Because Process Matters » IT Spending

City of Norfolk Improves Citizen Service Despite Lean Times

Metastorm PR — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 14:15:54 +0000

CivSource, a premiere publication writing about technology and policy issues facing state and local governments in the United States, recently wrote a detailed story on Metastorm customer City of Norfolk, VA. CivSource editor Jeff Smith met with and interviewed Mary White, Norfolk’s leader in business process automation, at the recently concluded 2010 Metastorm Global User Conference. White told Smith that given the widespread budget crunch at the state and local government level, now is a perfect time to improve government services and efficiency by leveraging business process management (BPM) tools.

The article goes on to describe in some specific detail how BPM has helped Norfolk, VA maintain, and often enhance, service levels, meeting increased citizen expecations despite budget cuts.

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CIOs: have you married business and IT yet?

Process Matters Blogger — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 13:46:53 +0000

Yesterday the CIO Agenda blog on Computer Business Review featured a post, CIOs must prepare for the ‘new normal’ that discusses a recent report from McKinsey Quarterly, Time to Raise the CIO’s Game: A Call to Action for European Companies.

Another interesting, related post was featured earlier this week on CIO.com – BPM is the CIO route to CEO.

Both posts highlight one common theme— Businesses will not be successful if they do not align technology with the business—CIO goals with CEO goals, strategy with execution.

The Computer Business Review post cites key objectives that CIOs must achieve in order to succeed in today’s uncertain business environment. First, align business with IT to improve collaboration and enhance performance of the overall organization and second, mind the performance gap to make sure you’re getting the most out of your IT spending.

The CIO.com post points out that business process management (BPM) is the very tool that enables this alignment and states that good BPM projects represent the perfect example of business and IT together “working towards efficiency, increased margins, new markets and an improved product.”

BPM technology certainly offers value that far exceeds its costs—and it is virtually guaranteed that both business and IT will benefit from the investment.

Want to know more? Check out this complimentary Gartner Research Report and Metastorm whitepaper, Snapshot on Increasing IT Value.

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Invest in Enterprise Architecture now

Metastorm PR — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 12:29:24 +0000

A recent video from analyst firm Gartner highlights the importance of aligning strategy with execution to survive and thrive in today’s challenging economic environment and beyond.

According to Dave Aron, vice president and research director in Gartner’s CIO research group, “CIOs are having to focus on all the different areas of business improvement, not just efficiency. That includes risk management, effectiveness and growth.”

Aron emphasizes that strategy is not a “luxury” for prosperous times. It is, in fact, critical now for businesses to deploy innovative IT solutions that model, analyze, and improve enterprise initiatives—enabling companies to harvest functionality and agility.

Enterprise Architecture (EA) does exactly that—offering today’s corporations a value proposition that essentially pays for itself in return on investment. Those that invest in Enterprise Architecture today are not only maximizing business value in the short-term, but also ensuring their competitive advantage and prosperity in the long-term.

Metastorm ProVision® is an industry leading EA solution that allows you to comprehensively discover and model your Business Strategy, Business Architecture and Information Architecture (applications, organization, systems and more) and then systematically and comprehensively plan changes to the enterprise to optimize business performance.

Learn how a leading oil and gas company deployed Metastorm ProVision to improve control over its fuel delivery process, get greater visibility into its retail network and achieve a significant decrease in human errors.

Learn more about Metastorm ProVision.

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Agile business processes for a changing environment

Metastorm PR — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 15:25:29 +0000

These days organizations both large and small must be cognizant of external forces that can impact their business. An environmental disaster could play havoc on supply chains. A disease pandemic could have a significant impact on the demand for related healthcare products. A new administration could also bring new regulations impacting existing business processes, while the health of the global financial markets could play havoc on interest rates and lending practices. Does any of this sound familiar?

As quickly as business operations move today, so does the changing external factors that impacts those business processes. The problem is that many companies make the mistake of often designing business processes in isolation, with little to no foresight given to external and environmental variations that have a significant impact.

It’s essential that process modeling and design consider these contextual external variables that have an impact on operations. Reacting quickly requires a closed-loop process modeling and execution platform. It requires the ability to proactively model business processes, make changes in assumptions as required and re-model the results. Being able to quickly and directly affect findings to re-engineer or execute new processes leads to greater enterprise agility, collaboration and understanding of business needs.

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Communicating the business value of IT

Metastorm PR — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 12:13:29 +0000

Many CIOs and IT managers face a common challenge to communicate how an IT project will help the company achieve its business goals. A recent article in CIO Insight lists 10 ways CIOs Can Communicate IT Business Value. These tips are from a recent Forrester report titled, “Value-Based Communication Boosts Business’ Perception of IT.”

The list can be summarized into the following tips:

• Link internal value of IT to business activities
• Personally position IT value
• Add business value to IT work with other organizations

For a BPM or EA project, these tips can certainly come in handy to successfully communicate the value of IT to a CEO. A Metastorm whitepaper titled, “Building a Case for BPM,” discusses at length how business or IT managers can build the credible business case needed to get upfront sponsorship and funding.

The whitepaper provides a repeatable framework for developing a business case for new or continued justification of BPM projects — with the objective being to help accelerate the startup time and enable more organizations to realize success from BPM. In times when just about any organizational cost needs to be justified, the recent insight from Forrester and the Metastorm whitepaper are helpful resources for CIOs or IT managers looking to build a strong case for their next BPM or EA project.

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IT on an upturn

Metastorm PR — Wed, 27 May 2009 12:52:21 +0000

A recent article in CIO revealed some interesting findings in regards to post-recession technology investments. Gary Beach, publisher of CIO, recently appeared on CNBC “Squawk on the Street,” to discuss how much CEOs value technology investments.

To prepare for the show, he interviewed 25 CIOs and asked, “on a scale of one to 10 – where one says your CEO plans to look at technology investments as a cost to be managed or cut when the recession ends and 10 is where the CEO plans to look to tech investment as a key investment area when the recession ends – where does your CEO sit?”

The average answer Beach received was 8.5 – a testament to his belief that we are in the most exciting era of technology.

And though these investments can be hardware, software or anything in between – IT is undoubtedly on the brink of positive change. At the recent MIT Sloan CIO Symposium, a number of CIOs discussed the forecast of IT. The Wall Street Journal reports that many CIOs agreed the reconstruction of business IT infrastructure is more urgent now because of the economy’s troubles.

While the economy has forced a number of executives to ponder their technology investments for the road ahead, it is comforting to know that a number of CIOs do not underestimate its importance and value in an organization.

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From projects large to small, BPM fits all

Metastorm PR — Wed, 06 May 2009 12:13:38 +0000

As we discussed last week, the Metastorm survey revealed some insightful findings from users of Metastorm software from organizations around the world as they navigate their IT decisions around the recession. When asked about return on investment (ROI), the majority of respondents cited an average ROI from each Metastorm software project to be between 16-30 percent, with some projects delivering a return of more than 100 percent.

And while some CIOs may worry that selecting a cost-efficient IT project could impair its long-term value, business process management (BPM) offers the best of both worlds: cost savings plus agility and business value. As Jim Sinur, analyst with Gartner, notes in his recent blog post, BPM is “an activity that not only cuts costs for survival, [it] can also grow value simultaneously.”

A BPM project does not need to be grandiose for companies to achieve these results. Sinur notes, “The numbers I have consistently seen for BPM efforts are in the 15 percent+ ROI arena with implementation schedules measured in weeks and months; not years.” When implemented on a smaller scale, a BPM project has the potential to increase efficiencies and ROI and achieve greater business value in the short-term – in most cases these results are achieved within the first year of implementation.

Sinur concludes, “I keep listening for innovative and high value BPM efforts and have not been disappointed.”

Stay tuned to the blog for case study examples of Metastorm customers that can attest to the cost savings and efficiency benefits realized from their own BPM projects.

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Building a business case for BPM

Metastorm PR — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 13:47:04 +0000

Business Process Management is gaining in popularity because, with a relatively low investment in technology resources, companies can realize significant gains in process efficiency, productivity, control, cost savings and business agility. But unfortunately a large number of BPM projects fail to launch at all due to the inability of business or IT managers to build the credible business case needed to get upfront sponsorship and funding.

Three fundamental characteristics of BPM make this technology a game changer:

BPM is Incremental. One of the core advantages of BPM is that it need not require you to conquer all problems at once in order to deliver results. Rather, projects can start small and still make a large impact.
BPM is Measurable. BPM is unique among technology-based initiatives in its ability to incorporate metrics and measurement parameters at the outset of the project and to automatically capture and track them along the way.
BPM is Repeatable. BPM presents a compound benefit where the skill set and competencies gained from the first process deployed can be leveraged to automate and improve multiple processes throughout the organization for years to come.

Common pitfalls to avoid:

While BPM projects are often executed as discrete initiatives, it is also critical to develop a repeatable methodology to evaluate and deploy processes across the enterprise. Without a true long-term view, BPM projects can remain siloed within an organization and not meet long-term enterprise needs.
Ensure project buy-in from the executive level. BPM projects fail to realize their potential without executive sponsorship. Some of that ties back to point number one, to establish a long-term view of BPM projects.
Falling into the trap of “analysis paralysis” during process definition. BPM technology is intentionally architected to be flexible and allow for rapid process change, so if the process isn’t ideal it can always be changed later.
Neglecting stakeholders –business process owners and even end users – when validating process designs.

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