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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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How does this notion of human and machine translate to success in the business world? Legendary fighter and advisor to the movie Sugar Ray Leonard tells us that we are actually seeing a story about relationships in Real Steel. That is, the importance of the relationship between Hugh Jackman, the ex-boxer now “corner man” and Atom, his robot fighter. It is that enabling (some might say co-dependent) relationship that leads to their success. Herein lies the lesson learned for business — while automation is required, it is not sufficient for success. I have seen that hold true in my world of business process solutions where adaptive case management and knowledge workers team up to drive productivity.

Customer Experience is the Competitive Battlefield
Industry leading companies, in insurance for example, are using the relationship between the knowledge worker and their case management systems to compete on the basis of the experience they provide to their customers. As a raving fan of adaptive case management (ACM), I have had the opportunity to see firsthand implementations that reflect the Real Steel lesson.

A critical first step is modernizing the legacy systems (yes, the automation) which drive most insurance companies in terms of core administration and where the sheer number of transactions handled and paper generated each day interferes with service to the customer. When taking on new business policies, ACM provides the all-important balance between automating out manual inefficiencies that lead to frustrating customer experiences and using technology to improve the service provided by humans, all the while assuring transparency and adherence to regulatory requirements.

By enhancing the legacy systems and providing information and content in context, ACM helps insurers effectively manage their complex enrollment and underwriting processes and the associated “paper” across multiple systems. For example, with commercial and life products, new business needs to be presented to the underwriter in a single view with multiple systems and third party data sources as well. Adaptive case management helps these insurers improve underwriter productivity and make more timely and informed decisions that in turn impact the customer experience for the better.

Case Study: A Tipping Point for Capturing New Business
One life insurance company whose implementation I reviewed provides a perfect success story for new business capture. The firm had reached a productivity tipping point in their processing of new applications. They faced a situation where they would have to hire four people for every 100 new applications received, in large part because staff had to physically move paper throughout the organization — file it, track it and retrieve it when requested — and the necessary information was not readily available to progress the application forward. With typical applications containing between 10 and 100 pages, depending on the complexity of the package, and the company receiving between 600 and 900 applications every week, they knew making a change was critical.

Today, with their new technology solution in place, the company is able to handle more applications and is growing the business with no increase in staff. Knowledge workers now have instantaneous access to the status of a file, the ability to view documents within the file, and can immediately review any of the reports related to the case, all in real time with the agent or broker. And, the company’s underwriters have increased their capacity by 20 percent.

The technology investment and improvement initiative have also enabled the company to engage an entire new sales channel by marketing term life policies through several large financial institutions and respond rapidly and efficiently to high volumes of new customers.

The Customer Moment of Truth Calls For High-Tech & High-Touch
Effectively capturing new business is critical to growth. Handling subsequent claims is the Insurer’s “moment of truth” for customer retention. Being there for customers in their hour of need and doing so efficiently demands a combination of high-tech and high-touch service. An insurance carrier’s reputation is built on the ability to effectively process customer claims, and reputation can make or break the business. Not only reputation is at stake, for insurance companies spend nearly 80 percent of their income on claims. Studies have confirmed that claim settlement times are directly correlated to both customer satisfaction and the severity of the claim, so efficient processes are a must.

With P&C claims for example, there is a great deal of third party data that is aggregated during the claim management process in order to determine the settlement amount and resolve the claim. This is exactly what led one worldwide insurer to unify their decentralized claim functions and improve their cycle times using business process and case management technology. In just one of their multi-site auto claims departments in a single country, they were handling 230,000 or so new claims per year. To further complicate the process, more than 10,000 documents a day relating to active claims, such as forms, letters and faxes, arrived in a variety of haphazard ways, from different sources, at different times and at different offices.

The solution the insurer implemented brings all the claim information together and routes it to the right knowledge worker desktop, automatically assigning claims, smoothly channeling incoming information, bundling documents and exhibits connected to the same claim and prioritizing the work. By leveraging the right technology, the company has been able to reduce paper-induced costs and request delays as well as the number of “missing in action” items. With improved claim decisioning, their customer claims experience in terms of turnaround time and consistency is now a competitive advantage for them instead of a burden.

Not only can ACM drive improved assessment and faster settlement times that decrease the severity of the claim, it can enable brokers and claimants to track progress of claims, provide self-service from first notice of loss (FNOL) to status inquiry and information provision, and support transparent decision making to minimize the risk of fraud or manipulation. In addition, adaptive case management is perfect for filling the “white space” in today’s claims systems to improve handling for fraud investigation and better support the process undertaken once a claim is identified as fraudulent.

Achieving Better Business Outcomes
For insurance and many other industries, changing the way a company does business with their customers means finding new ways of handling information to achieve the most effective business decision making environment. Adaptive case management does just that, enhancing the knowledge worker’s ability to perform their highly skilled, highly nuanced and often ad hoc and unstructured work activities. Thus, the result of combining humans and ACM technology is better business outcomes and a win in the battle to better serve the customer.

One review of Real Steel said the takeaway from the movie is “Do what you love and don’t ever stop.” With that in mind, watch for my next article in this ACM series — The Truth About Agility — about the value of continuous business process improvement and adaptive case management.

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In an effort to achieve some of the best of both worlds hybrid approaches have been developed which wrap applications designed to be largely OS independent with code designed to provide access to the lower level device features and capability. A number of vendors including OpenText have developed mobile frameworks to facilitate the creation of such hybrid apps. See for example the Mobile Wave Platform.

Meanwhile , HTML standards have continued to mature and provide a richer and richer experience and feature support. Recently OpenText released mobile BPM capability which relies on HTML5 and therefore runs on any device with HTML5 browser support (see http://www.name.com/). This allows companies to achieve major economies by building once and deploying broadly across a diverse set-up mobile users and devices. But on top of this,  these mobile apps rely on the same BPM design environment and underlying framework (access control, system integration, business rules, workflow and other features) used to create process oriented desktop apps. This allows mobile applications to automatically leverage the deep capabilities that already exist in a BPM platform while allowing organizations to deploy and update highly integrated mobile applications in record time and at dramatically lower costs.  

So what does the future hold? In my opinion over the next several years we will continue to see a combination of all three of the above approaches. However, we will see a convergence toward hybrid and device neutral platforms. The economic pressure to move towards greater platform independence is simply tremendous. With the explosion of mobile device usage, buyers—both consumer and corporate—want their mobile investment to be more portable and ubiquitous.  HTML continues to close the gap with device specific capabilities. Device makers appear to be responding as well. Strategy Analytics predicts sales of 1 billion HTML5 capable phones in 2013, up from 336 million in 2011. At the same time this does not mean that device specific apps and capabilities will disappear. Hybrid and native platforms will also continue to grow and, among other things, provide a mechanism for implementing features or capability not yet supported via broader standards such as HTML 5. 

What are your thoughts? Feel free to leave a comment 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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While many corporations have enabled millions of their customers to access a portion of their business operations through mobile apps, millions of their employees don’t have mobile access to the processes that support and drive those customer interactions.

At our recent User Summit, the talk of the show was Steve Russell’s mobile and social BPM demo.  If you want to see it for yourself, click here. (Better yet, if you’d like to see the mobile capabilities in person, invite a Sales Engineer in for a visit, we’d be happy to show it off.)

After that demo, I had the opportunity to hear firsthand how several customers intended to deploy mobile processes and the unique benefits those capabilities would bring to their environment. Here are five ways those customers thought mobile access to their BPM processes would drive value:

1. Real-time reporting of inventory – A customer in distribution intends to add mobile process access to their inventory reporting in order to gain instant visibility, ensure PCI compliance, and deliver superior customer service.
2. Access to information when a laptop or workstation is unavailable – A customer from the manufacturing industry has workers who frequently must perform essential maintenance tasks on large machinery far from any work station. Currently, the workers complete their work from memory and then go back to the work station to record their actions, risking error and noncompliance—mobile access to the maintenance process will eliminate costly fines.
3. Expedite new matter intake – Law firms are constantly challenged with keeping new matter intake processes moving forward with lawyers frequently out of the office. With mobile access to their new matter intake process, law firms can gain a competitive advantage by eliminating the bottlenecks and getting new clients onboard faster.
4. Accurate incident management – By equipping employees with access to the incident management processes via mobile devices, an engineering firm expects to increase their reporting accuracy and speed response times.
5. Consistent user experience – Several customers said that they already had developed a mobile application for other areas of their business and were eager to hook the HTML 5-based mobile capabilities into those existing mobile interfaces to deliver a seamless experience for their users. The result? Happy employees and happy customers.

So, how will you benefit from mobile BPM? The possibilities are endless.

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• interacting with dynamic process forms on an iPhone
• managing case complex work from an iPad, and
• monitoring internal social networks to provide real-time guidance for in-flight business processes.

The presentation not only provided cool insight into the future of our business process technologies, but got attendees thinking about more scenarios where process and case management could be applied.   Attendees were interested in extending BPM to a new set of mobile and field workers and customers (e.g., “How do we integrate our existing customer-facing mobile apps with mobile BPM apps”). They were curious to learn more about how teams could use social network feeds to guide process outcomes or improve customer service (e.g., “how can our insurance agents provide better service on the ground following a natural disaster”).  I received several questions about how knowledge workers accessing existing process apps on PCs on or off-premise, might instead move to tablet based solutions (e.g., “all of our attorneys have iPads – I want to learn more about moving our existing process app to the tablet”). Our latest product introductions and a few near-term roadmap deliverables provided new answers and insight to answering these and other questions.

If you would like to learn more about our social BPM offerings visit our Mobile BPM solution page download one of our recent Social BPM webinars or ask your contact us and we can bring a similar demonstration to your site.

Is Social BPM a Fad?  Matt Ridely Would Argue “No”
I just watched a TED video of British author Matt Ridley, “When Ideas have Sex.”While it is not a video about Social BPM, it does discuss the value of how communities socialize ideas to innovate. This video really helped cement in my mind the benefits we are achieving through our Social BPM capabilities. As Matt Ridley explains in his TED talk, “what is relevant to a society is how well people are communicating their ideas and how well they are cooperating… because of the connections people are making and the ability of ideas to mate as never before… we are surely accelerating the rate of innovation.” I have heard some people refer to Social BPM as a fad, but based on the knowledge shared by Mr. Ridley, one can better understand how companies are and will be using Social BPM capabilities to drive further innovation and differentiation.

To see Mr. Ridley’s complete TED talk, go here.

How Social Technologies are Improving Case Management
As I explained in a recent presentation (Gartner ITxpo: An Introduction to Adaptive Case Management), the idea of using technology to share information is not new. Email exchanges have gone on for decades. Services like LinkedIn, Skype, Facebook, and Twitter are uses by hundreds of millions, if not billions of people. The power of social BPM is in accelerating the efficiency and exchange of ideas. In the context of adaptive case management (ACM), the Social BPM capabilities we provide  simply enables users to get more work done in a single context-rich environment, rather than shifting between multiple tools and communication devices to get their work done. When applied into the ACM environment the exchange of ideas –“in the context of my work” – through these social technologies advances innovation and competitive differentiation for organizations. 

If you have a couple of minutes, be sure to check out the entertaining presentation on Case Management found through the link above. Questions or comments? Feel free to leave a comment below or reach out to me on Twitter @weekstweets.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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I had my process and case management hat on when I watched the video. I noticed how people we actively collaborating on projects including some process oriented work. I noticed how they were working from a single “workspace” that surfaced itself on many different devices and/or objects. They were working, collaborating, and communicating from their workspace.  Notice in the office scene, there is not a single phone on the desk – just a light, desk, chair and “workspace.” 

As we look toward the future, I see case and process management solutions fitting easily into this kind of environment. Our persona-based and smart business workspaces are already unifying work and communication environments for knowledge workers today. Our mobile business process management (BPM) solutions are already enabling them to get work done from anywhere.  As I watched the video and related it to my knowledge of our BPM solutions, I thought “we are well on our way.”

Curious to learn more about BPM without boundaries?  Check out our new mobile solutions, here. If you would like to continue this converstaion, feel free to leave a comment below or reach out to me on Twitter @weekstweets

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According to the Forrsights Software Survey, Q4 2010 the of the major drivers for BPM adoption among financial services and insurance companies are

– Optimization of processes (72%)
– Ability to ensure consistent process execution across divisional or geographic barriers (54%)

In the same survey, the biggest drivers from BPM software adoption among public sector and healthcare organizations was the

– Optimization of processes (72%)
– Ability to support compliance efforts (59%)

Regardless of the industry, one fact remains clear – more and more companies are adopting BPM to not just improve day-to-day productivity of workers, but to fully understand and optimize their organizational practices.

For those of you who are new to BPM or are still deciding the right project for deployment, taking the lessons learned from previous organizations is a great place to start.

Choose your first project carefully
Gaining executive buy-in is one of the most challenging first-steps of your BPM adoption. It’s important to do your homework prior to developing your adoption strategy. Take a look at some of the considerations other organizations have developed for their BPM projects see what you can leverage as you begin your own journey toward BPM adoption. For companies with an appetite for change, you should consider selecting a high-visibility, mission-critical process. For others, selecting a troublesome but less mission-critical process is an excellent first project to demonstrate the success and ROI of BPM before the more mission-critical processes are tackled.

Think of BPM as a way to drive change
While it is important to ensure and promote the success of your initial BPM projects, organizations who have achieved the greatest results in their BPM deployments have thought of BPM as a way to drive business change throughout their organizations. If you think about and promote BPM as a way to improve a few key processes or automate a function that cuts out 15% of costs, you aren’t going to get the full value of your investment. From the day-one of your deployment think of BPM as a platform that can transform the way you do business, better respond to business opportunities and a mechanism to support continuous process improvement.

Establish clear metrics to define success
As I said earlier, executive sponsorship is critical. One of the best ways to illustrate the value of BPM is to set clear metrics that define the success of your implementation. By measuring each of your BPM projects, you can communicate and demonstrate the value of BPM to other departments who have yet to automate their specific business processes using BPM.

Develop a meaningful way to access projects value
With multiple projects running independently from each other, it is important to develop a way for users to understand and access the relative value of each of your company’s projects. When you step back from individual projects and get a holistic view of the full-scale of your organizations implementation, you will most likely find that what you thought were multiple BPM applications might actually be better solved by automating a single “big process” with variations for each group or department based on a few unique business rules. This view enables you to deliver more capability, to more users in an even shorter time period. It also drives operational excellence in more areas by leveraging best practices across a larger footprint in the company.

There are thousands of organizations who have transformed the way they do business by leveraging BPM. To learn more about how some organizations have solved complex business problems and achieve significant ROI, check out this success story page. If you have questions about how to start your first BPM initiative, feel free to leave a comment below!

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In a presentation I delivered to a full room at this week’s Gartner Symposium ITxpo in Orlando, I discuss this growing disparity between what IT is delivering and the growing expectations of their technology and social savvy iWorkers.  I led the session attendees through the story, which you can read through below, describing the interactions of Bryan (the IT Pro), Jenny (the new iWorker), and Tom (Jenny’s supervisor).  After revealing some of the challenges Bryan, Jenny, and Tom were faced with, the story unfolds to reveal how a new case management solution enabled them to change the way work was done. 

The story shows how Adaptive Case Management enabled the organization to

• better manage structured and unstructured processes
• deliver content in context
• take advantage of new social and mobile technologies to collaborate anywhere their business operates
• offer personalized work interfaces based on roles, skills, and process context across the organization

If you are interested in learning more about Adaptive Case Management and how it might help your organization meet the growing expectations of the new iWorker, I invite you to take a tour through the presentation below. To continue the converation, you can follow me on Twitter @weekstweets.

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To take this even further, in a recent report Gartner predicted that “by 2013, mobile phones will overtake PCs as the most common Web access device worldwide. According to Gartner’s PC installed base forecast, the total number of PCs in use will reach 1.78 billion units in 2013. By 2013, the combined installed base of smart phones and browser-equipped enhanced phones will exceed 1.82 billion units and will be greater than the installed base for PCs thereafter.”[1]

So where does that take business improvement applications?

It’s clear that accessibility to information is critical. People have become accustomed to getting the information that they need as they need it. Business users are increasingly demanding the same access to the work that they participate in. Whether they spend most of their time in the field, in the office, or find themselves working both in and out of the office, they need to be able to continue the flow of work through the enterprise. However, many critical business applications today have been designed to require process participants being chained to their desks. With mobile usage so prevalent, it is only natural to extend the availability of the business applications you have grown to depend on daily to your smart phone. More importantly, with integrated support for mobile access, businesses can now rethink the very ways that they interact with customers, partners and employees.

OpenText Metastorm is pleased to announce the release of OpenText BPM Mobile for Metastorm BPM – allowing you to engage customers, partners and employees in completely new ways! The product release extends the Metastorm BPM solution by empowering you to fully participate or initiate business processes from the Metastorm BPM suite via smart phones or iPad.

OpenText BPM Mobile for Metastorm BPM gives you:

• The ability to deliver process improvements beyond the back-office and into more strategic client-facing and field scenarios.
• An improved customer experience made possible by consistent processes regardless of the way a customer wants to communicate with you.
• The option to define rules outlining how to perform a process via mobile device versus a personal computer to improve the mobile user’s experience.
• Instant mobile access for user’s on-the-move, helping to continue the flow of work regardless of location – eliminating unwanted bottlenecks.
• Out-of-the-box, multi-platform support for Android, Blackberry, iPad and iPhone users with no additional development effort for each platform.

The OpenText BPM Mobile capability is available to all OpenText customers on active maintenance for Metastorm BPM. More information about this release, including the solution sheet is available on our OpenText BPM Mobile for Metastorm BPM solution page. If you have questions feel free to contact us directly or leave a comment below.   

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[1] Gartner’s Top Predictions for IT Organizations and Users, 2010 and Beyond: A New Balance, by Brian Gammage, Daryl C. Plummer, Ed Thompson, Leslie Fiering, Hung LeHong, Frances Karamozis, Claudio Da Rold, Kimberly Collins, William Clark, Nick Jones, Charles Smulders, Mike Escherich, Martin Reynolds, Monica Basso, December 2009

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