February might be the shortest month of the year, but that’s not holding us back. Our calendar this month is jam-packed with informative webinars on a variety of topics around business process management (BPM) and enterprise architecture (EA). Check out the list below to see what we have to offer and be sure to register!

Communicating in the Language of Business
Thursday, February 9, 2012
11:00AM-12:00PM EST

It’s no secret that companies are looking to their enterprise architecture teams to increase business agility, cut costs, streamline operations and improve customer service. In this webinar, Sandra Moran, Director, Product Marketing for OpenText BPS will illustrate how enterprise architects can leverage customizable business performance intelligence dashboards to better demonstrate to both business and IT leaders the deeper value you can achieve from your EA investments. For more details and to register, click here.

Financial Services Webinar Series: Paperless Funding
Wednesday, February 15, 2012
11:00AM-12:00PM EST

In this 30 minute demo Brett Kovach, Senior Solution Consultant for OpenText BPS will show you how banks and major automotive and equipment financing organizations improved their lease and loan origination with three simple best practices for BPM. For more details and to register, click here.

Unlock the Secrets of BPM ROI: Insightful Study from Forrester Research
Tuesday, February 21, 2012
11:00AM-12:00PM EST

In the third installment of our Getting Started with BPM series, Clay Richardson, Senior Analyst, Forrester Research, Nathaniel Palmer, Editor-in-Chief of BPM.com, and Donna Tellam, BPM Solutions Director, User Experience Specialist, OpenText BPS will share proven strategies for BPM success. Learn from real-world examples of the challenges organizations face with BPM and how they’ve managed to overcome them. We encourage you to watch the first two installments, Practical Approach to Get Started with Process Improvement and Building the Right Team to Drive Process Improvement. For more details and to register, click here.

New Matter Intake Meets the iPhone
Wednesday, February 22, 2012
11:00AM-12:00PM EST

Gone are the days of being chained to your desk! Today, law firms can leverage mobile BPM capabilities — on the go — to expedite critical processes – such as new matter intake.  Mobile BPM keeps processes moving, regardless of the lawyer’s location. Join Keith Levin, Legal Sales Manager for OpenText BPS and Kristian Uggla, Legal Solutions Engineer for OpenText BPS, as they explain how OpenText’s new mobile BPM capabilities can increase your agility and reduce your time to value. For more details and to register, click here.

If you can’t make it to one of these webinars, don’t worry! We’ll have the recording onDemand so that you can watch it whenever you have the time. You can access the recordings, here.

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There is nothing like a great story to  illustrate some of the ways enterprise architecture initiatives are demonstrating value to the business. I hope you’ll take a few minutes to read the article because it highlights some of the specific ways Chubb has organized its team as well as  the company’s commitment to make architecture less about the process and more about adding value to actual business.

The result?

• A comprehensive partnership between IT and the lines of business that supports more effective decision making;
• Faster time to market;
• The ability to leverage sharable components, practices, technologies, and process across their federated organization.

Through this process they achieved real savings – like the $600,000 in 2010 just by identifying and then redistributing unused software licenses.

Not covered in this story is Chubb’s use of both enterprise architecture tools and business process management technology to support the operationalization of the gaps in business performance that can be automated and improved with business process management. You can read more about EA and BPM working together by downloading this Gartner Whitepaper.

I’ll be back soon with more on the how the evolution of EA and BPA are impacting the tools provided to address the needs of architects.

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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.

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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!

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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.

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To bring life to those enterprise aspirations, business and technology leaders should look to 2012 as a year to continue improving their collaborative efforts to achieve business change. There are no indications that the new year will bring any relief from the increasing pace of technology and business change, nor the increasing demands from more educated and socially connected customers. 2011 continued the trend toward business driving IT and 2012 offers the opportunity to make this shift pay off for organizations. Many organizations who are focused on bridging the gap between business and IT groups will achieve far more benefits if they fuse these two groups  into business teams working collaboratively to drive transformations.

So, what does 2012 have in store for EA teams?

In its yearly series, Gartner Inc. recently predicted that many organizations will begin to leverage EA tools to drive business value and impact. According to the report, “Gartner Predicts: Opportunities for EA to Lead Business Transformation in Turbulent Times,” December 1, 2011, Phillip Allega, Betsy Burton, et all. “EA practitioners will begin to shift their focus to begin to think about their role differently and, in many cases, employ a new way of working.” With only 40% of EA programs worldwide reporting to IT, EA’s focus must shift from IT and operations to delivery of demonstrable business value.

As I read through the report, I found the following assumptions particularly interesting.

The managed diversity approach
“By 2015, 25% of Global 1000 organizations will produce cohesive EA artifacts that support the diversity of complex business ecosystems.”

When undergoing a business transformation initiative, organizations must account for global operational diversity. According to the report, “the managed diversity style defines choices or options for what projects or customers can leverage without defining only strict, rigid standards. Managed diversity does not mean that there are no standards, but rather that EA planning achieves a balance between the need for a set of standards that help control costs and the need for a diversity of solutions to increase innovation, business growth and competitive advantage across locations that the organization operates in.”

Properly executed, EA can help organizations achieve the delicate balance of identifying and propagating best practices, maximizing technology investments, ensuring compliance with local regulatory bodies, and risk reduction with the flexibility to adapt business systems to compete in global markets. With flexible but defined guardrails, organizations typically find a significant increased speed in their ability to execute when teams are empowered to leverage the elements they need with the guidance  to avoid critical mistakes.

Working together
“By year-end 2014, 50% of Global 1000 organizations will support EA as a collaborative business and IT effort.”

Successful organizations have already started moving their EA teams  out of IT and into the business. Gartner’s survey results indicate that while 68% of EA programs in the US report to the IT organization this picture is already considerably different worldwide. China, who primarily looks to EA for business transformation initiatives, reports to business leadership 76% of the time. This shift in reporting relationships naturally drives changes in the focus and composition of project teams. The complementary nature of skills, perspectives and insights from enterprise architects and business people  can combine to  produce dramatically better results. Organizations cannot drive business growth without carefully selecting the members of the project team.

I particularly appreciated Gartner’s caution, “do not assume that just because business leaders are collaborating and engaging in EA, the effort will be “business strategy driven.” Executive leadership should be mindful that they have defined a clear business strategy that includes actionable directives to provide the context in which these collaborative teams can drive execution.

Increased focus on the decision process
“Through year-end 2014, 60% of organizations will continue to focus EA on assurance, rather than governance.”

According to the report, there are two key challenges when implementing EA governance: 1) they lack training and critical understanding of the topic, and 2) they focus exclusively on control and assurance. This is a problem because EA practitioners often lack an understanding of how the business uses information to makes business decisions. Quite honestly, it is easier to focus on control and standardization because this space is more comfortable for individuals with a technical background. Increasing collaboration between IT and business can be part of this solution but only if architects dig deeper to understand the decision process, the relative value of investment priorities in the context of the business strategy and which standards provide value to the organization. This level of understanding requires more than collaboration between the groups.  It requires a true respect and commitment to understanding how the organization defines and drives business value and how they can then become a part of driving that change.

What is your take on Gartner’s predictions for EA this year? Do you see your EA team driving or reacting to these predicted trends?  Will this be your year to deliver strategic business value? Leave your comments below and we can discuss.

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BPM Addresses Supply Chain Priorities
If your organization competes on the basis of its supply chain then you’ve probably watched with interest the annual Top 25 Supply Chain report from Gartner Research. I follow this report closely each year and have written about it for CMSWire where I’ve shared some case study examples in the past. This year there were a few surprises in the list but it mostly consisted of “old favorites,” including Apple, Dell, P&G, Wal-Mart, Coca-Cola, PepsiCo and Microsoft. Four key themes emerged for this year’s leaders – including how they deal with volatility, their approaches to value chain network integration, their focus on sustainable execution and their abilities to orchestrate. Clearly, BPM and business architecture disciplines and technology are useful to address all of these key supply chain themes.

Supply Chain, Classic
It is no surprise then that one of the stories that interested me and many others at last week’s User Summit was the outstanding presentation by Ted Bozarth, a Business Consultant with Coca-Cola Bottling Company.

Ted is a member of the Enterprise Services Group responsible for development of business transformation methodology, co-leading Coke’s Enterprise Architecture effort and providing business consulting services to the Supply Chain area of the business. Ted has impeccable credentials including Project Management certification, a Six Sigma Blackbelt (in the interests of full disclosure, I am a recovering Greenbelt) and a BS in Supply Chain Management from Michigan State University.

His current focus within ProVision is modeling business strategy and linking it to the business architecture (processes, facilities, metrics, etc.) to enable strategy-driven business transformation. This ProVision activity is critical to Coca-Cola Bottling who owns and operates five production centers and 47 distribution centers throughout nine states, operating a direct store delivery (DSD) supply chain model, and sells four cases of beverages per second, including Coca-Cola Classic in 22 different packages or case sizes. Work to date includes: Product Lifecycle Management (PLM), Material Flow to Consumer, Supply Chain Metrics Modeling, Point of Sale Materials Management, Transportation Brokerage Management, and Supply Chain Strategy.

Clearly Ted and his team are using ProVision to improve some classic supply chain areas and for a Classic product! I look forward to hearing more from him as he and his team progress in their transformation efforts.

Supply Chain, Country
Perhaps less expected but equally interesting to me was the conversation I had over breakfast last Wednesday during the User Summit with Cliff Nottingham of the US Army Security Assistance Command – “The Army’s Face to the World.” His eCollaboration business process application is serving the country well in support of the USASAC mission to implement Foreign Military Sales (FMS) of defense articles and services to eligible foreign governments.

And lest we think the supply chain is inconsequential to the mission, keep in mind that USASAC is responsible for life cycle management of FMS cases, from pre-letter of request, development, and execution, to closure. The command manages more than 4,655 FMS cases valued at more than $121 billion. Each sale of equipment to overseas customers comprises the same “total package” of quality materiel, spare parts, training, publications, technical documentation, maintenance support, and other services that AMC provides to U.S. Army units. Additionally, each sale is made in accordance with the policies and strategic interests of the U.S. government and materiel is either shipped from U.S. government stocks or from production – their goal is to field a total package and promote self-sufficiency.

We often hear about the public sector interest in learning from and adopting best commercial practices. I think the USASAC story is a great example of where the private sector could learn much about managing and improving their financial and product supply chain from government!

I’d be interested in hearing more stories about using business process and case management to improve supply chains – whether classic or country. I definitely see this as an area that is only increasing in importance in the face of our current economic and market challenges.

___________________________
About Deb Miller
Deb Miller is Director of Market Development, Business Process Solutions for OpenText. Her work focuses on industry strategies for business process improvement. Her career includes more than 20 years of global industry experience with GE. You can read more of Deb’s writings at http://DebsG360.wordpress.com/ and follow her @DebsG360 on Twitter.

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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!

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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!

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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.

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With multiple applications supporting a variety of systems and processes, information becomes dispersed across several databases, making it extremely difficult for users to access the information that they need in a timely and efficient manner. Organizations often do not know what applications they own, and have little insight into the value they bring to the company, how much they cost to maintain, and who uses them. To further complicate this issue, Gartner reports that by 2015, 60% of new business application purchase decisions will be made outside of IT¹.

As you look to maximize your technology investments, the following guidelines can help you better understand what applications your business owns and needs:

1.  Collect information about your current portfolio
One of the largest problems when building an application portfolio management (APM) repository begins within the initial phases of collecting information. Organizations don’t always know what they have. To get your APM project going, it takes a champion at the executive level to bring together different areas of the business to identify, understand and examine each individual application and what business process and capabilities it supports. According to Gartner, a top-down approach allows you to collect the highest level of information for each application, which allows you to undergo a quick assessment of the balance of value to cost and risk for each application. From there you can group allocations according to their specific characteristics².

2.  Facilitate collaboration between business and IT
Often, IT drives an APM initiative either for IT chargeback purposes, or to conduct maintenance impact analysis, and may be viewed as having little interest in supporting the business’ interests. On the other hand, the business often advocates for APM to identifying where they could leverage an existing application to save a capital investment required to support a new business capabilities, unaware of the impact it might have on IT. The only way APM will be successful is if the two groups collaborate and work together to meet both requirements and viewpoints. Together, business and IT can take into account their experience and collective knowledge to identify, understand and analyze the value and impact each application has across the business.

3.  Don’t try to boil the ocean
Organizations tend to think that they need to have a complete application portfolio before they can see value from the investment. This is not the case. Companies are more successful if they select a business unit, focus on the applications within that domain, and implement reports and dashboards that illustrate the business value. Your team can leverage early success demonstrating value to the company and then move on to improve other areas of the business. 

4.  Establish visibility into your processes
The best APM solution complements your organization’s enterprise architecture initiatives. Taking a business capabilities-oriented approach allows you to prioritize the various needs of existing applications, such as maintenance, training and cost. Embedding your APM solution into your enterprise architecture framework allows you to establish clear visibility into your process. An excellent APM solution, built on an enterprise architecture platform, gives you the ability to understand – all the way down to the business process level – what it takes to retire a system with minimal disruption to operations.

5.  Build a repository of APM information
As your application portfolio matures, more and more meaningful data should not only be collected, but maintained. A repository of data can be extremely valuable when making large-scale business decisions. With extensive information about your applications in one central location, executives are able to make smart, creative decisions that result in huge bottom line savings.

Enterprise collaboration and executive sponsorship is the foundation for a powerful APM solution. It is essential that you communicate with knowledge workers across your business to really understand the value and role each application brings to the success of your organization. APM needs to be a cooperative effort between both business and IT. A champion from the executive level can help build the case for fostering collaboration between business and IT. 

____________________________

¹Gartner, Predicts 2011: Aligning Enterprise Business Applications to Drive Business Outcomes, November 2010.
²Gartner, Planning for Application Overhauls: Start From the Top With APM, July 2010.

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Now, more than ever, consumers have become highly critical and skeptical of financial services firms. People want assurance and move visibility into the operations, fees and services offered to them. To gain back customer trust and loyalty – while driving greater profitability, growth and agility – you need to focus on how your organization will address three key areas.

Three BIG topics in financial services you need to pay attention to, right now:

The Compliance Challenge
In the world of regulations like Sarbanes-Oxley, Basel II code, MiFID, etc., you need a solid platform in place that supports current regulations – but more importantly, creates an environment in which adaptability is a fundamental component. New, stricter regulations are knocking on the door. To avoid a significant drain on resources, money, and time, it’s critical that you invest in a tool that enables you to achieve compliance on a long-term basis without having to significantly alter your operational systems. Business process management (BPM) can help financial services companies define, automate and standardize processes to be both auditable and consistent. By leveraging the existing underlying systems, and providing a more agile platform that is integrated with them but enables control and automation across systems and departments, you are able to implement changes in a fraction of the time you could with legacy systems. Most regulatory mandates require you to provide a wealth of information and audit trails. With BPM, you can track, monitor, and report on critical processes to not only comply with federal regulations, but better improve current processes to drive enterprise-wide efficiency and profitability.

Better Customer Experience
No new customer wants to spend weeks (and even months) getting their account started. The fact of the matter is, in many financial service companies customers go through a long, rigorous process to open their account – all of which is caused by ineffective, poorly structured new client on-boarding processes. One of our customers, Cornerstone Tax Advisors, had an extensive, paper-based on-boarding process, and as a result the time between the first client interaction and the conclusion of the contract ranged from 11-20 months! However, by using Metastorm BPM, the company was able to control and monitor in-bound workflow with ease, visualize its operational positions, and easily design, model, and change its new client on-boarding processes – radically improving the customer experience, and allowing the company to bring on new clients better and faster.

Smart Consolidation
Over the past few years, we have seen a significant amount of consolidation within the financial services industry. The reason for this is simple – companies want to expand their portfolio, gain more market share, increase their customer base and achieve higher profitability. Unfortunately, almost half of the companies that undergo a merger or acquisition do not achieve the original goals. This is largely due to not having clear objectives – that take into account the organizational structure – to meet the strategic goals of the acquisition. An enterprise architecture tool can help you understand the people, processes, systems and technologies within both companies. Taking it a step further, with an enterprise architecture tool you can analyze, model and simulate the optimal way for these processes to merge together – producing the best business structure possible for your organization.

As the world recovers from the economic crisis it is imperative that you have all the resources to make well-informed business decisions. You need to know what capabilities and assets you have and the best way to manage and utilize them to remain a viable competitor in this ever-changing marketplace. To find out more information about Metastorm’s financial services solutions, visit our financial services solution page.

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The conference served to reinforce what we are seeing and what many of you who are involved in enterprise architecture (from the business or IT side) are likely experiencing – that EA continues to transform and that the EA role is becoming a critical part of developing business strategy. In fact, according to Gartner, five years from now, 30% of EA efforts will be supported as a collaboration between business and IT – an increase of more than 20% from early 2011.This evolution demands new approaches to connecting with larger business ecosystems. This is the key to driving improved business performance. 

As EA gains visibility as key a driver of business performance, enterprise architects must be able to demonstrate how EA efforts and initiatives deliver value to the business. According to Gartner analyst Betsy Burton (in her keynote “You’ve Got a Seat at The Table: Now What?”), a common mistake architects and IT people make is to describe the “business value” in terms of the capabilities or results of EA, rather than basing it on a measurable value of EA’s impact to the business (business outcomes). EA teams must be able to articulate both EA capabilities and business outcomes, but measure the value of EA based on the impact to the business. To do this, EA’s must know and reflect the CEO’s top priorities.

To achieve business outcomes and to drive business change, EA value must be collaboratively developed and supported within the context of the business direction, strategy and future vision.

Below are a few conference sessions where IT and the business worked collaboratively to achieve positive and successful business outcomes.

United Airlines Case Study
United Airlines, a Metastorm customer, presented to a packed audience on how business and IT are working together and leveraging enterprise architecture and Metastorm ProVision to identify and streamline critical processes in the wake of the recent United/Continental merger to deliver increased value for both business and IT. 

PG&E Case Study
Another Metastorm customer, Pacific Gas and Electric Company ( PG&E), shared their vision of how a customer-centric capability and process architecture enables projects to deliver holistic enterprise business solutions. The framework is valuable input for their IT partners as they build the infrastructure that supports business processes. The case study discussed PG&E’s framework approach, process management maturity, and how they are using information technology delivery methodologies to work collaboratively with other users.  

BPM – The Catalyst to Deliver Outcomes
In addition to end user case studies, several Gartner analysts presented compelling presentations. One that we found particularly insightful and relevant was Elise Olding’s session on the relationship between BPM and EA. During her presentation, Elise identified where the synergies between BPM and EA lie, and discussed how successful enterprises that understand how EA and BPM work together are achieving powerful results. “BPM delivers proven value and executes on EA strategy. When EA and BPM work together, it is a winning combination that connects strategy with results.”

We were pleased to see many Metastorm customers at the event and hope you found the event worthwhile. Thank you to those of you who stopped by to see us at the Metastorm booth. For those of you who were not able to attend the conference, we will leave you with some words of wisdom and practical advice from Tom Peters:

1.)  Have lunch with your colleagues – it’s often the best way to solve a lot of problems in business.
2.)  Say “thank you” often, it lets people know you value and appreciate their contributions and will make them want to help you in the future.
3.)  Execution is strategy — it’s all about the people and the doing, not the talking and the theory.

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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

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Gartner Keynote: You’ve Got a Seat at the Table: Now What?
As an architect, one of your hardest challenges is to determine how to focus, position, and communicate the business value of enterprise architecture. In this keynote address, Betsy Burton, VP Distinguished Analyst for Gartner will revisit the value of EA and explore the best practices for how you can deliver, demonstrate and drive true business value across your organization.

United Airlines Flies on Enterprise Architecture
Discover how United Airlines uses Metastorm ProVision to analyze, understand and transform its organizational operations. Diana Krohn, Sr. Enterprise Architect for United Airlines and Diane LeBeau, Director of Business Architecture for United Airlines will discuss how United is leveraging enterprise architecture to establish the foundational elements of a business architecture practice, forge business partnerships, create engagement patterns, and build a durable business model repository.

Effective Enterprise Architecture Governance Plays Several Roles in IT Governance
How do you effectively connect strategy to execution? In this session, Julie Short, Research Director for Gartner, will discuss: why EA governance is a critical component in linking business and IT, what is the nature of EA governance, and the best practices that make EA governance effective.

Rapid-Fire: Architecting for the Unknown
Things happen and if you’re not prepared, change can be detrimental to your organization. Betsy Burton will explain how enterprise architects can better prepare for unexpected change and shift their strategic thinking in a way that allows them to seek, model and adapt to new events by leveraging technology, information, people and processes.

PG&E – The Importance of Business Capability and Process Mapping Maturity
Business capability and process mapping are critical components in building a strong, cohesive infrastructure to support your business processes. Metastorm customer, Matthew Duncan, Senior Project Manager for Pacific Gas and Electric Company, will share PG&E’s vision for creating a customer-centric capability and process architecture enabling projects to deliver holistic enterprise business solutions.

BPM – The Catalyst to Deliver Outcomes
It is becoming increasingly clear that EA and business process management (BPM) are inherently and necessarily linked to one another. In this session, Elise Olding, Research Director for Gartner, will cover everything you need to know about BPM and how successful organizations today are achieving valuable results from leveraging the power combination of EA and BPM.

Transforming Business Process and Technology
To be a successful consumer-driven organization today, you must focus on how you can get customer service, business processes, metrics and technology to work together to achieve a target state roadmap. Hear directly from Metastorm customer, Bill Riordan, Global Business Process Manager for HP, about how HP was able to radically transform its customer service operations. Before you go, check out this short video highlighting how HP was able to identify and analyze over 1,500 disparate global processes and improve and consolidate them into 100 universal processes across 132 different countries! 

Enterprise Business Architecture: Uniting Business and IT
Every organization wants to get business and IT on the same page. And, leading organizations know that a critical aspect of uniting these two groups comes from understanding how to leverage enterprise business architecture in a way that engages business leaders. In this session, Betsy Burton will discuss the value of supporting an enterprise business architecture and how organizations can better understand the impact change makes on the people, process, information and technology within their organization.

This year, Gartner is offering tons of valuable opportunities for you to expand your knowledge of enterprise architecture, hear directly from your peers about their success in implementing EA programs and engage in dialogue about the future of EA. Visit their website today to register for any of these sessions or explore other sessions they’re offering.

Be sure to stop by Metastorm’s booth (Booth #1) to view a product demonstration or speak to a representative. If you’d like to schedule a meeting during the conference, stop by the 1:1 scheduling booth or contact Wendy Werve, Director, Analyst Relations for Metastorm at wwerve@opentext.com .

Don’t forget to follow us on twitter @Metastorm and use the event hashtag #GartnerEA.

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