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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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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According to Forrester Research, dynamic case management is a highly structured but also collaborative, dynamic, and information-intensive process that is driven by outside events and requires incremental and progressive responses from the business domain handling the case. Examples of the combined ECM and DCM solution include patient record, a lawsuit, an insurance claim, or a contract, and the case folder would include all the documents, data, collaboration artifacts, policies, rules, analytics, and other information needed to process and manage the case We believe this integration offers our customers the ability to truly drive positive business transformation throughout their organization by having the ability to bring the right content into any given process.

Customers now have Singular View of Content through Integration with OpenText Content Server
OpenText BPS customers will be able to store and retrieve content from OpenText Content Server, adding new advanced ECM capabilities including search, discovery, auto-classification and management of process-related documents as records. Providing a singular view of content enables our customers to easily use and maintain content over its entire lifecycle.

Process and Content Integration in Action: Insurance Claim

Attendees of our Content World conference in Orlando had an opportunity to see these ECM and BPS integrations in action. For those of you who weren’t able to join us, let’s walk through an example of how this might all come together to solve a very common business process for many of our customers, an insurance claim.

The case starts with a letter from the customer informing us of a claim that he would like to file. OpenText Capture Center takes care of scanning the letter, and begins the work of extracting information using Optical Character recognition and some built-in intelligence to pull the relevant information out of the letter. Most of this work is done automatically, but we’ll flag any problems that arise.

Next, we’re on to the case manager who needs to take some action to review and process the claim.

An invalid policy number is flagged by OpenText Capture Center

The OpenText Case360 adaptive case management solution presents the case manager with their claim processing tasks that need to be completed, as well as tasks that are already complete. This aids them in quickly determining what work needs to be done and ensures they don’t replicate work already completed by others.

Tasks to be completed by the case manager

The case manager decides that they need to gather some additional information related to the case, so they dynamically add a task to request more supporting evidence for the claim.  New documents arrive and are quickly added to the case, with additional information gathered automatically from witness statements and hand-written forms.

Errors easily spotted by users 

The left side of the screen depicts a warning message for the user indicating a missing address in a mandatory form field. On the right side, the user hovers the cursor over the address in the document scanned using OCR, which enables them to view the correct address.

Users quickly make corrections

The user clicks on the address in the scanned document on the right side of the screen, and the form field on the left side of the screen is populated with the correct address. This type of on-the-fly processing significantly reduces the amount of time needed by claims agents to complete claim processing with all of the necessary information correctly entered the first time.

On the screen below, automatic recognition of an incorrectly formatted police report number is flagged. This enables the user to immediately view the scanned document and correct the report number.

With all of the necessary information available, the case manager now completes the claim and authorizes payment.  All of the documents related to the claim are stored in the OpenText ECM suite, with appropriate security and records management policies applied.  As with all content managed by the ECM Suite, the claim documents can now be leveraged from other enterprise systems including SAP, Oracle, and SharePoint.

Documents and contextual information managed by OpenText Content Server

Insurance claim processing is just one of thousands of examples of how the new integration of content and process helps our over 3,100 customers eliminate paper, automate work, and ensures that all people that need to work on the receipts have secure access to information both during the processing and for long-term records maintenance.

Updated Case360 User Interface Streamlines Adoption of Integrated Products
I’m also excited to unveil an updated user interface for the Case360 adaptive case management solution to match the look and feel of the OpenText ECM suite, streamlining adoption of the integrated products.

If you’re new to dynamic case management, I encourage you to download our free white paper by industry expert, Bruce Silver, Case Management: Addressing Unique BPM Environments to better understand the context of BPM and case management. Would you like a demonstration of these new capabilities and how you can integrate your content and process to achieve better results? Contact us at BPM@opentext.com

Have comments or questions about our new capabilities? Please post them in the comments below. Stay tuned to our blog for more announcements and details about new solution capabilities coming soon.

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From my experience working with our customers, the companies who have embraced BPM practices as essential to their management approach have had far greater success than those who have leveraged BPM to solve a few problem processes.

How AmerisourceBergen Transformed Their Business with BPM

For example, at last month’s User Summit, our customer AmerisourceBergen showed us just how far their “BPM way of thinking” has transformed their business. Their first BPM initiative was to implement an automated, collaborative Contract & Chargeback process which was not supported by their SAP application. The Contract & Chargeback process is used to manage the established pricing and terms for each of AmerisourceBergen’s manufactures and then controls compliance with pricing terms and payment of rebates from the manufacturer if the company is forced to sell at a lower price to compete- a multi-billion dollar exercise for the company. The project was a huge success and delivered a high return on investment through lower headcount, fewer and faster dispute resolution, and more accurate pricing information.  AmerisourceBergen identified many additional processes for BPM and expanded its use of Metastorm BPM to support an enterprise-wide business transformation initiative. More specifically, the company created six new processes in Metastorm BPM that extend and augment SAP’s capabilities around managing and automating high volume, highly-specialized supplier credit processes. Today AmerisourceBergen has over 3,000 users and almost 300 processes automated in Metastorm BPM. They have also established a Process Center of Excellence (COE) consisting of key business and IT people to access new processes for automation, build business cases for BPM and oversee BPM projects. 

Rather than taking the one project at a time approach, AmerisourceBergen and other cutting edge BPM adopters have seen a significant pay-off from adopting an enterprise-wide, business transformation approach to BPM. By building a Process Center of Excellence, your organization can bring together both IT and business people and resources to start thinking about how to deploy BPM across your entire organization. 

If you’re interested in learning how to extend your BPM implementation beyond a few projects, or have any thoughts on this subject, feel free to leave a comment below!

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Five reasons you should start using BPM for regulatory submissions

1.  Reduce cycle times and increase efficiency
There’s no need for the last-minute rush to get documents completed and submitted on time. In fact, you would be surprised by how many companies have very little understanding of how their documents are produced, reviewed and approved before they are submitted. BPM helps companies capture, analyze, understand and optimize critical submission process data, letting you get the job done faster and more efficiently, while ensuring you are meeting all submission deadlines.

2.  Complete process visibility
With BPM, you can know exactly where you are in your process at anytime. You can pinpoint the exact process you wanted automated, understand what it does and the interrelationships of the people, systems and technologies it involves, and optimize the process in a way that gives you the best advantage. Leveraging these capabilities users are able to initiate next steps, track deadlines and set up alerts to signal when specific users must take action based on clinical data becoming available. In addition, BPM processes can be easily updated and improved without requiring revalidation of other systems (e.g., Document Management, CTMS).  

3.  Better manage resources and roles
Social BPM capabilities allow you to define your users and what skills, training, certifications, and capabilities they have to ensure the right task is being assigned to the best person to complete it in the shortest amount of elapsed time. Work can be routed to the most appropriate employee, keeping in mind their current workload, to ensure projects don’t pile up and deadlines are met whether they are down the hall or across the globe.

4.  Establish universal metrics and standards
Real-time, personalized dashboards give you the ability to monitor and track the entire document creation, compilation and submission process. From planning, document writing, scientific review, QA and approval and issuing – you know who needs to complete and approve a task at any specific time. You can also generate customizable reports on different processes, establish performance metrics and see how you’ve improved your regulatory submission processes.

5.  Global accessibility
Web-based BPM suites give you the ability to access a wealth of information anywhere, eliminating geographical barriers. Work can be assigned to different users by adding a role attribute for users’ locations – ensuring people with enough hours in their work day and the right skill set can complete a task. Globalizing your customer operations not only helps you gain access to everything you need anywhere in the world, but also cuts down on operational costs. This feature gives companies the ability to truly leverage their global workforces to gain strategic advantage by effectively creating more working hours in a day.

A great BPM suite has the power to cut costs, increase productivity and transform the way your business operates. Stay tuned as we continue to discuss BPM’s influence within the pharmaceutical industry and how the combination of BPM and enterprise content management (ECM) can improve the way you get submissions done.

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One of Metastorm’s customers is a global aerospace engineering corporation that has several business units responsible for building and supporting its engineering services. This organization is organized by individual project teams, and has several, massive multi-million dollar projects running at any given time. Each project team can have a budget allocation of millions of dollars and is comprised of several engineers who work closely together, but separate from members of other project teams to complete their individual missions. Given the sizable investment for each project, the team focuses solely on what they need to do in order to deliver on time and on budget. As a result, if a team needs a specific application or program that they don’t already own they go ahead and purchase it, without checking if the other teams have the tool.

The company realized that these teams were working on similar projects but in siloed teams and there was little communication occurring across the organization. This resulted in multiple teams owning the same programs and resources – creating duplication of effort and financial investment. It also became apparent that there were some projects that could have been leveraged by another group eliminating re-work and lost time. Given the lack of cross-departmental visibility, opportunities to improve overall profitability and efficiency were lost.

Realizing that they would be able to operate more effectively if they had a better understanding of their current applications, systems, programs, and processes, the company looked into implementing an enterprise and business architecture tool. They recognized the need to get a comprehensive blueprint of what assets each of the project teams owned, what they were doing, and how it fit into the bigger picture. After looking at several vendors in the marketplace, the company selected Metastorm ProVision to help consolidate its engineering efforts and build a new system that encompassed the entire organization’s capabilities.

The project started 18 months ago and with the help of Metastorm consultants they built a repository for all of the different components, capabilities and assets that once existed among siloed project teams. With Metastorm ProVision, the company now has an enterprise model that helps them understand the relationships that exist across their organization, what assets they have, and how project teams are leveraging these assets. All the sub-projects roll up into a high level view of all initiatives and are tied back to corporate KPIs. Metastorm ProVision allowed them to create strategy through to execution providing a clear vision to transform their engineering operations.

For many organizations, enterprise architecture has become a critical component for bringing value to the business and integrating IT and business operations. As we have discussed in this series, EA initiatives can start at an executive level, as part of an IT initiative, or in response to a specific business requirement. Regardless of its source, your organization should find a tool that supports the ability to move beyond tactical architecture to allow users of all backgrounds to understand the systems, processes, applications and people that will help your organization maximize its resources and reach its goals.

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Incidents – big or small – can have a huge impact on your business operations and it’s important that when an incident does occur that you are ready to respond. Incident management scenarios span across all industries and incident management solutions enable you to quickly respond to and resolve the issue in a way that minimizes the overall impact to your business operations.

Organizations should seek a solution that is accessible and easy to use to enable recording, reporting and driving a resolution for incidents encountered during routine business operations. Investing in a strong, dynamic incident management solution allows your organization to:

Ensure all incidents are handled the right way by the right people. Categorizing incidents by the situation and defining who responds and what actions they should take eliminates confusion and greatly reduces cost and risk. This gives your organization a consistent, universal response process, allowing for faster issue resolution and better communication across the enterprise.

Adhere to corporate policies and insurance mandates, be prepared in the case of litigation, and manage overall risk. A strong incident management solution will give you the ability to track and audit each case with real-time visibility. For example, London Underground leverages an incident management solution powered by Metastorm to gather all of the information needed for any given incident, reducing the potential for human error in manually filling out forms. By electronically transferring and storing information, London Underground is able to process over 400 incidents each day – ensuring proper escalation and resolution, saving time and money, minimizing unexpected service interruptions, and most importantly maximizing safety.

Prepare and prevent future incidents. With automation, process integration and trend analysis capabilities, it’s much easier to proactively prevent future incidents from happening. Incident management solutions allow you to fully understand and track how you manage and respond to unexpected events. This way, you can go back and organize the process for continuous organizational improvement.

You know that incidents are going to happen. Do you know how you’ll ensure their handled in a better way? Move beyond reactive incident management and transform the way your business reacts.

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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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For these unpredictable and difficult to model processes, workflow and basic BPM will not do – organizations need a dynamic BPM solution that helps them improve, manage and monitor both their structured and unstructured processes.   In contrast to a more traditional, rigid workflow offering, dynamic BPM offers the ability to handle these unstructured, rapidly changing processes that require collaborative interaction from people.   Supply chain management and case management are both great examples of how organizations leverage dynamic BPM capabilities to track and audit processes that require a great deal of ad hoc collaboration and flexibility.

Supply Chain Management
Modeling, analyzing, understanding, and optimizing the activities and processes within a supply chain is crucial to the growth and success of companies in the manufacturing, retail and distribution industries.  For example, Blue Rhino, a division of Ferrellgas, distributes and refills propane cylinders to over 27,000 retail locations in 48 states and Puerto Rico.  Given the nature of its products and industry, Blue Rhino has a very seasonal business, with multiple locations across the United States, and a huge customer base. They needed a BPM technology suite that was designed to support constant change.  Challenges include fluctuations in supply and demand for propane tanks, unpredicted disruption within the supply chain, regulatory compliance shifts, and changing customer service demands.  These challenges necessitated that Blue Rhino implement a BPM offering dynamic enough to allow them collaborate with distributors and retailers and restructure process models based on changing conditions.  By investing in Metastorm’s BPM offering, Blue Rhino was able to increase its collaborative interactions with distributors to gain greater visibility and more accurate information, while also achieving better structure and automation across these dynamic business processes.   

Case Management
Legal case management is another scenario where an organization needs to respond to unpredictable events and adapt to a changing business environment.  To be more specific, the Department of Justice, Office of the Federal Detention Trustee (OFDT) is responsible for providing safe, secure and humane confinement of persons in federal custody awaiting trial or immigration proceedings.  With a population of some 55,000 detainees across 94 federal judicial districts, collaborative and dynamic interactions must occur.  While the process of detaining a prisoner is modeled out to the specific requirements of the federal government, there are numerous documents controlled by several federal agencies needed for each step of the process and unexpected events can occur for individual prisoners depending on their case.  The OFDT turned to Metastorm BPM because of its security and flexibility, which allowed them to break away from the structured process of detaining prisoners, respond to the situational change, and go back and complete the process.  Now, they can easily receive and process or check on the status of any prisoner’s detention designation document in real-time. 

Unstructured processes exist throughout organizations.   To gain better control and grow effectively, organizations need the flexibility to easily collaborate on and adjust business models and processes.  BPM is not just about workflow. Dynamic BPM offers the ability for organizations to track, manage and audit not only structured, well-defined processes but also the unruly, unstructured, ad hoc processes – the processes that are often the most critical to organizational success.

Contact us to learn more about Metastorm and our dynamic BPM capabilities.

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Capability maps help make sense of it all.  They are an organizational model, representing the business capabilities, processes and functions and all of the IT resources that enable them – allowing you to more easily see how each operates in order to run the day-to-day business operations

But, why should you invest in capability mapping when you already have your own method that’s been working? 

Over the past few months we’ve talked to our customers and industry experts and discovered that capability mapping is a cleaner, easier way to illustrate how your organization operates at the individual level – enabling organizations to analyze and understand what capabilities are being underutilized or overworked. 

Still not convinced? Here are three reasons why we think you should start capability mapping:

1.  Close the gap between EA and BPM

Yes, business process management (BPM) teams and enterprise architecture (EA) teams are responsible for driving different strategy initiatives –BPM for process improvement and EA for strategy and IT planning.  However, there does not need to be a complete disconnect between the two units.  Getting these two teams to see eye-to-eye and collaborate more effectively is key in mending this gap.  Capability maps help facilitate this by offering both teams a complete, holistic map of the organization’s capabilities and resources.  Now, they can discover both problem areas and opportunities that exist across all levels from strategy to execution and work together to address them. 

2. Gain support from senior executives

To the senior executive, it really doesn’t matter how the business unit leverages its capabilities to meet its performance target.  What matters is that they have visibility into the organization and know that the business is achieving its goals and hitting its numbers – and if it’s not, they need the visibility to know where the trouble lies. Organizational capabilities can be mapped out in a way that offers this visibility and insight.  Using a capability map, IT and business leaders are better positioned to get more support from senior executives for process improvement projects and IT investments.  They are able to illustrate what capabilities are missing, what capabilities need work and what capabilities can be eliminated in order to run a better, more effective business. 

3. Prioritize and manage initiatives

With full visibility into the capabilities, organizations can drill down and see how their business operates on a daily basis.  From there, organizations are able to prioritize and manage transformation and improvement initiatives  and see exactly what capabilities are being leveraged in order to manage change.  This visibility allows organizations to identify the strengths and weaknesses,  see what capabilities require the highest priority, remove redundancies, and devote more resources to improving the capabilties that are broken or flawed. 

Capability maps are simple to design, easy to use and necessary for optimizing organizational structure, planning roadmaps for change, and evolving and improving business processes.  If you want to learn more about how capability maps can strengthen your business and help mend the gap between EA and BPM teams, check out this onDemand webinar featuring Neal Lohmann, director of business transformation solutions for Metastorm and Clay Richardson, senior analyst for Forrester:  Align EA & BPM with Capabilities – Get Expert Insight from Forrester.

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When I asked the attendees to describe their ability to handle major and ongoing changes within their organization in a poll, 63% of participants indicated that it was “slow, painful and expensive” and 31% said that efforts were “disjointed and siloed.”  Meaning only 6% of the 83 participants who responded believed that their organization “could be an industry model for business transformation.”

I’m not surprised.  Often, organizations struggle to manage change because they lack a consistent approach to business transformations.  Determining the end goal of a transformation (whether it be upgrading to a new technology, seeking operational efficiency, or staying ahead of competitor innovation) is one thing, but trying to figure out a successful, cost effective way to roll out the transformation takes deep insight into the day in and day out activities and processes within the organization.  

What organizations need to do is figure out how to communicate and collaborate across the enterprise so they can break down the obstacles to change. One way to achieve this is to align the organizational structures against a framework that enables organizations to prioritize and manage transformation initiatives – while also providing visibility into key organizational practices and providing vehicles to help people in cross-functional roles communicate and work together more effectively.      

Today, Metastorm announced a new Business Transformation Practices Framework that is designed to do just that.  The framework helps organizations eliminate the competing practices and communication barriers that prevent change and help them prioritize and manage transformation initiatives to achieve consistent and repeatable processes across current and future transformation activities.  The framework is complementary to and integrated with the Metastorm ProVision® and Metastorm BPM® software – ensuring that multiple, business transformation initiatives can be tracked, monitored,  implemented and fine-tuned through business architecture and business process adjustments on an ongoing basis.

If you’d like more information about the Business Transformation Practices Framework, you can contact me or go to www.metastorm.com/transform to read white papers, download solution sheets and register for upcoming business transformation webinars. An onDemand video of The Power of Business Transformation webinar from last week is also available here. 

I also encourage you to join me for my next webinar – How to Manage Industry-Specific Change Using a Business Transformation Practices Framework – on Tuesday, March 15^th at 11:00 am EST, register here.

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But without a clear, well defined plan in place—one that allows you to see and understand all of your business capabilities and determine the best possible transformation strategy—your organization won’t be in a good position to effectively implement and manage change.  

Why invest in a business transformation strategy?  Here are three business reasons to create a formal business transformation strategy and implement a consistent framework for managing change: 

1. Eliminate siloed departments and competing practices

Executives and senior managers often don’t realize how many complex, competing practices exist within their organization.  Siloed departments cause huge communication barriers, which end up preventing any sort of meaningful change, while also stifling innovation and blocking agility.  A business transformation strategy will give you ability to identify and remove these redundant practices, and help you map out a more effective and strategic way to establish consistency, repeatability and measurability across business transformation activities to better manage change and foster innovation.

2. Gain visibility and control into business operations

If you can’t see how your organization operates on a day-to-day basis, how can you determine the right change and manage it once it has taken place? Investing in a business transformation framework solution will allow you to drill down in the daily operations to see exactly how people and processes work together and simulate potential business transformations to deliver ongoing improvements and remain competitive.

3. Establish collaboration and a common vocabulary across all business practices

Communication is the key to success.  Organizations need to figure out how to establish a common vocabulary and enhance communication between people from various departments and locations.  By mapping out each role and responsibility within the organization and having a tool that establishes an effective form of communication, you can remove the communication barriers that keep your organization from being able to keep up with and positively contribute to change. Real-time chat and model viewing capabilities across multiple users allows organizations to model, discuss, and improve their business operations, making it easier to execute and manage a business transformation.

To remain successful and competitive, your business has to change.  The best approach to managing any change is being prepared for the unknown.  Metastorm offers a business transformation practices framework that can be implemented directly with our complete software portfolio, to give your organization broad understanding and visibility into your practices and allow you to prepare and respond more quickly and effectively to environmental, technological, or regulatory changes.   

If you’re interested in learning more about how a business transformation framework can help your organization manage change, I encourage you to participate in Metastorm’s upcoming webinar The Power of Business Transformation on February 8^th at 11:00am EST.

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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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