorm Brings to the Company OpenText announced Friday the completion of the Metastorm acquisition. We...
Knowledge Management (and beyond!) with Metastorm Metastorm was recently named to KMWorld Magazine‘s “100 Companies that...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

7 Reasons You Want to Attend the OpenText BPM User Summit!

Elizabeth Edwards — Thu, 01 Sep 2011 18:12:45 +0000

For the past nine years Metastorm has hosted its Global User Summit, designed to offer our customers and partners the opportunity to extend their ROI, hear success stories from industry peers and learn first-hand what is in the pipeline for upcoming products and services. This year is no different. In fact, we are thrilled to offer an expanded Global User Summit, now OpenText BPM, bringing together Global 360 and Metastorm customers, partners, executives and product experts for three days of learning and networking.

Our theme this year is Expand Your Universe. Regardless of where you are on the spectrum of enterprise architecture, business process analysis, business process management, case management, and enterprise content management, there is opportunity to expand your reach to drive further strategic and operational improvements.

I have been a part of the User Summit since its beginning. There is no doubt in my mind the tremendous value you will gain by attending the Summit. However, if you are still deciding if you should attend – I have put together seven excellent reasons that should sway your decision.

The Top 7 Reasons Why You Should Attend #UC2011:

1. Keynotes
Hear from John Shackleton, President and CEO of OpenText who will be revealing his vision for convergence of process and content and the value the new combination of Metastorm and Global 360 as OpenText BPM brings to our customers and partners. Bob Caldwell, general manager of OpenText BPM will also be sharing his vision for the continued growth and achievements of this newly created product group. Additionally, Clay Richardson, senior analyst at Forrester Research will be adding his insight into Social BPM and why collaborative and social technologies can drive serious, meaningful results.

2. OpenText BPM Roadmap
Chief Technology Officer for OpenText BPM, Steve Russell, will address all attendees and share product roadmap insights and strategy. He will be discussing the future of enterprise architecture, business process analysis, business process management, case management, and enterprise content management and how these capabilities will come together to help your organization plan for and execute smart improvements. You will be the first to hear the plans and how they will increase your ability to change the way you do business.

3. Pre-Summit OpenText Metastorm Workshops
We’re offering a special one-day curriculum of unique workshops focused on giving you the knowledge to maximize your investment in OpenText Metastorm products. While the workshops are an additional cost to the Summit registration fee, our customers who invest in training are better utilizing our products and see a much higher return on investment from our technology. There are still seats available for our Pre-Summit Workshops – register today!

4. Networking, networking, networking
With hundreds of attendees from a variety of industries, there are endless opportunities to network. By attending you can get new, fresh ideas about how to expand your EA, BPA, BPM, DCM and ECM efforts to support your business objectives.

5. Customer Success Stories
One of the best ways to get the most out of your investment in our products is to hear the incredible things your peers are doing. This year we have a dynamic group of customer speakers, including Blue Rhino, Coca-Cola Bottling Company, HP, Parsons Brinckerhoff, PCSU Financial Services, Salt River Project, SCRI, and Sunstein Kann Murphy & Timbers LLP, who will all be sharing how they leveraged our technology to transform their operations.

6. Location & Events
This year, our Global User Summit will be held in Reston, Virginia at the Hyatt Regency Reston – a premier hotel in the heart of Fairfax County’s technology hub and close to Washington, D.C. To further inspire you, we are providing a complimentary evening event for all Summit attendees. You can take advantage of this great opportunity to explore the world-renowned Steven F. Udar-Hazy Center – the companion facility to the National Air & Space Museum on the National Mall.

7. Partner Symposium
This one-day event is exclusively for partners and designed to give you insight into the vision of the OpenText executive team for our partner community. By attending our Partner Symposium you will gain firsthand experience of how to maximize your sales success and maximize your potential as an OpenText partner.

By selecting Metastorm and Global 360 software, you’ve already made the commitment to innovation and business improvement. With two days of sessions, case studies, demos, networking, product roadmaps and more, you will gain some serious insight and deeper knowledge (that you can’t find anywhere else!) about our software solutions and how you can initiate positive change across your organization!

P.S.: Register by October 1^st and get $200 off the regular Summit rate!

Save the Date – Metastorm Global User Summit Coming Soon! Expand your universe! The 2011 Metastorm Global User Summit and...
Insights from OpenText: What Metastorm Brings to the Company OpenText announced Friday the completion of the Metastorm acquisition. We...
Takeaways from the Elite User Conference At the Elite User Conference — both on the exhibit hall...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Metastorm and Microsoft meet in the clouds with M3

Sandra Moran — Mon, 22 Aug 2011 13:04:48 +0000

Designed to bring modeling to the masses, OpenText’s Metastorm M3 is now even more accessible as a cloud-based application on Microsoft’s Windows Azure Marketplace. To be included, M3 had to undergo specific certification by Microsoft in addition to its prior certification as a Windows Azure solution.

This makes Metastorm M3 the only enterprise-class business planning & modeling solution offered on the Azure Marketplace. M3 offers the most popular modeling types from Metastorm’s Enterprise Architecture (EA) and Business Process Management (BPM) software and delivers them anywhere, anytime in a secure, easy to use environment – enabling real-time collaboration, annotation and recording capabilities in the cloud.

With a $0 investment in new software or infrastructure, both business and IT staff of any experience level can get involved in the design process and collaborate across different departments. For greater business improvements, you’ll want to take modeling even further and identify relationships between key business and process components of your organization. So anything that your teams build in M3 can be uploaded into Metastorm ProVision as part of a larger EA or business transformation project or exported into Metastorm BPM for automation.

This certification as part of the Windows Azure Marketplace is the latest in OpenText Metastorm’s credentials. As a Gold Certified Partner in the Microsoft Partner Network, OpenText Metastorm leverages Microsoft Silverlight for its user interface, and offers integration with the Microsoft Office suite, Microsoft SharePoint, Microsoft Workflow Foundation and Microsoft Visual Studio. For additional information, check out M3 here in the Windows Azure Marketplace.

ME2009: Using Metastorm BPM with Microsoft SharePoint and Microsoft Office Another interesting session at ME2009 explored the tight integration between...
Insights from OpenText: What Metastorm Brings to the Company OpenText announced Friday the completion of the Metastorm acquisition. We...
Collaboration in the Cloud—Introducing Metastorm M3 In our recent blog post about the Future of Social...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

New Business Transformation Management Course!

Process Matters Blogger — Wed, 29 Jun 2011 13:03:50 +0000

Calling all Metastorm ProVision users!

Are you having trouble aligning strategy to execution? Discover how you can establish better visibility across your enterprise to identify and understand the best business improvements for your organization.

In our brand-new Business Transformation Management course, you can learn how to leverage Metastorm ProVision to define and control positive change within your organization. Drive meaningful change across your organization by taking advantage of this webinar and truly understand how you can align your goals, strategies and capabilities with complex business transformation initiatives.

Here are the details for you to register today!
Metastorm Business Transformation Management Course
Date: Thursday, July 14, 2011
Time: 11:00 AM – 12:00 PM EDT

3 Reasons to Start Thinking About a Business Transformation Strategy The reality is change is inevitable. To keep up with...
Business Transformation – It’s elementary with Metastorm! In elementary school most children learn about the transformation of a...
Metastorm Teams with Forrester to Shed Light on EA & BPM Disconnect Are BPM and EA aligned in your organization? On September...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Takeaways from the Elite User Conference

Jen Silate — Wed, 15 Jun 2011 16:12:13 +0000

At the Elite User Conference — both on the exhibit hall floor and in the sessions — the discussions surrounded the many challenges facing law firms today, including risk management, conflict processing, and new business intake, as well as the various solutions developed by Elite and its partners. The need for automation and integration was paramount to these discussions.

It is becoming essential for firms to automate their critical processes in order to increase profitability and efficiency. By automating the interactions between people, systems, and content, firms are able to:

Streamline their processes so that the best practices for any given task are consistently followed
Accelerate their on-boarding of new matter and employees to increase profits and improve productivity
Ensure compliance with regulations and confidentiality agreements with full audit trails

Integrating these automated processes across not only Elite systems, but the other critical systems firm-wide is just as essential. Cost savings and user adoption for any project increases substantially when you build on pre-existing technologies. The one-two punch of implementing a solution that automates your manual processes while integrating with the systems you already have in place not only delivers business improvement, but also a rapid ROI.

Further, agility is the key to sustained profitability — in the legal industry and elsewhere. Canned solutions with tight parameters and heavily coded customizations leave your project in a time capsule — a relic of what worked in the moment in time when the requirements for the project were defined and incapable of keeping up with the continually updated and ever expanding regulations governing the legal industry.

And it isn’t just a trend – automation, integration and agility are required to keep your firm profitable, efficient and ready for whatever challenges tomorrow brings.

Law Firms Practice Process Improvement How can law firms increase revenue? With the complexity of...
Achieving Operational Excellence In my post last Monday, I discussed that if you leverage...
Putting the “global” in the Metastorm Global User Conference Today Chairman and CEO of Metastorm, Bob Farrell, spoke with...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Achieving Operational Excellence

Sandra Moran — Thu, 26 May 2011 13:32:02 +0000

In my post last Monday, I discussed that if you leverage enterprise architecture (EA) disciplines and solutions during the business process design phase of your business process management (BPM) projects you can better discover what your best practices are. However, establishing visibility into your operations, and understanding how and why the top performers and departments in your organization have more productivity and success than their counterparts, is only the first step in achieving operational excellence.

To achieve and maintain excellence throughout your enterprise, collaboration and process improvement must be constant.

Once you have captured and deployed the best practices discovered during the design phase, collaboration must continue to be fostered. Process improvement cannot be viewed as a one-time event. To achieve the agility that you need today, your organization must continue to evolve and improve processes, adapt them quickly when opportunities and challenges arise, and leverage technologies that allow you to continue to build on the collective intelligence and insights of your organization’s top performers. When your systems support rapid development and deployment, your organization has the ability to continually innovate and better respond to change whether it comes from internal or external forces, like competitor’s actions or new regulations.

By uniting the people who know how to get work done most effectively with people who need to know on a continuous basis, your organization will have a deeper understanding of its strengths, weaknesses, process gaps and redundancies. Seeking continuous feedback on how to continue to evolve and improve processes is a critical part of building a culture of operational excellence. In fact, there are technologies that enable multiple users in your organization to communicate, collaborate and make process improvements anytime, anywhere. This ensures that the right people with the right knowledge are involved achieving operational excellence.

There is untapped knowledge and excellence in your organization. The most successful companies are deliberate about identifying excellence and ensuring it becomes part of the operational model.

Uncovering Process Excellence Achieving process excellence is possible. To do it you can...
Six Strategies for a Successful Center of Excellence Few organizations, less than 20% according to a recent study...
Metastorm Customers Speak Out on Business Process Improvement Its back! Today Metastorm reveals real-world insights from organizations speaking...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Six Strategies for a Successful Center of Excellence

Alison Cooley — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 13:24:35 +0000

Few organizations, less than 20% according to a recent study by Robert Kaplan and David Norton, are able to execute successfully on their business strategy¹. Implementing the right business improvements is nearly impossible when you have no clear understanding of how your business’ strategy, processes, people and content are interconnected. Many of today’s successful organizations have deployed a powerful process center of excellence (COE) to unite business and IT and help drive innovation to transform their businesses. Organizations with a COE are able to successfully execute improvements and handle unexpected challenges and change for a distinct competitive advantage.

When trying to improve or build a COE, make sure you have these six key strategies for success:

Define and understand your vision and goals
Translating your basic business needs into a well articulated strategy can be daunting. By articulating your business vision and goals upfront you are better able to prioritize and manage your issues and connect them to your overall business strategy.
Collaborate with IT and business users
To harness the full power of a COE, you must bring together both business and IT. It is critical that these two groups share their knowledge and experience and work together to analyze, map and build new, more effective processes. Both groups must understand the value the other brings to the table and how they can work together to improve the overall business.
Understand your organization’s strengths, weaknesses and needs
Every organization has its process issues. A strong analysis tool can help you understand exactly how your organization’s systems, people and processes interact – giving you deeper insight into which processes are successful and which processes need work.
Build a best practices repository
With careful consideration, a best practices repository is one of the best ways to tackle big business challenges. Your team must begin to analyze and understand both your structured and unstructured processes and how you can improve them to drive business growth.
Leverage software tools to see lifecycle of process
A great COE will help your organization embrace and manage process improvement. Powerful software solutions can help you model and analyze your goals and business strategy, enabling you to better understand where you are and where you want to go. Business analysis tools allow you to model and simulate more of the operational aspects of your enterprise – helping you better understand how your strategy, processes, people and content are interrelated. A business process management tool can help you automate and monitor your human-centric and systems-based processes.
Focus on process improvement
Today’s business world is ever-changing and it is critical that you are always analyzing and improving your business processes. By always thinking about how to improve and remodel your processes, you will dramatically increase your agility and efficiency for competitive advantage.

__________________________________________________
¹“The Strategy-Focused Organization: How Balanced Scorecard Companies Thrive in the New Business Environment,” Robert Kaplan and David Norton

Metastorm Customers Speak Out on Business Process Improvement Its back! Today Metastorm reveals real-world insights from organizations speaking...
3 Reasons Organizations Need Capability Maps Organizations are made up of thousands of capabilities, each individually...
Pharmaceutical company recognized for process excellence Today we are proud to announce that, AmerisourceBergen – one...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Is Your Industry in a State of Flux?

Alison Cooley — Fri, 01 Apr 2011 14:08:24 +0000

A week or so ago Metastorm presented a webinar on how to manage change in different industries. The webinar explained how industry-specific capability models can accelerate the value of an organization’s transformation efforts. So what industries are most in need of a formal business transformation framework and platform? When polled, respondents clearly emerged as having an immediate need for BT frameworks in the financial services and pharmaceutical industries.

While the results of the poll were obviously influenced by the composition of the webinar attendees, the results can also be tied back to key market drivers. In the past several years, both financial services and pharmaceutical companies have faced major compliance and regulation overhauls – forcing these companies to rethink and remodel they way they operate their business in order to cooperate with new compliance mandates. These organizations are scrambling to meet new reporting requirements (and often want to be the leader in responding to them) and still push out new, successful and innovative products. So, it makes sense that these organizations are looking for a framework that offers them expansive, accurate visibility into their organization. It is critical that the organization understands how they operate and how they can address these new requirements so that they can remain profitable in the market place and get ahead of the competition.

However, organizations don’t just need a quick solution to solve one individual regulation. They need a strong framework to prepare them for and support all change that is to come.

Metastorm Teams with Forrester to Shed Light on EA & BPM Disconnect Are BPM and EA aligned in your organization? On September...
Financial compliance at the process level In the new presidential administration, it is intended that new...
Change is Necessary – But Can Your Organization Handle It? Having trouble managing ongoing business transformation projects – large or...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Insights from OpenText: What Metastorm Brings to the Company

Lubor Ptacek — Tue, 22 Feb 2011 14:08:43 +0000

OpenText announced Friday the completion of the Metastorm acquisition. We do many acquisitions at OpenText but this particular acquisition is very interesting for a multitude of reasons. Metastorm is the leader in business process management (BPM) which is a discipline quite related to enterprise content management (ECM). In fact, enterprise content management has long included a process-centric category of solutions called transactional content management (TCM). Kyle McNabb and Connie Moore from Forrester were probably first to articulate this category in their groundbreaking 2005 report titled Transactional, Business, And Persuasive Content: A Better Way To Look At Enterprise Content.

The TCM solutions deal with optimization of business processes that involve content. In fact, at least half of all business processes involve content: a received fax, scanned paper, or submitted form. The Metastorm acquisition will allow OpenText to significantly raise the bar when it comes to managing content-related processes. I am not talking just about the technology but also about market presence, reputation, number of R&D engineers as well as expertise in sales and marketing.

Many business processes that customers optimize using Metastorm software do not involve content. This market is very interesting for OpenText as well. According to Gartner, the BPM market grew by 15% in 2009. Obviously, that represents a great growth opportunity for OpenText, no matter if the solutions are content-centric or process-centric. And Metastorm is a leader in BPM according to Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Business Process Management Suites.

On top of that, Metastorm adds two other product areas to OpenText’s portfolio: business process analysis (BPA) and enterprise architecture (EA). Metastorm is a leader both areas – according to their respective Magic Quadrants. Just the fact that each of the areas has a Magic Quadrant suggests that these are separate, albeit very related, substantial markets and technologies – which when combined with BPM allow organizations to define strategy, analyze change and automate business processes to make better decisions. And given that Metastorm is a leader in three different spaces, the company and its solutions are a very compelling addition to the OpenText portfolio. You can read insights from one of my colleagues on the synergies he sees with Metastorm ProVision here.

A particularly interesting trend emerged in the last year or two – Case Management. Case management is a powerful way of organizing all the case-related documentation and process optimization capabilities involved in managing a case. A case can be anything from lawsuits to government grant proposals to insurance claims. And while OpenText already has had a case management offering for a couple of years, this is an area of focus today and it is likely that some of the BPM, BPA or EA capabilities from Metastorm will find their way into OpenText’s case management offering. Note: this is my take at the acquisition and not an official OpenText roadmap. Read the press release and listen to the included podcast if you want the official information.

The press release discussed how Metastorm adds to OpenText’s portfolio in the Microsoft ecosystem. The ecosystem value proposition is a big part of OpenText’s strategy – the company partners with Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP and offers solutions for customers in all three of these ecosystems. And since Metastorm’s software is very friendly to the Microsoft stack and it does have existing integration with SharePoint, it is a natural fit. SharePoint is not used for process optimization today – Metastorm is a key partner of Microsoft for this purpose. This now becomes a natural addition to the portfolio of solutions we can offer to customers with significant investments in Microsoft technologies.

OpenText builds software and acquires companies to solve customer problems that relate to content. This is what we do and how we stay ahead of the curve. With all the assets and talent that Metastorm brings, this is a particularly exciting acquisition that opens up a whole new world of possibilities.

____________________

Lubor Ptacek joined OpenText in 2008 and as Vice President of Product Marketing he is responsible for all product marketing activities for the entire suite of OpenText enterprise content management products. His responsibilities range from messaging and market intelligence to analyst and public relations. With 20 years of experience in the enterprise software industry, Lubor has worked in a variety of positions in marketing, product marketing, and product management. Prior to joining OpenText, Lubor held various roles at EMC, Documentum, Vignette, and Novell. Currently, he also serves on the Board of Directors for the Association of Information and Image Management (AIIM).

Lubor holds a computer science degree from Technical University Ilmenau in Germany and has an MBA from Santa Clara University in California.

Let’s Practice What We Preach Today, OpenText announced it has completed the acquisition of Metastorm. ...
We’re excited to launch the Metastorm News Blog Hello! Welcome to the Metastorm news blog. On this site,...
BPM for Quality – Insurance Exec Shares Insights Who does not want to improve quality within their organization? ...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Forest Labs Chooses Metastorm for Business Improvement!

Process Matters Blogger — Wed, 02 Feb 2011 14:21:22 +0000

Today, Metastorm announced that Forest Laboratories has selected Metastorm’s enterprise software suite for its business process improvement initiatives. Forest has selected several business processes for analysis and automation – including a strategic initiative to model, analyze and automate business processes related to Aggregate Spend Management and compliance with the U.S. Federal Physician Payments Sunshine Act. Forest Labs is also working with Metastorm’s Professional Services team to establish a Process Center of Excellence to help govern process improvement initiatives across the organization.

Metastorm has a track record of success in the Life Sciences industry, helping some of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies— including Allergan, AmerisourceBergen and PfizerWyeth—understand, improve and automate their business practices to prepare and respond to new regulations and competitor innovation.

For more information, check out our Life Science solution page, where you can download Metastorm’s Aggregate Spend Management overview, request a demo, and watch an onDemand webinar.

Metastorm Customers Speak Out on Business Process Improvement Its back! Today Metastorm reveals real-world insights from organizations speaking...
BPM & BOTOX: How Allergan Battled Compliance Burdens Last September, as you probably remember, Allergan reached a $600M...
AmerisourceBergen Recognized for Business Process Improvement Initiatives Metastorm customers are continuing to receive tons of recognition for...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Logica: Creating an Information Sharing Environment

Process Matters Blogger — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 13:24:45 +0000

At Metastorm, we strive to build and nurture successful relationships with our customers and partners, while providing them with innovative, market leading software to meet their unique business needs. In our newest season of the Metastorm Customers Speak Out video testimonial series, Logica, a business process outsourcing (BPO) company, shares how it is using business process management and business process analysis software to engage clients, create stronger, deeper connections, and establish an information sharing environment between the business and customer.

Norman Baldwin, global BPO operations director for Logica, discusses how Metastorm solutions have helped Logica generate a formal focus on organizational and customer success. When selecting a business process analysis and business process management vendor, Logica was looking for software that fostered an openness culture between their employees and clients. Baldwin explains that Metastorm software has allowed them to deliver their services in an economic, effective and efficient way. Metastorm software also enables Logica to go back and evaluate what they do, and ensure that they are doing it in the best ways possible, Baldwin says.

The synergies between BPM and BPO are obvious. BPO providers must be “experts” in business process excellence in order to provide world-class outsourcing to their customers. Metastorm is unique in its ability to provide not only the business process management software foundation, but also business architecture and business process analysis software that gives BPO providers the ability to map out a unique strategy and business process improvement program for each customer.

All 38 episodes of the Metastorm Customers Speak Out video testimonial series can be watched on the MetastormMedia YouTube channel or on the Metastorm customer testimonial page. The customer testimonials are also available on iTunes, by subscribing to the Metastorm iTunes Podcast. If you are interested in learning more about our partner success, visit the Metastorm partner page.

Metastorm Customers Speak Out on Business Process Improvement Its back! Today Metastorm reveals real-world insights from organizations speaking...
Allergan: Business Process Initiatives as an Investment for Long-Term Goals Pharmaceutical companies have found ease and success in deploying Metastorm...
Metastorm Continues Success in Global Government Today Metastorm announced that our partner, iOctane, and the New...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.