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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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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With a powerful enterprise architecture system in place, a variety of groups can lead EA initiatives. For instance, one of our customers is a global financial services company who is one of the largest credit card issuers in the United States. To support its global operations, the organization has 10 different mainframes located throughout the world that are responsible for running the company’s complex business applications.

Recognizing the amount of money and time spent maintaining these mainframes, the IT department decided they needed to consolidate and move the mainframes to a more centralized, lower cost location where they could be better managed. The members of the IT team went through a demanding investigative process to analyze the potential to bring the mainframes back to the U.S. At that time, the mainframe systems were outsourced to another company to be hosted and maintained.  After almost four years, the IT team realized that it had not saved any money from this outsourcing initiative.

Realizing the enormous scale of this data and system architecture project and the potential cost savings that the company could achieve, the IT team needed a strong enterprise architecture solution that allowed them to model all of the assets and capabilities of each mainframe in order to better understand the divisions and functions they supported. Using Metastorm ProVision, the team was able to build a portfolio management solution to understand its entire mainframe environment, which includes the hardware, software, applications, communication, support, maintenance and costs.  

The first step was to map out the current environment of its mainframes. During this process, the IT team identified close to 500,000 objects in the repository. After the mapping phase the team built out a consolidated model and was able to reduce the number of mainframes from 10 to four. Additionally, the team was also able to consolidate the subsystems (regions) from 30 to less than 10, which considerably lowered redundant messaging. Working with the Metastorm consulting team, the organization has identified two separate data types within the consolidated mainframes, the customer and the supplier. They have also been able to understand and define specific objects. With the unique data linking supported by Metastorm, if an application is moved the team will know what databases, queue requests, transactions, subsystems, data, file transfers, batch jobs, and software that will be affected.

In this particular example, the IT team led the effort to embark on a full-scale enterprise architecture project. Based on the initial estimates, the company expects to see an estimated $40-100 million savings in the first fully operational year.

Tune in next week as we examine another business case where a totally different group within the organization decided to undertake an EA initiative.

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It’s evident that oil and gas companies are under an incredible amount of pressure. Pressure to meet increasing demands for energy, pressure to provide consistency in operations amid (or in spite of) price fluctuations, pressure to find new domestic sources for energy, and pressure to meet new, stricter safety standards and regulatory demands.

With a growing list of industry challenges, coupled with the fact that the world’s energy needs are expected to grow at an estimated 40% by 2030¹, oil and gas companies should be looking to transform their upstream operations. Leveraging business process management allows oil and gas companies to fully understand and optimize upstream operations. By taking a BPM approach, these companies are able to (1) improve their process execution and (2) better leverage their existing resources.

BPM allows oil and gas companies to improve process execution by giving these companies complete visibility into their operations, allowing them to eliminate gaps, reduce redundancy and streamline processes – producing a faster time-to-market. By leveraging BPM, oil and gas companies not only have the ability to quickly adjust to new rules and regulations, but they are able to generate audit trails to proactively understand how they are adhering to policies – reducing risk for the organization.

With an aging workforce, it is especially important that oil and gas companies have the ability to pass down critical information to new, less experienced employees. BPM enables oil and gas companies to do this by allowing them to discover and operationalize their best practices. For example, data and information gathered throughout the Authorization for Expenditure process can be brought together into a comprehensive view and made available to the knowledge-workers who need to make decisions about the process. By automating the hand-offs and information transfer across departments, employees can be guided by best practices learned over years of experience. Instead of depending on experienced workers for information, companies can turn to information systems that can be tapped into anytime, anywhere.

Interested in learning more about how BPM can help your company achieve the agility and innovation needed to thrive in today’s market place? Watch our new onDemand webinar, Achieving First Mover Advantage in Upstream Operations.

____________________
¹HIS CERA Upstream Capital Costs Index, 2010

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

1. 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.
    
2. 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.
    
3. 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.  
    
4. 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.
    
5. 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.
    
6. 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.      

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To achieve these goals, some organizations look to leverage a robust BPM suite, while others are simply trying to improve their processes using BPM.  Regardless of intentions or methods, organizations are investing more and more each year in BPM projects to improve flawed business processes, save money and boost productivity. 

Gartner asked 600 business process management users to rank 22 capabilities they wanted most from BPM software and then ranked the responses from most to least important in a report titled, Survey Analysis:  BPM Spending to Grow Significantly in 2011¹.

Here are Gartner’s top five and where we see the value…
 

1.  Business Process Modeling

Process is the foundation of an organization.  Exploring, modeling and analyzing processes is a reliable way to determine how to improve the way things are done.  By having an enterprise and business architecture modeling element, you can develop a blueprint of your organization to understand the interrelationships, processes and behaviors that exist.  From there, you can model out exactly how the process will change and actually see how it would work in a real-world scenario.   

2.  Business Rules Management

Organizations need to make decisions based on rules and policies and they are looking for a way to edit and approve expectations and claims on a case-by-case basis.  A business rules management capability within a BPM suite allows non-technical business users to be directly involved with managing the rules and processes that are subject to complex and varied exceptions – making it easier for them to make the right, informed decision.

3.  Collaboration

With the continuing (and game changing) innovation of social networking, collaboration has become a critical part of our society and organizational fiber.  Removing communication barriers within organizations is an ongoing goal in the quest for optimal productivity and agility.  People use social networking tools to collaborate in every other aspect of their lives and are now looking for collaboration tools and techniques to be extended to the office.  When you combine advanced collaboration tools with business modeling, organizations are better equipped to easily engage more people in creating the right processes that offer the best value to the enterprise. 

4.  Process Optimization/Simulation

The ability to simulate process changes is one of the most valued aspects of a business process management tool – it allows you to make smart, well thought out decisions.  By simulating processes you have the ability to understand interactions and design the best processes to maximize your resources. A business process analysis element allows you to analyze process performance and stage as is and to be analysis – which helps you compare the potential for increased service levels as well as time, error, and cost reductions.

5.  Human Interaction Management

People are the core of a business and they’re involved in some of the most manual, complex, and evolving processes that run the organization.  BPM suites help organizations support these human-centric processes by giving managers visibility into the interworking of the business and access to the content they need, when they need it. Organizations can document and analyze these human-centric processes, gather input from employees (hopefully using a robust collaboration capability!), and better understand the strengths and weaknesses of the organization’s practices so that business improvements can be made. 

Clearly there is a close match between what people are looking for in a BPM suite and what Metastorm offers.  This is likely because, as a long-time leader in the BPM market, we have spent years talking to industry experts, analysts, our partners and our customers about what they want and need from a BPM suite and how we can best help them solve their process problems. It’s clear that BPM isn’t going away and that people are turning to it more and more to help fix some very complex problems.

For more information about Metastorm BPM, read our solution sheet or check out some of our customer success stories. 

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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.

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According to the report: “Predicts 2011: Business Process Management Competencies Will Expose the ‘Haves’ and ‘Have-Nots’,” by David W. McCoy, John Dixon, Jim Sinur, Michele Cantara, November 2010, Gartner predicts make four key predictions related to BPM.  We will address two in this blog post:  

• Between now and year-end 2014, overlooked but easily detectable business process defects will topple 10 Global 2000 companies.
• By 2015, context-aware computing will be used to rejuvenate at least 25% of “commodity” enterprise processes that are currently perceived as “low value.”

The first prediction is of course a call to action for large organizations to address the need for BPM sooner rather than later.  As BPM enters mainstream adoption, those who fail to invest in the disciplines and technology to analyze, improve and automate cross-functional business processes will surely be at a disadvantage.  Numerous organizations have proven that BPM does in fact work and delivers high value results – so we are not sure why any Global 2000 company would risk being left behind.  Or for that matter, why any government organization would still be watching and waiting.

Of the Gartner predictions in the report, the second is perhaps the most significant from an innovation perspective as it suggests that successful organizations will utilize context-aware computing to not only transform low value processes, but also to more fully leverage differentiating processes in ways that increase competitive advantage and drive value for the enterprise.  In addition to delivering value for the organization, Gartner suggests that context-aware computing will benefit end-customers by enabling a more personalized and intimate experience.

According to the report, “Context-aware computing centers around the concept of leveraging information about the end user — the environment, processes, communities and identities employed when interacting with computing technologies.”¹  That end user could be an employee or it could very well be a customer, and if you give some thought to this concept you will likely quickly come up with high-value areas – from supply chain management to customer service to crisis management – where this would add significant benefit.  This still nascent application of BPM provides an opportunity to those organizations who have already invested in BPM to take their efforts a step further and continue to drive competitive advantage over their competitors who may now just finally be making the move to BPM technology and business process improvement philosophies.

Given its potential for being a ‘disruptive’ and ‘game-changing technology,’ context-aware computing as it relates to process management and performance is a topic Metastorm will be delving into at length in future blog posts.  In the meantime, we continue on our quest to also educate those large organizations who have still not made the leap into BPM – although at this point, I would say given all of the proof points pointing to the success that BPM delivers, it should be more of a short jump than a leap.

¹ Predicts 2011: Business Process Management Competencies Will Expose the ‘Haves’ and ‘Have-Nots’, by David W. McCoy, John Dixon, Jim Sinur, Michele Cantara, November 2010

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Organizational leaders spend countless hours analyzing, planning, and mapping out how specific people – in a variety of departments and locations – will all come together to achieve common strategic goals related to profitability, customer service and support, market leadership, business agility, and competitive differentiation.  However, much like your personal new year’s resolution, you get busy and the daily and unexpected demands of your work week take over and things begin to fizzle out.  You assume you are all working towards these goals, but the fact is there is a disconnect.  Oftentimes, what your organization needs is take a step back and figure out exactly how effective you are at executing these strategies.  Getting fresh ideas for your approach could be as simple as attending a thought leadership conference and networking with others who face similar challenges.

To jump start our new year, Metastorm will be the lead sponsor of the IQPC Next Generation Business Process Management Summit in Orlando, FL, January 17-20.  At the event, Neal Lohmann, director of business transformation will take part in a six-member BPM panel debate, which will discuss the reality of customer-centric business operations, whether IT or operations drive business process management initiatives, how to combat resistance to change, and ways to implement business process excellence strategies to achieve results.

Metastorm customer, Spring Garcia, special staff supervisor at the State of Louisiana Office of Community Development Disaster Recovery Unit, will deliver the keynote address of the event.  Attendees will be able to hear how the Disaster Recovery Unit of Louisiana uses the Metastorm BPM software suite to align their strategy with execution, ensuring that critical systems and processes are operating when they are needed the most – in times of life-threatening crisis. 

Whether or not you are able to attend the event in person, you can access some of the online resources available from IQPC and Metastorm.  In this podcast interview between Laura Mooney, vice president corporate communications for Metastorm, and Diana Davis, editor for Six Sigma and Process IQ, Laura discusses how organizations can work together in 2011 to mend the gap between strategy and execution. Laura explains that organizations need to enhance the collaboration between the people who come up with strategic objectives and the people who are executing these objectives on a day-to-day basis.  By pulling these groups together and determining the right way to reach the targets, organizations will achieve enterprise-wide visibility and eliminate siloed departments, practices and information.     

To register and find more information about Process through Process Week and the Next Generation BPM Summit, go to http://www.bpm-summit.com/.   To access additional online resources from Metastorm, visit http://www.metastorm.com/ and click on Downloads for access to podcasts, whitepapers, videos and customer case studies.   We hope you have a successful start to your new year!

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Government agencies – like their big business counterparts – are looking for the perfect solution, something that gives them the answer to all their business problems. They’re looking for an enterprise and business architecture tool that increases their agility while decreasing costs, improves visibility and enhances cross-agency collaboration, offers high levels of privacy to protect sensitive and classified files, complies with the standards set forth by their respective agencies, and most importantly – is easy to use, with a fast return on investment.

Over 100 federal government agencies and more than 1 million U.S. government users (and counting) deploy Metastorm’s business process management, business process analysis, and enterprise architecture software.  As I mentioned, a key factor for agencies when selecting software is that it needs to comply with standards and regulations.  Metastorm’s Enterprise software suite is Common Criteria Certified, JWICS Certified, DARS certified, Navy FAM approved, and this week Metastorm announced that Metastorm BPM Version 9 has been awarded the U.S. Army Certificate of Networthiness – assuring Metastorm BPM meets the strict U.S. Army and Department of Defense standards for security, compatibility and sustainability. 

Throughout the years, Metastorm has seen our regional and federal government customers succeed in their business process improvement initiatives – and many accredit their success to Metastorm’s ease of use when solving such complex problems.  Last week, CivSource published an article titled, Richmond, VA. utilizes BPM to get city employees involved in budget program, highlighting the City of Richmond’s success in implementing its Common Cents initiative built on Metastorm BPM. 

Our federal customers have also leveraged Metastorm’s software to improve business processes. Metastorm Enterprise software is deployed, base-lined and accredited across almost all of the U.S. Intelligence agencies.   

In a case study Metastorm published last month, the U.S. Army Human Resources Command (HRC) uses Metastorm Integration Manager (MIM) to transfer, store and integrate hundreds of thousands of sensitive personnel records in near real time.  Prior to using Metastorm BPM the U.S. Army HRC was using a labor-intensive, time consuming process which took weeks, and even months to complete. 

Additionally, Metastorm BPM powers the Department of Justice, Office of the Detention Trustee eDesignate platform, which manages the prisoner designation process from the U.S. Courts, the United States Marshals Service (USMC), and the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP).  The U.S. Social Security Administration also uses Metastorm BPM to conduct all allegations of fraud over 100,000 a year, and fraud investigations over 10,000 a year.

Those are just a few instances of how Metastorm’s government customers are streamlining and improving organizational processes, while seeing a great return on investment.  I encourage you to check out more customer success stories, resources, and solution information for local and federal governments.  Let us know if you have any questions or comments!

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The evaluation emphasizes how well solutions support EA teams in day-to-day activities, including modeling future-state analysis, road mapping, presentational aids, dashboard analysis and scenario planning.  The Leaders selected in this report have a broad range of capabilities to support EA, combined with the ability to deliver these to diverse group of stakeholders.  See our press release on the report for full details.

At Metastorm, we have focused on incorporating strengths into our software that truly make us unique versus the competition — including ease of use, the availability of frameworks and models for several industries (including telecommunications, insurance, defense and supply chain management), the ability to integrate EA with BPA and BPM, and the delivery of a web-based repository tied to world-class modeling capabilities. 

Adopting an EA tool allows your organization to improve its management, analysis, reporting and communication abilities.  Metastorm ProVision offers a powerful suite of enterprise and business architecture, process discovery and business process analysis, and integrates seamlessly with the Metastorm Enterprise software portfolio – which is the only platform recognized by industry analysts for combining the three synergies of EA, BPA and BPM.  We believe that consistently being positioned as a Leader in industry analyst evaluations for all 3 disciplines is a confirmation of Metastorm’s ability to provide our customers and partners with the best-of-breed solutions, enabling them to effectively drive strategy and change throughout their business operations.

Explore Metastorm’s product page learn out more about Metastorm ProVision.  I also encourage you to review our full list of industry analyst credentials  to gain further understanding of Metastorm’s market leading position in the broader technology landscape of EA, BPA and BPM.

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Several analysts at the conference focused on addressing this topic and while each came at it from a different angle – depending on their research coverage area or discipline, one thing remained consistent:  transforming business is all about managing organizational change and culture change. This often understated consideration is critically important because without support, consensus and buy-in within and across the organization, true business transformation is not possible.   

If the goal of business transformation is increased productivity, we need to figure out how to align IT goals with business needs and how to measure results against business outcomes.  According to John Chambers, Chairman and CEO of Cisco, who delivered one of the conference keynotes, changing process is the only way to bring about productivity improvement.  I think many people agree that process change, management and optimization are essential for enabling business results.

We heard over and over that the key to addressing the IT/business alignment challenge is making sure that business and IT speak the same language.  If you are talking about databases and routers and I am talking about revenue per employee and faster time to market, we are not speaking the same language and our goals are not the same.   When evaluating technologies and concepts, we need to ask how they are going to enable business results.  If we can successfully translate technology into productivity, IT budgets will grow dramatically.  If we can speak a common language, it’s a win-win for business and IT and we can move the culture of the organization forward.

ITxpo highlights:

The business/IT alignment conference theme resonated with the attendees we spoke with during the conference.  We met with attendees from a wide range of industries – financial services, manufacturing, healthcare, energy and utilities, telecom, Federal government, armed services, state and local governments – who are looking at how EA, BPA and BPM can help them better understand their enterprise, simulate and analyze changes and process improvements and execute those changes in a way that positively impacts business outcomes. Several current customers who stopped to speak with us (thank you for stopping by!) are looking to expand their use of Metastorm, with many interested in learning more about our cloud modeling capabilities in Metastorm M3 and about Metastorm Smart Business Workspace.  

Neal Lohmann’s Business Transformation and Architecting for the Cloud education sessions held during the conference were very popular as were Kevin Haugh’s Business Process Management (BPM) and Modeling for the Cloud sessions.  Mark DiGirolamo’s Enterprise Business Architecture sessions were packed with CIOs, Enterprise Architects, PMOs and technology leaders wanting to learn how to deliver more effective strategic business and IT planning.

Many attendees stopped  by after Salt River Project’s presentation on Tuesday and wanted to learn more about how Metastorm ProVision could be used to help them with their initiatives.  Many also visited us after Gartner’s sessions on the Magic Quadrant for Business Process Management Suites (BPMS) and the Magic Quadrant for Business Process Analysis (BPA), both of which positioned Metastorm in the Leaders quadrant.

The message echoed loud and clear throughout the conference: bridging technology and the business through business architecture and process improvement is critical for managing enterprise change and improving business productivity.  All in all, it was an informative and insightful week hearing from IT leaders who recognize that it is up to them to translate technology into business value. They seem energized to take on this challenge (or, perhaps more appropriately, this opportunity), and are ready for change.   

I think Mr. Chambers summed this point up and brought the conversation full circle by reminding attendees that: “One of the important things to remember as an IT administrator or business leader is that transitions wait for no one.”

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The report cites Metastorm’s ease of use and strong functionality across the process improvement life cycle and ease of use for nontechnical and technical roles as notable strengths.  Attendees at Gartner Symposium reported that Gartner analyst Michele Cantara also highlighted Metastorm’s collaborative cloud modeling capabilities and the ability of Metastorm ProVision to tie EA and BPM together as key differentiators during her presentation about the BPMS Magic Quadrant at the conference. 

This year, the Magic Quadrant evaluation focused on vendors’ ability to support the following four main usage scenarios that drive organizations to invest in a BPMS:

1. Support for a continuous process improvement program
2. Implementation of an industry-specific or company-specific process solution
3. Support for a business transformation initiative
4. Support for a process-based, service-oriented-architecture (SOA) redesign

Metastorm is known for its ability to provide a flexible, comprehensive and highly-proven BPMS solution that effectively addresses each of these scenarios and allows organizations to quickly implement, manage, monitor, and analyze core business processes. Complementing its leadership position in the BPMS Magic Quadrant, Metastorm is also positioned in the Leaders quadrant of Gartner Business Process Analysis (BPA) Tools Magic Quadrant and Enterprise Architecture (EA) Tools Magic Quadrant.  The power of these three solutions combine in Metastorm Enterprise to enable effective alignment of process execution activities with business goals at all levels of the organization.  

I encourage you to read what industry analysts have written about Metastorm to understand the value of Metastorm’s Enterprise software solutions and how they can be leveraged to help organizaitons make better, more informed business decisions.

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Yesterday I attended a presentation delivered by Salt River Project, the world’s 3^rd largest public power utility and a Metastorm customer.  SRP’s presentation provided a comprehensive look at how SRP is growing BPM from project focused, to business unit, to Enterprise IT within the organization. SRP also discussed the time and cost value (hard dollar savings) BPM is delivering to their 100+ year old organization and the role Metastorm ProVision has played in the success of SRP’s BPM program and initiatives.  During the presentation SRP made the following two comments, sparking universal nods across the audience:  

1.  Transformation relies upon the creation of scalable approaches, enabled by technology, to direct change that drives results. This requires bringing together people, process and technology.

2.  You are never done – BPM is an evolution.

You can read more about SRP’s BPM project and how they are using Metastorm ProVision to drive business value by reading Salt River Project’s customer success story.

I also attended David Cearley and Carl Crunch’s session on Gartner’s Top Ten Strategic Technology Trends for 2011.  The list they unveiled is consistent with what we are seeing and hearing.  In my view, a number of these technologies will prove to be highly disruptive and transformational over time.  The challenge and the opportunity we face today is that these technologies can be implemented in an almost unlimited number of ways.  The key though, is that they be applied in ways that deliver clear business value in 2011.  For instance, certain applications and solutions are superior candidates for Cloud-based deployment—those that benefit most from broad, elastic and collaborative usage.   An example of this is an offering Metastorm recently released – Metastorm M3 – which allows the masses to easily model/document the current state of the enterprise as well as desired improvements to it. 

The social and collaborative technologies mentioned are also exciting and hot.  But, if used in an unfocused way, can actually be detrimental to organizations by distracting people from their day to day work.  Hence, they too need to be implemented in ways that are designed to generate value.   One way that this can be done is by anchoring these technologies to the core business processes and work activities of employees, as we do in a number of our solutions.  

In short, these are some of the most exciting technologies we have seen in years.  Like many things their success will depend on how and where they are used.  Used well, they present opportunities for almost immediate value and competitive differentiation.  Used poorly, they could actually delay broader adoption in the organization.

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