We have all heard the story before: organizations trying to become more customer-centric but can’t because they are held back by ageing applications and siloed operations that leave them unable to keep up with the demands of the modern customer. I have been working a lot recently with customers in the Financial Services industry where this issue is extremely prevalent.

The good news is that there are alternatives to legacy systems that no longer fit the bill, and at OpenText we call them Smart Process Applications.  Smart Process Apps combine the power of Business Process Management or Case Management, with ECM, capture, analytics, collaboration, and customer communications management to allow organizations to be more collaborative and support the dynamic and demanding customer environment that exists today. Smart Process Apps break down the barriers of application silos while still referencing the legacy applications as the system of record.

I am really pleased to announce a new case study we did with QSuper, one of Australia’s largest superannuation (aka retirement) funds that service government employees, related entity workers, and their spouses. Like many financial services organizations, QSuper operates in a highly competitive and dynamic environment, where legacy applications with limited functionality and no central view of the customer could limit their ability to open new accounts, provide stellar customer service, and ensure consistence execution of operations.

QSuper used to rely on a workflow system that was embedded within one part of their organization. The system had limited functionality, no disaster recovery capabilities, and experienced frequent downtime – that led to disruptions in their business. In addition to these issues, eight different systems were used by operations staff with numerous repositories for customer information, which included a mixture of paper and electronic documents.

Like many other financial services organizations, QSuper realized that they needed to modernize their application infrastructure to provide a single view of their customer in order to become more efficient and improve the customer experience.  This new system, workQ, is a Smart Process Application that now handles 78 percent of customer administration processes and is used across QSuper, from knowledge workers processing claims to business operations and IT staff to mid-and senior-level management. They have also been able to decommission 5 of the 8 former customer systems, which has significantly reduced business operations costs and improved employee responsiveness to customer inquiries. The advanced analytics and reporting in the new system has reduced the manual effort to create reports by 99% and provides a much clearer view of overall business performance.

QSuper is just one example of numerous customers who are providing better customer service with a modern, Smart Process Application infrastructure.  To learn more about Smart Process Apps and other customer success stories, follow me here.

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What I find even more exciting is how prolific we can make Smart Process Applications. Our MBPM platform has always made it easy for customers to roll out Smart Process Apps, but when you add the OpenText Assure platform (built upon MBPM), it truly becomes a Smart Process Application Factory.

Assure provides a set of over 70 pre-built services and reports that can be assembled like building blocks to create and deploy high value Smart Process Apps much faster than the “blank slate” approaches found in traditional BPM suites. Once an organization deploys their first Smart Process Application with Assure, they become adept at designing a process, using the building blocks to assemble their solution, and then deploying their apps. The value of Smart Process Apps is quickly spread across the organization, with new apps up and running in as little as 30 days. And as we continue to introduce more building block services with Assure, our clients will receive even higher value, and be able to deploy their Smart Process Apps even faster.

As an example, I’ve recently spent time with our customer PSCU, the nation’s largest credit union servicing organization. (We have a full case study here.) Using our Assure Smart Process App platform, they have deployed customer and agent portals, and apps for employee onboarding, e-commerce, account management and fraud management. And they will be rolling out a comprehensive dispute resolution system in the near future.

The new Smart Process Applications they’ve deployed at PSCU have saved them over $300,000 in service delivery costs in the first year, and they are now rolling out new process-based services in 25% of the time with Assure. According to PSCU, being able to respond faster and more efficiently to customer requests keeps them far ahead of the competition, and being able to roll out more apps, and do it faster, means they are continually increasing the value they receive from the platform.

For another example, I recently spoke to a customer recently called MFDA, also known as the Mutual Fund Dealers Association of Canada. They provide their industry with information, guidance and regulations that benefit the investing public and strengthen their industry as a whole. They first purchased MBPM in 2007, and deployed their first four applications in the first year. Over the next five years, they kept rolling out Smart Process Apps for HR, voting, IT projects, filings, etc., and now have 23 applications creating significant value for their organization.  Again, the more solutions they developed, the more value they received from the platform. In fact, Sandy Kemsley, who writes a widely read BPM blog called “Column2” (http://www.column2.com) described their impressive track record for implementation in a post late last year.

So, the next time you hear someone saying “too much of a good thing can be bad,” I might agree if it’s eating cake or juggling chainsaws, but if they’re referring to Smart Process Applications, then more is always better.

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Well it is nearly time to head back to Washington. This time for the Gartner Enterprise Architecture Summit – although the name may be a little deceiving as Gartner, like OpenText are seeing that the real interest among customers is for Business Architecture, rather than Enterprise Architecture – and this an area where ProVision scores very highly, among analysts and customers alike.

The theme of Business Architecture vs. Enterprise Architecture and why they are different will be a topic we will be addressing in our OpenText conference session, as well as providing you with ideas and insights that ensure that you can go away with concrete actions to ensure your success..

For our session I am delighted that we will be joined by a number of our customers including Diana Krohn of United Airlines, Tim Price of Hewlett Packard, Kathryn Cluff of FiServ and David Simpson of Salt River Project. Rather than the typical vendor case study session we wanted to once again bring you something different, so these fine folks will be joining me on a panel discussion on the “Value and Importance of Business Architecture”, where we will explore issues such the need for an architectural approach to business? How do you go about getting the business case justified? And how do you get people to collaborate better?

Each of the panellists has a great deal of experience and success in creating and driving business architecture initiatives within organisations. If we ask nicely, they will hopefully share some of the things that didn’t work, as well as the things that did – it’s always cheaper to learn from the successes (and mistakes) of others!

So why not come and join us on Wednesday, May 22 at 3.00pm – it is certain to be a lively and informative session.  Can’t be there? Then why not tweet me (@markmcgregor) the questions you would like the panel to address using the hashtag #OpenTextBA.

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Although a new term for many following the BPM market, Smart Process Apps are a reflection of innovations we have been delivering in our business over the past few years — giving our customers more agile work environments, helping them innovate faster, and solving problems that extend beyond the boundaries of BPM for our customers.

For those following our BPM roadmaps, you’ll remember that a few years ago, we integrated OpenText’s Content Server, Capture, and StreamServe products with our BPM solutions — a move that directly reflects OpenText’s EIM strategy today.  Then last September, in Forrester’s inaugural report on Smart Process Applications they defined a new market around the combination of these same technologies.  This was a great validation on the hard work our Dev teams delivered on our roadmap as well as OpenText’s EIM strategy.

Beyond the integration across our portfolio, we have been working on the next generation of our core BPM offerings — introducing building blocks for process and case management that are allowing our customers to accelerate design time for Smart Process Applications, reduce risks on scoping deployments, and deliver better time to value to their organizations. These next generation offerings are built on top of our core BPM platforms. For horizontal process applications, we offer Assure (e.g., HR, Customer Service, etc.) and if you are interested in vertical solutions like those for Financial Services, we offer Client Management (e.g., Insurance, Wealth Management, etc.).

Over the past few months, I have been out meeting our customers and partners in Europe and North America at our OpenText EIM Day events and have heard some amazing stories. Companies like Nelnet are showing how they are combining BPM and Capture technologies to improve the servicing of student loans.  Organizations like PSCU are delivering new innovative process-based services through personalized self-service portals to their credit union clients using the building blocks of our Smart Process Application platform (they improved customer satisfaction by 80% in the past nine months). Partners like Microsoft are helping us show off the Smart Process App that we built with them for Dodd-Frank compliance. And organizations like KRZ in Germany are rolling out process-based service applications to over 30 municipalities, helping with everything from invoice management to processing applications for kindergarten enrollment.

There are still a few more EIM Day events left with more interesting stories to come.  If you are interested in learning more about our Smart Process Applications, come join us at one of these events.  If we can’t see you there, and you want to learn more about our Smart Process Applications, take a peek at our website or download a free copy of the Smart Process Apps Wave report here.

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It’s the same thing when certain dynamic processes within an organization are not effectively managed by transactional or functional applications. Those systems often can’t keep up with the changing needs of dynamic, human-centric processes such as managing a request for services, opening an account, or managing exceptions, and knowledge workers will use spreadsheets, email, IMs, Access databases and other tools as workarounds to get the job done.  Forrester in refers to these kinds of processes “untamed,” and when content and actions within untamed processes are not managed, they add will costs and time to the process, increase risk to the organization, and result in poor customer experiences.

The concept of the Smart Process Applications has become the most compelling new type of solution for unstructured and collaborative processes. The analyst firm Forrester does a nice job of explaining these new types of applications in their report called “Smart Process Applications Fill A Big Business Gap” (downloadable from the OpenText website), and how they include the following components:

• Information Capture
• Data Awareness
• Information Capture
• Content Analysis
• Collaboration
• Multi-Channel Communications

And how all of these services are orchestrated and managed by a business process management infrastructure. Smart Process Applications created with these technologies effectively bridge the gap between transactional applications and dynamic human engagement, and can tame the untamed processes.

To consider the power of Smart Process Applications, let’s first look at the capture and communications aspects of a process.  These are the “on-ramps” and “off-ramps” of a process, and are how an organization engages with its customers, partners, citizens and employees, both in the information capture, and outbound communication aspects of a process. Examples of on-ramps include a mortgage application, the forms needed to apply for a business permit, or an insurance claim form, and they may trigger a process or be a communication in the middle of a process when more information is needed. Examples of off-ramps include a notification to the mortgage applicant for further information or actions, an acceptance or rejection notification, or a marketing communication with a desired action.

The importance of the on-ramps and off-ramps is described by Forrester in that enterprises will begin to distinguish and differentiate themselves by the way they handle customer requests, exceptions, and other ad hoc engagements with speed, efficiency, and quality. According to them, taming the workarounds must be done from the “outside in,” by understanding the user’s perspective first before mapping the internal components needed to support a process.

For the onramps, this means high quality, multi-channel inputs. This includes dynamic information captures sessions that take the user “by-the-hand” through sophisticated transactions/interactions, providing intuitive help, engagement history where needed, and by eliminating the need to input redundant or known information.  How many of you have yelled at a form: “… But you already asked me that!”  Hopefully, no one was around to hear you.

More importantly, effective on-ramping is providing access to users in the ways they want, which is multi-channel communications and now means mobile access along with web-based, paper-based, and phone-based mobile interactions. The Apple app store experience, starting with the iPhone and now tablets, has changed expectations with more and more (meaning older) users that they should be able to start any process, check a status, purchase goods, and process payment from any mobile device they want, wherever they are.  Mobile is no longer an option for process engagement – it’s a requirement.

On the off-ramp side of a process, how an organization responds will directly impact the user’s experience, and can affect process participation or abandonment, overall satisfaction, and sales.  Impersonal text-based communications get lost in the white noise of incoming content, and create a lack of connection with an audience. Multi-channel response communication that provides clear, relevant, personalized, and visually appealing interaction, across any device, is now the expectation.

So the key to bridging the engagement gap between process systems and users is through a complete Smart Process Application such as the ones provided by OpenText.  They extend the BPM foundation with broad EIM components that create the on-ramps and off-ramps that truly engage users.  OpenText provides a very powerful set of on-ramps with:

• OpenText Social Workplace – for extending processes to Apple IOS-based devices.
• OpenText Portal – for creating windows into a process with rich content.
• OpenText Mobile Wave – for creating mobile experiences across devices.
• OpenText Capture and Recognition – to capture and digitize document and form information .
• OpenText Tempo Social – to engage users through with social and team worksites.

For off ramps, OpenText offers the industry leading tools including:

• OpenText Customer Communications Management – to automate the generation of compelling customer communications – both digitally and via paper.
• OpenText Mobile Wave – to communicate with users across mobile platforms.
• OpenText WCM – to create engaging web experiences.

Organizations that attempt to manage their untamed processes without a broad set of tools for user engagement may improve internal productivity, but will not extend the value outside their organization to the people that really matter most. OpenText has a very broad set of EIM pillars that work together to create high value Smart Process Applications. They are the right tools for the job.

A great example of a customer that used OpenText to change how it engages with clients is Irish Life, where BPM and social tools were used to create a social media-based case management claims solution.  Check out the video.  According to Irish Life, the solution boosted morale, improved customer service with advance reporting and collaboration, and increased internal productivity by 35% in the process.

In his report called “Stuck In Cement: When Packaged Apps Create Barriers To Innovation,” Craig Le Clair of Forrester writes about “recapturing human engagement – but doing it at scale.”  That has been a huge challenge, with most organizations failing miserably in developing the best, or even adequate on-ramps and off-ramps.  Now organizations can achieve this goal because with OpenText’s Smart Process Applications, there is finally the right set of tools.

One final note, be sure to download a free copy of Forrester Research, Inc.’s report, “Smart Process Applications Fill a Big Business Gap” at: www.opentextbpm.com/SmartProcessAppsReport, and register for OpenText’s Smart Process Applications webinar with Forrester Vice President  and Principal Analyst, Craig LeClair, on March 20^th.

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As Sam Walton once said “The Customer is King – for they can fire everyone in the organisation from the CEO down – simply by spending their money somewhere else!”

Switching our mind-set from one of internal focus to one of external focus is not easy; we know intuitively that an outside-in approach leads us to better decisions on how to serve our customers. But for the most part the monolithic IT systems upon which we mostly still rely are not best suited to supporting us during such a transition and can actually prevent us from serving our customers.

The need to better serve customers is something that BPM and in particular BPMS have long been touted as the ideal technology. Well suited to assist such business transformations, however, in reality the majority of use cases for BPMS tools have been directed at the automation of more transactional work. We have concentrated on removing paper or reducing task times e.g. BPM has been used as a tool for efficiency and still very much internally focused.

Truly successful businesses and leaders understand that the growth they seek and the market differentiation that sets them apart only comes when they switch their focus from efficiency and instead direct their people and efforts in the direction of effectiveness. The results are even better when that effectiveness is directed at better serving their customers.

Consider the example of First United Bank and Trust, a company that found that the old ways of working were actually limited their ability to grow as a business.  By first addressing efficiency issues and then moving on to effectiveness they were able to harness their people and resources better, deliver better service to their customers and as a result accelerate their corporate growth once more. In this short video, Bryan Wandel, Director of IT, First United Bank and Trust, shares how they made the change.

This need for effectiveness requires that we once again rethink our IT systems and our approaches to developing them. Any business today, however large or small is going to be more dependent on technology today than ever before. Greater effectiveness requires us to find better ways to create flexible applications that are more able to deliver what we need, not just today, but tomorrow and the day after – for agility and responsiveness are just two of the hallmarks of an effective business.

Much of the effectiveness we seek will come as result of a better harnessing of the skills and abilities and enabling greater collaboration between our own people, between us and our customers and even between us and our competitors. In this respect the jury is still out on whether pure BPMS is really the right technology to help us.

It seems that perhaps there is a better way; Smart Process Apps an approach that provides us with the benefits of traditional package solutions, but with the greater flexibility afforded by BPMS based systems. At the same time Smart Process Apps reduce system implementation times, while supporting a more collaborative environment and providing ubiquitous access to systems.

At first glance you might think that Smart Process Apps is just another marketing buzzword. If so consider that recent report by Forrester Research suggests that the market for Smart Process Apps will reach $27.6bn by 2015, while the BPM platform market will only grow to around $6.5bn. (To learn more about what Forrester have to say on Smart Process Apps click here for a free report)

Based on these numbers it would seem that transitioning to Smart Process Apps offers a win-win for both vendors and their clients.

One final note, be sure to download a free copy of Forrester Research, Inc.’s report, “Smart Process Applications Fill a Big Business Gap” at: www.opentextbpm.com/SmartProcessAppsReport, and register for OpenText’s Smart Process Applications webinar with Forrester Vice President  and Principal Analyst, Craig LeClair, on March 20^th.

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Part of the discussion last week in DC revolved around the collaborative and social nature of Smart Process Applications. I remarked how many of us use tools like Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook in our personal lives, while realizing that the same capabilities are rarely offered inside the firewall. If you work at a mid-sized or big company, you probably know that it is easier to find your internal expert on finances, facilities, or industry marketing on LinkedIn than it is to search a company directory. You also realize that you can share information or news on a Facebook wall with your friends in seconds, but sharing news, asking for advice, or offering business updates usually happens inside the firewall via email that clutters up your Inbox.

These social and collaborative systems being deployed inside the firewall lack a critical capability – they do not integrate with the core systems that enable us to get our work done. Why is this? There are many reasons and excuses are out there. How can we govern that information, store it, and audit it? Who owns the information and data?  It’s hard to say because beyond the firewall – no one really owns it. If we tie these streams into our core systems, will it break something, open a hole, or open conversations that we don’t want to have?

Asking those questions is important, but it misses some of the really exciting stuff going on. For example, one of our large insurance clients in the UK implemented social capabilities into their claims management operations allowing their teams to work collaboratively.  They can now ask “have we seen this issue before?”, or “can you approve this customer claim before we breach our SLA?”, or “does anyone have a documented summary of how I can complete an investigation for Y?”. The result – they increased productivity by 35% on the team.

In the enterprise, it is not just about sharing information – it’s also about capturing knowledge, interactively brainstorming on new approaches, and getting work done faster. The big advantage comes when organizations begin integrating these social capabilities (finding experts, sharing information, and processing work) into their back-end systems to get work done or their front-end systems to better serve customers.

Like many things in the world of technology, it is not about “if” social technologies are going to meet up with core business systems – it is just a matter of when and how. I see two groups pushing this to happen: the younger workers and customers. The young folks just entering, or about to enter the workforce, don’t know how to get work done without being collaborative, social, and interactive with their peers.  And even though I am hugely in favor of the young folks driving this evolution, there is one group that will beat them to it: the almighty customer. Yup, if you are a business and you cannot service your customers the way they expect, they will just flock to the next business that can. As a consumer, I have grown just as impatient as anyone at waiting for businesses I engage with to catch up and offer me additional ways to interact in the form, time, and place of my choosing. Social capabilities tied to front and back end systems are coming sooner than you might think. The fun part for me as a customer is that I’ll benefit from the businesses that are first to bring these capabilities to market – and as a technology innovator, I’m working for a business delivering those capabilities.

One final note, be sure to download a free copy of Forrester Research, Inc.’s report, “Smart Process Applications Fill a Big Business Gap” at: www.opentextbpm.com/SmartProcessAppsReport, and register for OpenText’s Smart Process Applications webinar with Forrester Vice President  and Principal Analyst, Craig LeClair, on March 20^th.

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I am increasingly interested these days in solutions that meet industry-specific requirements. Vertical solutions are compelling because they focus on solving a critical pain point or gaining a competitive advantage within an industry.

I often write about the financial services and public sectors, so I decided it was time to look at a different face of case management. In this month’s article in my ACM series, I talk with my colleague Rob Gascho, Energy Industry Strategist at OpenText, to get his expert perspective on solutions for the Energy sector.

Deb Miller: Rob, prevailing wisdom tells us that companies don’t want technology, they want solutions. More importantly they want solutions that address their industry challenges. What are the biggest operational challenges today for the energy sector?

I was speaking with the CIO of a large exploration company recently who told me, “We’re not in the exploration business but are actually in the risk management business.” That really resonated with me.

It’s the important decisions made about where to invest and where to put wells into production that involve millions of dollars with every decision. It’s critical that you have the right information and that everybody is working from the same page. So this is where case management and business process improvement can really help, especially given the complexity of the energy industry.

Deb Miller: The energy industry is quite complex and it seems that it’s getting increasingly so. Just one example is oil and gas exploration companies moving to become producers and integrated energy companies. They have to deal with different business units including upstream, midstream, transportation, downstream and often even retail. How are energy companies dealing with industry complexity?

Rob Gascho: Historically, a lot of the businesses have operated in silos as distinct units. I’m seeing that more and more companies are moving to an integrated and a group-wide model for their business, having a centralized business model and core business processes.

This allows organizations to have different disciplines talking to each other, whether geology in the exploration area or land or drilling operations, or further down into production, operations, or even business functions like legal, finance and regulatory compliance. You can get all of these groups working together by focusing on operational excellence and having integrated processes across your organization.

Deb Miller: McKinsey says that the value of operational excellence can be measured. Companies can get up to 30 percent higher value out of existing processes and world-class operators can achieve improved compliance by implementing operational excellence through process improvement. Has the energy industry reached a tipping point in the pursuit of process excellence?

Rob Gascho: I do see a tipping point for the industry. I think it’s a really interesting time for energy companies. The global financial crisis has driven business transformation initiatives. They’ve been rationalizing their IT spending and figuring out how to improve their strategy for managing information and driving operational excellence. Case management, as a part of a holistic enterprise information management strategy, can be a platform for business transformation.

Deb Miller: I’ve seen a disconcerting statistic from the Construction Management Association of America stating that 40 percent of all major construction projects run longer than planned and incur significant cost overruns. What can the industry do to improve that?

Rob Gascho: First and foremost, the industry needs to ensure they have the right information available to the right people at the right time. Even before the first shovel is in the ground, managing your regulatory submissions, permits and contracts with an effective Case Management solution can significantly reduce delays on major capital projects.

Deb Miller: Can you share some use case examples?

Rob Gascho: Case management as a part of an enterprise information management approach can help better manage critical business information and processes across the enterprise: between EPC contractors; vendors; joint-venture partners; and between the owner-operators.

Most energy companies are really interested in achieving process excellence and improving these processes to be more effective, to reduce costs and to mitigate risks. Health, safety and environmental compliance is a major concern in the energy sector. Case Management can improve the tracking and visibility of HSE incidents, contributing to increased compliance and reduced risks.

Deb Miller: Are energy companies succeeding in their process improvement efforts then? Are they having an impact on their cost effectiveness?

Rob Gascho: I’ve worked with customers who have been able to save an order of magnitude with their process improvement. For example, they’ve been able to solve problems around enterprise asset management and in one case, save over US$ 35 million at one facility alone in the first year.

Deb Miller: How about utilities? They seem very concerned about improving processes that help them communicate more effectively with their customers, from a billing or a customer service perspective for example. How could case management help with that?

Rob Gascho: If you’re a utility, a customer communication management solution can help you attract new customers, it can help you sell new services, and it can create new value within your organization, increasing your top line.

Integrating and enabling the customer communication management solution with case management enables multi-channel communication — whether it’s through email or through print, you can deliver customized messages to your customer that help you sell new services or help you retain customers or attract new customers. So there’s a lot of ways that utilities can increase revenue and gain competitive market share using case management technology.

Deb Miller: Tell me more about gaining a competitive advantage in the energy sector; what about oil and gas companies?

Rob Gascho: Oil and gas companies are always in this constant pursuit for operational excellence, looking for ways to gain an advantage by getting their wells into production earlier than their competition. Oil companies spend a lot of effort in improving their technological processes around their operations, but often overlook how they could actually improve their internal business processes in ways that could be more effective to increase their productivity and improve their efficiency. Business process and case management solutions can provide a competitive advantage here.

Deb Miller: We read quite a bit lately about how business process management (BPM) is evolving. For example, in his recent CEO whitepaper, Mark Barrenechea says,“Forrester maps the evolution of BPM from the early days of workflow in the 1980’s — as additional capabilities have been incorporated to include model-driven development, web services, case management and ultimately, smart process applications.” What does this evolution mean for the energy sector?

Rob Gascho: Forrester went out to the oil and gas sector and asked what business benefits they looked to achieve from improved process. The number-one business benefit was cost reduction — how to trim the fat out of business processes and become more efficient in executing common tasks.

The second one was increasing the quality of output, reducing the number of errors that are related to business processes being executed in a poor way. This is the human element.

And the third was impacting the top line — increasing sales volume, or reducing cycle time. These could be asset management or maintenance processes, or they could be processes around how to make decisions about which well to put into production. These are all areas where smart process apps could focus for a big impact.

Deb Miller: In “Smart Process Applications Fill a Big Business Gap,” Forrester describes smart process apps as a new category of application software designed to support business activities that are people-intensive, highly variable, loosely structured and subject to frequent change. As a next generation of packaged apps smart process apps can encapsulate current best practices in these collaborative business processes yet make it possible for the app to reflect continuous improvements in how collaboration can occur. Where might oil and gas companies apply case management as a smart process app today?

Rob Gascho: One example, authorization for expendite (AFE), really gets to the heart of a current business problem for oil and gas companies. The typical company profile for an AFE app is a large enterprise suffering from spreadsheet chaos.

They have an integration challenge with data in a variety of applications and the only way to integrate that data is to copy and paste it into a spreadsheet. They would be manually completing their authorization for expenditures with no visibility into critical business information residing in other departments within their company. There would be little or no visibility into the process across their operations department, their land, engineering and accounting departments, and also with their external parties. The interaction between the various departments who were making decisions around this would primarily be handled by email and telephone without any tracking, prompting, or ability to follow-up if tasks were slipping.

Deb Miller: Could you share an AFE customer story?

Rob Gascho: The energy companies I work with see AFE as vital to their business and are looking for a solution around this highly unstructured process. A significant driver for one customer was that they were increasingly working in joint ventures and needed better insight not just within their own organization, but with their partners. They had to make decisions around authorizations for expenditure and realized they were being really inefficient in their operations with past due royalty payments in the tens of millions.

What they were looking for at the time was a custom solution to handle their capital expenditure approval and tracking. More than that though, they were looking for something that would get rid of their manual processes and provide collaboration for the initiation and tracking of drilling, completion, equipment and facility AFEs. They had to be able to pull data from multiple systems and provide a single dashboard that was linked into this business process.

Really what they wanted to do was to break down the silos in their organization, so that the engineers could execute their drilling completion and production decisions; that managers and executives could make informed business decisions about which wells to put into production; and that land and accounting could make decisions around how to allocate funding and to make sure the appropriate permits were in place.

I’m sure a lot of IT departments are looking for this panacea of the dashboard. This is where a case management or smart process app can be highly effective to bring all of the data into a single view in the context of the process and show the status of the tasks and where there is slippage.The executive can go right into the AFE and issue the approval directly. And there’s a complete audit trail and automatic routing that makes sure that AFEs that are rejected, terminated or approved go to the right next step within the organization.

The AFE app provides an interface for their external joint venture partners to go in and make decisions on which AFEs they wish to approve, such as which wells to put into production. It also provides an interface where real estate could link to the information in the GIS system and link to the land agreements and permitting documents into the process.

Accounting also has an easy way to update and modify the budgets attached to these AFEs — a way to delegate work to team members throughout the process, and a way to collaborate with engineering and land to make corrections.

So for the authorization for expenditure process, the AFE process app is able to link the various silos to collaborate — whether systems or functional silos — and bring engineers, accounting, the executives and the real property people together to get an integrated view of their information and create an effective and compliant decision making environment across the entire process.

Deb Miller: Great example, Rob. Could you distill some lessons learned around case management value for the energy sector?

Rob Gascho: I recommend a focus on three key business values where case management can deliver:

• Insight: Using the right information at the right time delivers valuable insight at all levels of the organization and across the industry value chain. Case management can provide relevant information in the context of the process to support informed business decisions.
• Business impact: Case management can help deliver impact to the top line — reaching new customers or putting new wells into production faster – and to the bottom line — trimming the fat out of processes, making them more efficient, reducing the time it takes to actually deliver that process.
• Governance: One of the biggest business drivers is regulatory compliance and managing risks. You need to manage all of the documents and unstructured bits of data that may be attached to your business process, emails, documents, and contracts, but also the process itself. Case management can put governance over that process and the information so that you can ensure that you have effect of management of change and compliance within your organization.

Deb Miller: We often say that case management is not so much about automating people out of the process, but rather about improving the experience for the people in the process. What are your thoughts?

Rob Gascho: Operational excellence is about providing the right information to the right person at the right time.

When we look at the challenges that face the energy sector, it’s important to understand how people fit into that triad of people, processes and tools. People have the ability to make complex decisions and operate beyond the traditional process automation or workflow management system.

So that’s the advantage of case management for the energy sector. It enables energy companies to make sure that their business process improvements take advantage of that added ability of people to rationalize problems, think outside of the box, and make well informed and compliant business decisions.

About Rob Gascho

Rob Gascho is the industry strategist for the Energy sector at OpenText. In this role, he is responsible for developing strategy and marketing of business solutions that meet the needs of the Energy sector. His experience includes leading the Software Solutions Centre for AMEC Engineering, and implementing business systems for British Petroleum and Sinopec. You can follow Rob @RobGascho on Twitter.

Editor’s Note: To read more from Deb’s ACM series, check out How ACM Delivers 3 Elements Critical for Business Transformation Success in 2013

About the Author

Deb Miller is Director of Industry Marketing at OpenText. Her work focuses on industry strategies for enterprise information management and business process improvement. Her career includes more than 20 years of global industry experience with GE. You can follow Deb @DebsG360 on Twitter.

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Let’s start 2013 by considering how the CIO function can deliver new solutions to your enterprise when as much as 80 percent of the IT budget goes to just keeping the lights on, maintaining your current systems. With market conditions forcing increased cost cutting, and a distinct trend to place more of the technology decision making and buying power in the hands of the business, the mystery of successful delivery is getting harder for the CIO to solve.

Those who follow my CMSWire article series will not be surprised to discover that for me the clues all lead to adaptive case management as the solution.

My proof includes the story of one CIO, the CIO of the Courts of Puerto Rico Administration, who managed to “crack the case” using case management to cost-effectively provide new services.

The CIO and the C-Suite Challenge

What makes a successful CIO? Some would say this is a trick question, that there is no such thing as a successful CIO, that in fact the “I” in CIO stands for Irrelevant. There are certainly a lot of obstacles in the way of success.

Technology spend decisions are also a challenge. IDC just predicted that 58 percent of new IT investments this year will directly involve the Line of Business in the decision making, and 25 percent of these will have an LOB exec as a key decision maker. Gartner is predicting a massive shift in budgets for the future, resulting in businesses groups controlling as much as 90 percent of technology spend.

If these challenges aren’t difficult enough, then consider that the very existence and relevance of the CIO role is constantly under fire. As one CIO.com article on the Future of the CIO proclaims, “For almost as long as there have been CIOs, we’ve heard breathless speculation about whether the position will last, and if so, in what form.”

Time works against the CIO. The average tenure of a CIO is only about 5 years – a short window in which to make meaningful contributions to the business. No wonder then that creating value for the enterprise is such a mysterious undertaking. Of course cynics would say there is clear formula to solving the mystery: the first year is spent creating the plan, the second year is for selecting new technology and prioritizing the projects, the third year is for beginning the implementation, and the fourth year is to be spent finding the next job to move to in the coming year. I’m not that cynical! In fact, I see ample evidence of truly successful CIOs helping to transform their enterprises. How are they doing this?

How Means, Motive and Opportunity Help Solve the CIO Challenge

The CEB in their CIO survey for 2013 found that CIO priorities for the next twelve months show strong urgency around reshaping how IT creates value and how it is governed. Of course, I have a technology and solution approach in mind here. [Cue the suspenseful mystery music in the background and then play the big reveal sound.] I see adaptive case management as one of the most effective ways for CIOs to meet the challenge of creating value because it helps in 3 critical areas.

First, the means to accomplishing IT value creation will require a smart combination of technology and change management. I’ve frequently shared my views on how case management tackles the most difficult aspects of delivering new value to the organization by ensuring that people adopt the new solution.

Value creation will also require the CIO to identify and communicate shared objectives with enterprise owners. It needs to be clear that the motive for implementing new solutions is tied to business strategy and results and the ability to innovate.

And finally to be successful in creating value, the CIO will have to work quickly to leverage a short window of opportunity. The current environment has zero tolerance for long projects with delayed ROI.

While complete roll outs reasonably require a multi-year approach, the key is to deliver value in each phase. This means, as I explored in an earlier CMSWire article on “The Best Way to Improve Business Performance,” that the methodology surrounding the implementation is as important as the technology itself.

CIO Best Practice, Courts of Puerto Rico

One interesting example of a CIO leveraging case management as a best practice is Office of the Courts Administration CIO of Puerto Rico.

The courts office is responsible for operating Puerto Rico’s network of courts, and coordinating the work of 338 judges and 14,000 lawyers, on 350,000 cases per year. Their goal was to implement a common case management system and approach to manage criminal cases across all 13 regions of Puerto Rico. The aim and the result of the implementation were not just to cut costs of delivery but also to revitalize the ability to improve through “the intelligent application of IT.”

The implementation case study and the CIO were profiled late last year by MWD Advisor’s Neil Ward-Dutton who examined their implementation of case management technology and techniques. As an independent advisory firm, MWD writes case studies reports to illustrate best practices, specifically reports that are “designed to help organisations considering or actively working with Business Process Management technology understand how others have worked to obtain benefits from BPM implementation, and how they have worked to overcome challenges that have arisen along the way.”

The lessons learned with this case study illustrate key elements along a path to successful cost-effective implementations, including an emphasis on a common language, collaboration and organizational change management.

As MWD explains, there was heavy involvement from the “line of business” for the CIO. In order to proceed with the solution, the CIO had to convince both Puerto Rico’s Chief Justice and the Courts Administrator.

“They were convinced principally through understanding the value of the iterative approach to development and ongoing change management that would be possible, facilitating ‘implementation by approximation’, rather than monolithic delivery cycles and abrupt handovers. The key convincing point was how the toolset would enable a common language to be shared between the IT development contractors and internal subject-matter experts.”

Further, the CIO and his team emphasized to all stakeholders that the solution is focused on collaborative working practices. Perhaps most impressive is that as MWD reports “Along the way, the organization is changing the way it conducts change projects.”

Challenge Accepted, Mystery Solved

The Courts of Puerto Rico is just one example of the strengths that case management can bring to help CIOs successfully meet the challenge of delivering new services.

I like how one of the current CIO.com Hall of Famers, Steve Rubinow, former CIO of NYSE Euronext and current CIO of FX Alliance, explains a not so mysterious path to success:

“It is the ability to handle, and spark, major business shifts that determines a CIO’s effectiveness.”

As I see the continuing challenges CIOs will face both in the public and the private sector, my conclusion is that successful CIOs will leverage case management because it can enable them to:

• Align with their “line of business” objectives
• Implement iterative results in 6-18 months
• Respond to the shifting business needs and regulatory climate
• And, inevitably, deliver valuable new services to the enterprise and their customers.

Case closed.

Image courtesy of Kuzma (Shutterstock)

Editor’s Note: If you didn’t notice, Deb is an authority on all things adaptive case management. To get more of her insights, read The Past, Present and Future of Case Management

About the Author

Deb Miller is Director of Industry Marketing at OpenText. Her work focuses on industry strategies for enterprise information management and business process improvement. Her career includes more than 20 years of global industry experience with GE. You can follow Deb @DebsG360 on Twitter.

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View the list of influential individuals within academic and standards organizations now, as well as bios, images, and links to additional information for each member of The Case Management Top Influencers Study. Learn why they are so influential in the field of case management.

This is a very prestigious distinction and we congratulate all of the academics and standards organizations who have been included.

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View the list of system integrators and vendors now, as well as bios, images, and links to additional information for each member of The Case Management Top Influencers Study. Learn why they are so influential in the field of case management.

This is a very prestigious distinction and we congratulate all of the system integrators and vendors who have been included.

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View the list of end users now, as well as bios, images, and links to additional information for each member of The Case Management Top Influencers Study. Learn why they are so influential in the field of case management.

This is a very prestigious distinction and we congratulate all of the end users who have been included.

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Have you ever wondered who are the most influential individuals in driving Case Management adoption? Who are the key influencers in driving growth and knowledge in the Case Management community? Who is driving the ideas to evolve Case Management to be a more strategic business platform?

As a company who has a vested interest in the expansion and success of Case Management, OpenText wanted to know. We felt that if we had this knowledge it would help us decide who to partner with and where to make our investments. The question then became one of “how”.

A simple survey would be one approach. But would that really tell us everything we wanted to know? So we turned our focus to another approach: What if we could find the most influential voices in the Case Management community and work with them?

OpenText had been successful identifying the top influencers in the business process management (BPM) and SharePoint market working with a company called Influencer50. As I mentioned in yesterday’s article, The Case Management Top Influencers Study: Who are the main influencers in Case Management?, Influencer50 is a team of independent analysts who find the top influencers in select markets.

Our BPM and SharePoint studies were a huge success for us as it helped to identify who our customers trusted when they were making decisions around business process improvement and implementing SharePoint. Because we were seeing a lot of companies looking to leverage Dynamic Case Management as a strategic business process platform, we wanted to repeat this success for the case management market. Understanding who our customers — and potential customers — look to as “trusted advisors” makes it easier for us to identify who we want to work with in a number of key areas such as our customer implementations, product strategy, and education.

By identifying who the top influencers are in the Case Management community, we can also do our part to proliferate their good ideas and work in partnership to support their community expansion efforts. For example, we are working with several members of the community (names to be revealed in the following weeks) on an educational series, guides, and webinars around how to know if case management is right for you and what features are critical to achieve success.

OpenText believes in the spirit of community and that the more people with great ideas, the better. “Influencers”, by definition are people whose actions or opinions have an effect on someone else. Interacting with the top influencers in the Case Management Community can help us identify what the “best of the best” are doing right to learn, grow, and share their ideas.

What do you think? Is there someone that has been highly influential in your decision-making process that you feel should be included in the list? Please share.

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A Little Background

For those working with Case Management and having to make decisions about purchasing and implementation, who do you trust when it comes to making those decisions? This is a question OpenText decided to tackle by commissioning a study to find out who the top influencers are in the field of Case Management: The Case Management Top Influencers. The study was done by Influencer50, a team of independent analysts who find the top influencers in select vertical markets. The results of the study focus exclusively on people who influence Case Management decision makers in the United States and the UK. There are some influencers from outside the US and UK, but their influence is on the audience within the US and UK.

What This Study is Not

The Case Management Top Influencers Study is not a popularity contest. You will be surprised by some of the people included. I seriously expect to hear “Who is THAT?” and “How come S/HE was chosen and not me!” That’s ok. The results are based upon how well and how far a message goes towards influencing people, not how many “friends” someone has on Facebook or how many “followers” they may have on Twitter. The study takes into account a series of factors including:

• Market reach
• Frequency of impact
• Message independence
• Expertise
• Persuasiveness
• Thoroughness of role in decision-making

Different weight is given to each factor.

You will not see rankings, placing people in order from 1 through 70. After thinking it through, we decided that would just be a flame war waiting to happen. We have divided the influencers into specific groups and will present names defined within specific areas of the Case Management Community, such as end-users, industry analysts, consultants, academics, systems integrators, and vendors.

What You Can Expect To See In This Series

Starting today, we will begin a series of articles on specific segments within The Case Management Top Influencers. The first segment is “Case Management Industry Analysts / Consultants”, followed each week by a new market segment.

1)    Today: Industry Analysts and Consultants

2)    November 1: End Users

3)    November 8: Systems Integrators and Vendors

4)    November 15: Academics and Standards Organizations

We are providing bios, images, and links to additional information for each member of The Case Management Top Influencers Study.

How You Can Participate

Go to the site; see who the influencers are and learn more about them and why they are so influential in the field of case management. This is a very prestigious distinction and we congratulate all who have been included.

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