Earlier this year we formally surveyed banking executives from across North America to help us better understand the pitfalls within loan processing.  One of the most surprising results was that half of the executives surveyed rate their loan processing environment as either lagging the competition or merely adequate. We recently launched an extended, global, version of the survey and invite you to participate at http://svy.mk/KTr2S5.

While it’s no deep, dark secret that executives and stakeholders alike are looking for better ways to simplify, streamline and continuously improve the loans, credit and financing processes within their organizations, it is not always clear what changes can have the greatest impact. Improving these processes starts with an understanding of the current industry priorities, benchmarks, regulatory requirements and consumer demands.

To learn more about the current state of the financial services industry, join us on Wednesday, June 13^th at 2:00PM EST as we unveil the results of our executive survey9 in a webinar, Mending Lending: Trends and Best Practices to Improve Loan Processing. During the webinar, Rodney Nelsestuen, Senior Research Director for TowerGroup and I will be discussing some of the surprising findings from the executive survey, industry trends, as well as offering proven best practices and actionable approaches to transform your loan processes. All attendees will receive a complimentary copy of the survey findings.

We hope you will join us at the webinar session and please take a moment to participate in the survey.

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This year was no different; I was excited to talk about all the new great advancements in the BPM space: Social BPM, Mobile and Cloud computing, just to name a few (still dreading the work pile up). Well, the craziness started around noon Tuesday and attendees swarmed the exhibition hall to see all the vendors’ offerings. I had great conversations with users from every industry, representing a variety of roles and including existing customers as well as competitor customers – all eager to exchange knowledge and hopefully walk away with new ideas.

But this year, I noticed (for the first time?) that I was talking to a lot of “newbies” in the space (this was also clear from the number of badges that had BEGINNER ribbons on them). Managers, CIO’s, it didn’t matter; they were all looking to understand what BPM is and how it will help them. The surprising point here is that in most cases, those with whom I met were overwhelmed and timid about BPM, which made me wonder: “Have we overcomplicated our message?” If you looked around the exhibit hall, the vendor booths were decked out with fancy acronyms and aggressive promises, all touting advanced, seemingly, futuristic and complex capabilities, so I think in some ways, in an effort to differentiate and highlight our technology capabilities as vendors, we confused the very basic message that BPM really is a management discipline. It’s how an organization gets work done.

At its core, BPM is about driving better business outcomes for an organization by improving processes, optimizing and maximizing resources and simplifying work. It is important for beginners to really understand the value of BPM and how it can transform the way work gets done. On the vendor side, we talk about BPM technology as being about more than process automation – it’s about enabling continuous process improvements. And, we do see that companies who are using BPM solutions to support a well defined business strategy are yielding the greatest value from their BPM solutions. But the fact is, automating processes is exactly where many organizations are with their BPM efforts today and this is a critical first step towards enabling continuous process improvements. While many people would say that automating a broken process is not beneficial, I would argue that there is absolutely value in seeing how and where improvements are needed. Automation provides this visibility.

For this, it’s important to remember the most basic principle of all start small. Even the smallest process improvements can produce significant results. Most of the successful BPM implementations I have seen began with a small process improvement project that they were able to repeat across the organization. There are still a significant number of organizations who are not yet benefiting from the value of BPM. Many of these companies will need to follow the industry’s evolution, albeit in a condensed timeline, and for this we need to continue to talk about the basic values in our message and help the “newbies” join our growing family.

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After months of development and planning, OpenText is bringing our high-velocity business process management (BPM) offering to the Microsoft® Azure Cloud. Building on the success of our on-premise OpenText Shared Services Center solution that provides over 70 process-enabled services for IT and business, our clients will now have the option to consider cloud, on-premise, or hybrid deployments. While the 70 process-enabled services already accelerate deployment and design initiatives, giving our clients the option to deploy and deliver these services in the cloud further accelerates their time-to-value.

Following on the heels of our announcement earlier this year with Microsoft, we are really excited about delivering this solution in the Azure cloud.   I’ll describe a few of the benefits Azure brings to our solution below, but one of the best is that when our customers choose to deploy in the cloud, on-premise, or in hybrid configurations, there is a single code base that makes integrations, interactions and ongoing support easy.

The Need for Speed
While visiting many of our customers and prospects, I have heard them complain about the massive investments they are making to maintain a huge portfolio of packaged applications for their businesses. The business executives are complaining that their IT organizations cannot update those packaged applications fast enough to keep pace with the rapid pace of change happening in their markets and industries. In many cases, the same application is being modified with custom coding efforts to support localized business needs.  And while IT organizations try their best to support the requirements from their business customers, they realize that every application change introduces more frailty and higher maintenance of the packaged applications. In my conversations with our clients, both IT and business execs are looking for an alternative: they want to introduce changes quickly, yet maintain the reliability and integrity of the environment at a low-cost.

This is where Shared Services Center is grabbing their attention. Business leaders love the ability to deliver new or modify existing process-enabled services rapidly. For example, one of our clients told me that they are rolling out 4 – 8 new services each week to support their customers. At the same time, the IT executives there are in love our solution as they get a common platform for delivering both business and IT shared services that allows changes to be made quickly, affordably, and reliably. Cool, huh?

While reading John Halamka’s CIO’s blog recently on dealing with the pace of change, he mentioned “If you are doing business as usual, you are falling behind.” Change is everywhere. According to a recent Gartner survey¹, nearly 30% of organizations reported making changes to their processes on a monthly or more frequent basis. An additional 37% of organizations made process changes on an ad hoc basis. This is clearly a rate of change that most traditional packaged application environments can’t support. If your organization is among those making frequent process changes, you might consider taking a look at OpenText’s Shared Services Center solution.

More about Azure
As mentioned earlier, I am excited about the common code base between our on-premise and cloud-based offerings. It just makes life simpler for everyone. But that is not all Azure brings us. It also brings us the ability to offer our software as a service to clients – bringing all of the benefits of our Shared Services Center solution without the overhead of deploying, configuring, or maintaining the underlying environment. What other cool things does Azure bring to the table? Here are just a few:

• Blob Storage, allows OpenText Shared Services Center to accommodate changing demand for document and data storage, expanding and contracting to support your organization’s needs.

• Shared Services Center takes advantage of blob storage along with Microsoft SQL Azure to balance structured data performance with the need for unstructured data storage and retrieval.

• Just as our BPM environment allows you to redirect staff to better manage changing business demands and work assignments, Azure’s  geo distribution capability allows you to redirect computing resources to where they are most needed to better serve customers

OpenText Shared Services Center is available in an on-premise version today, and will be available via Windows Azure in July 2012.  I’d love to hear your feedback. Feel free to ask questions by posting a comment here or contacting us at processspecialist@opentext.com.

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The hot topics this year, not surprisingly, include case management, mobility, gamification and social media, and basic and next-generation BPM.

With an agenda packed full of keynotes, myriad BPM sessions designed for all levels of BPM maturity (introductory to advanced) and user case studies, it’s hard to decide where to start. We’ve taken a look at Gartner’s agenda and shortlisted the sessions we think are “must-sees.”

Case Management

Dynamic Case Management: Unifying Experiences to Transform Customer Service
Wendy Kimball, Director, VSP, Kelly Romer, Group Manager, Intuit, and Yasemin Sezer, SVP, Software Engineering Services, L&T Infotech
Wednesday, April 25th 2:15-3:15PM
View the session abstract and add it to your agenda builder, here.

Rapid Fire: Case Management: The Hottest Unstructured Process Pattern
Janelle Hill, VP Distinguished Analyst, Gartner
Thursday, April 26th 4:30-5:15PM
View the session abstract and add it to your agenda builder, here.

BPM Success

BPM Foundations
Janelle Hill, VP Distinguished Analyst, Gartner
Wednesday, April 25th 10:00-11:00AM
View the session abstract and add it to your agenda builder, here.

BPM Best Practices of Highly Adaptive Organizations
Betsy Burton, VP, Distinguished Analyst, Gartner
Wednesday, April 25th 10:00-11:00AM
View the session abstract and add it to your agenda builder, here.

End User Case Study – Achieving Service Excellence: Making Every Moment Matter
Jorge Rosas, VP, Chubb Group of Insurance
Thursday, April 26th 12:15-12:45View the session abstract and add it to your agenda builder, here.

Spectacular Success or Dismal Failure? Critical Practices for Getting BPM Right
Helen Cousins, EVP & CIP, Lincolin Trust Company and Elise Olding, Research Director, Gartner
Thursday, April 26th 8:30-9:30AM
View the session abstract and add it to your agenda builder, here.

Rapid Fire: Running A Proof of Concept to Ensure BPM Success
Teresa Jones, Principal Research Analyst, Gartner
Thursday, April 26th 04:30 PM to 05:15 PM
View the session abstract and add it to your agenda builder, here.

Metrics for Success
Friday, April 27th 10:30-11:30AM
John Dixon, Research Director, Gartner
View the session abstract and add it to your agenda builder, here.

Social media, mobility and gamification

Keynote: Driving Organizational Success by Combining Social Media & Business Process Transformation
Anthony J. Bradley, GVP, Gartner
Wednesday, April 25th 8:45-9:45AM
View the session abstract and add it to your agenda builder, here.

Leveraging Mobility, Context and Communications Into Your Business Processes
Bern Elliot, VP Distinguished Analyst, Gartner
Wednesday, April 25th 3:30-4:30PM
View the session abstract and add it to your agenda builder, here.

Gamification: Employ Game Techniques to Increase BPM Engagement
Elise Olding, Research Director, Gartner
Friday, April 27th 10:30-11:30AM
View the session abstract and add it to your agenda builder, here.


Expanding your BPM Strategy

Time to Rethink Your Business Process Modeling Strategy
David Norton, Research Director, Gartner
Wednesday, April 25th 11:15 to 12:15 PM
View the session abstract and add it to your agenda builder, here.

End-User Case Study: Use Business Capabilities To Illustrate Crucial Investment Decisions
Betsy Burton, VP Distinguished Analyst, Gartner and Matthew Duncan, PMP, Senior Project Manager, Pacific Gas and Electric Company
Thursday, April 26th 9:45 AM to 10:45 AM
View the session abstract and add it to your agenda builder, here.

BPM on the Horizon

Intelligent Business Operations
Jim Sinur, Research Vice President, Gartner
Wednesday, April 25th 11:15-12:15PM
View the session abstract and add it to your agenda builder, here.

Technology Road Map for Expanding your BPM Efforts
Teresa Jones, Principal Research Analyst, Gartner
Thursday, April 26th 8:30 AM to 09:30 AM
View the session abstract and add it to your agenda builder, here.

Keynote: Business Process Management 2020
Jim Sinur, Research Vice President, Gartner
Thursday, April 26 April 5:30 PM to 06:15 PM
View the session abstract and add it to your agenda builder, here.

Driving Differentiation with BPM & Application Pace Layering
Michele Cantara, Research VP, Gartner and James Holincheck, Research VP, Gartner
Friday, April 27th, 10:30 AM to 11:30 AM
View the session abstract and add it to your agenda builder, here.

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A few weeks ago Clay Richardson Senior Analyst at Forrester Research, Nathaniel Palmer Editor-in-Chief of BPM.com and Donna Tellam, Director, User Experience Specialist of OpenText BPS hosted a roundtable-style webinar in which they discussed some of the lesser-known ways organizations can maximize the value of BPM. Here are a few key takeaways that can help you achieve the best possible return on your BPM investment.

Start small, think big, move fast
The majority of BPM projects are mission critical in nature and therefore have a much higher internal risk. Clay suggests that organizations start with a project that is big enough to demonstrate clear value to the management team, but still small enough that it doesn’t put your organization at too much risk. With the right amount agility in your process improvement efforts, you can rapidly drive organizational changes. For example, one company had a big vision for BPM. In order to prove the potential value of enterprise-wide BPM deployment to their organization they selected a specific project where they could engage the line of business manager. The scope of the project was small enough that only a fraction of the users were affected by the change. By having the line of business manger involved throughout the entire project, they were able to fully experience and convey how BPM could transform their organizational operations. Once users catch a glimpse of what BPM can do, the team is almost bombarded with requests to automate key processes across a variety of departments within the business. Breaking a large, often complex vision into bite-sized projects pieces can be an effective way to demonstrate the incremental value of BPM while setting the stage for how BPM can be expanded to support broader initiatives and goals.

People driving change
A compelling event is often the catalyst for a BPM project. However, some of the most successful BPM implementations start with a person, rather than an event, driving change. These process improvement projects begin with a change agent that truly understands the strategic value of BPM. This change agent is either in a senior management position or has the attention of senior management and is positioned to gain executive sponsorship. It is important for the change agent to collaborate with the person responsible for shaping the BPM project so that they can articulate the need and value of process automation.  Securing the right executive sponsor and team for a BPM project is also critical to the success and adoption of BPM within organizations.  This support must be secured from the outset and can make or break BPM projects.

The metrics
To demonstrate value, you must understand and measure your success – which can be tricky. Successful organizations measure how effective they are able to transition their organization into a more process-driven culture. You can do this by taking a look at the number of process automation projects you do in a given year and how many of those projects take advantage of BPM capabilities.

As your BPM team shifts its focus from the typical cost-cutting objectives that involve automating the manual, mundane tasks and towards value innovation, you will begin to see how these improvements impact customer-facing activities. By improving core processes that would typically take several days, weeks (or even months) you are better prepared and have more time and resources to devote to delivering innovation, improving customer service and getting products to market faster.

If you are new to BPM or want to squeeze more value out of your BPM implementation, I strongly suggest you check out Clay Richardson’s Forrester Report, The ROI of BPM Suites. For those of you craving more information, download our recent webinar and podcast which unveils the steps to taking your BPM project to the next level.

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Over 43% of organizations deploying SharePoint are looking to purchase workflow or business process management (BPM) add-on applications for the platform, according to the 2011 “How Are Businesses Using SharePoint” survey. Like many businesses deploying SharePoint, usage within the organization expands dramatically as users find it a useful place to store, share and collaborate on content and information. As the base of users expands rapidly across an organization, the amount of content within SharePoint begins to balloon. As the comfort level with SharePoint increases users tend to store more critical documents like invoices, claims, employment applications, loan documents, and contracts. Users then want to utilize SharePoint to distribute, review, amend and approve this critical content. The more critical the content, the more people across the organization want to interact with it to get their work done.

This past week in San Francisco, I was invited to present a paper with Sadie Van Buren on how organizations can improve their SharePoint business process maturity. The business process maturity level definitions were established by Sadie in a collaborative effort with many people across the SharePoint community over the past couple of years. In addition to her business process maturity definitions, the SharePoint maturity model also provides level 100 through 500 definitions for publication, collaboration, business intelligence, search, integration and more. You can find a copy of her maturity model here.

During our session, we discussed SharePoint process maturity at five levels, beginning with basic workflows (e.g., submit a time off request) leading all the way up to advance concepts, including dynamic process execution, process intelligence dashboards, on-the-fly process changes and real-time collaboration between process experts.

At the lower levels of SharePoint process maturity, users take advantage of workflows to approve an expense report or a vacation time off request. In these instances, users have little to no visibility of the workflow’s execution status. Daily or monthly reports are not generated on process execution history, few people collaborated through the execution of the process, and the process itself rarely changed.

The interesting thing about our discussion was that as process maturity increased in SharePoint, other maturity levels increased.   Process maturity was the tide that lifted all ships in the SharePoint ecosystem.

At higher levels of maturity process examples are less tactical and more strategic to the business. For example, take a business that is using SharePoint as an application platform to host operations like loan processing, accounts payable or new account on-boarding. For these organizations, visibility to process execution is critical for knowledge workers, management and business analysts. Process changes are initiated by both SharePoint developers who are making changes to the process application or by managers who are changing work assignments based on business intelligence metrics displayed within their view to the application.

Additionally, as process maturity levels increase, roles (e.g., case workers, reviewers, researches, approvers and supervisors) interacting with the process are more specialized. We also see collaboration tools within those applications being used across those roles to speed decision making. Sadie and I discussed that as SharePoint process maturity increases, so do the maturity levels for collaboration, business intelligence, search and integration.

So, you might ask yourself – why is this important to the SharePoint and business process community? For years now the SharePoint community at large has been concerned with its accelerated use and expanded presence in the enterprise. As SharePoint’s popularity has grown, the cost to support it has also grown – not only in terms of license cost, but in IT personnel required to support and maintain it, training required, hardware to run it, etc. As the cost of the environment continues to expand, CIOs and other business leaders are asking how they can get a better return on those investments. As the cost increases, people are looking beyond the technology strategy and are beginning to question the business strategy behind SharePoint. The same 2011 survey mentioned above showed that beyond user adoption and training, the lack of or limited business strategy surrounding SharePoint was their second biggest challenge with the platform.

If your organization is seeking more value from SharePoint and looking to resolve your business strategy for the platform, I strongly suggest that you consider the adoption of workflow and businesses process as a key part of their overall program.

Interested in learning more about SharePoint and process maturity, please visit our SlideShare site to get a copy of the presentation, “Improving Your SharePoint Process Maturity” that Sadie and I delivered.

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Despite automation gains, industry processes are still heavily people and paper-oriented. So it stands to reason that changing the way business is done for the better means finding new ways of handling information, revamping manual processes and motivating workers. To include the people side in our process, change initiatives will require “fit to purpose” tools that address the user perspective.

Process improvement needs leaner “fit to purpose” tools
With continuing pressure from the global economy, organizations face an increasing demand for lean tools to get more done with fewer resources.

As Clay Richardson of Forrester Research¹ writes in his blog, “The shift away from ‘IT-centric’ inflexible solutions such as CRM and ERP will give way to more dynamic business-centric solutions that deliver the same process improvements with greater flexibility and adaptability for the business.”

Business process (BPM) and case management meet this demand as “fit to purpose” technology.

To illustrate, consider a customer enrollment process. Here there is a need to involve and balance people, paper and automation. Human judgment is also often required for exception handling or contextual decision making. A purely rules-based automation technology to define an enrollment process makes it difficult to do anything more than track the status of a particular application using an attribute. This limits visibility into the actual process. The electronic forms capabilities of most traditional content management solutions doesn’t quite fit either because enrollment isn’t about the document itself but rather about the customer and all their supporting information housed in many other systems.

Indeed, most traditional packaged application solutions often ignore paper and focus on the process steps, glossing over the challenge that the content itself presents. However, business process and case management fit the less structured, collaborative needs of the enrollment process and many other core processes quite well. Managing and controlling processes is what we are ultimately trying to achieve. To do this successfully will require our understanding and inclusion of the human factor.

Processes don’t do work, people do
As Keith Harrison-Broninski aptly reminds us in his landmark book²  Human Interactions: The Heart and Soul of Business Process Management, “After all processes don’t do work, people do.”

In today’s knowledge-based economy, the fact is that most work processes, including the hardest ones to control, are carried out by people rather than computer systems. That is why leading organizations are including user work study and a focus on user interface design in their business improvement strategies.  We can use this information to improve and amplify human-driven processes and to better serve the critical needs of our knowledge workers.

For maximum results, solutions should have an obvious and direct impact on each individual stakeholder. McKinsey advises leaders at companies starting a transformation to put a priority on finding efficient and scalable ways to engage employees.³ In a digital era characterized by increased collaboration, organizations are shifting from a purely IT-centric strategy to create dynamic, business-driven process solutions.

A critical element in that shift is the renewed emphasis on designing user-centric environments and controls. User-centricity requires the availability of context-driven content and the ability to support knowledge worker decisions via the integration of all the pertinent data, tasks, milestones, discussions, events, policies and processes. Part of the growing trend is the move to support more complex processes with ad-hoc and less-scripted workflows by leveraging case management disciplines and technologies.

Case in point is Univita Health.  Business process and case management are critical to supporting their long-term care group, one of the premier suppliers of outsourced services in the industry. Univita traditionally had maintained long-term care coverage as its base but had switched to a different model—home-based healthcare – and needed to be more efficient in managing their knowledge work.

With their solution in place, Univita automatically routes documents to a knowledge user who is responsible for the related line of business. The document is evaluated and classified based on the request type. The user can add the document to an existing client file or create a new work case depending on the request. The solution is integrated with the client information system that is used to validate the customer information. Once this vetting process is complete, the request is routed to a work queue based on the request type where a knowledge user can select the work request.

As a result, Univita is able to prioritize work and match work requests with user skills. Once the process is complete, the documents are automatically archived but remain available in the event there is a customer inquiry. Univita now has a workbench for their knowledge workers and a single point of reference for customer correspondence.

The truth about people and change
Whether you follow Lean, Six Sigma, or a combination of disciplines, one truth we all recognize is that people are the hardest part of business change. I have learned from experience how important it is to consider the users’ point of view. This is especially true for less prescriptive processes, where work is centered on and driven by the process participants. Perception is reality – if the process change is perceived as unfavorable then it will be so. To be successful then we need to design the user experience to serve each participant role, including focus on the all important customer role.

And, if you want to increase the chance of success and accelerate the implementation of change efforts, you need to emphasize not just the quality of the technical solution, but also the role that stakeholders play in the process change itself.

One of my favorite examples is the business transformation at Irish Life, They are one of Ireland’s largest and most successful financial organizations and the market leader in the provision of life, pension and investment products. Irish Life was drowning in paper and, without a standard process, turnaround times were excessive. There was no visibility of where work was in process and the #1 customer complaint was response time.

Irish Life chose business process and case management to remove paper and streamline their processes and balance workload, resulting in improved customer turnaround time and consistency, management visibility into all work statuses, and a 35% improvement in productivity.

To achieve their goal, Irish Life included the process participants and stakeholders in the improvement initiative. By focusing on the user, Irish Life changed how their work gets done. In effect, they improved the workers experience, rather than merely speeding old and potentially ineffective ways of working.

From a people perspective the system has made a huge impact.  While the environment is more controlled than before, employees recognize the improvements in the way they work and the results of that work are being driven by the BPM solution. A key example is how they deal with ‘problem cases’. The teams now have the correct information and the necessary time to process the cases within the SLAs, which is clearly a source of satisfaction for the workers.

In fact, with the improved visibility at an executive, management, and team level, it is not unusual to find employees now being proactive; asking questions like ‘can we also do this with the system?’ With improvements implemented throughout the business, Irish Life’s motto is now ‘today’s work done today.’ The Irish Life success is all about driving adoption rates and enthusiasm from the grass roots as well as top down. Evidence the CEO’s comment, “It’s been the best thing IT has ever done for the business.”

The lesson learned is that in order to drive operational efficiency and productivity improvements, we need to focus our efforts to consider how people will embrace, accept and adopt change resulting from those efforts. Being user-centric and attuned to your stakeholder motivations and solution needs will enable faster time to business value with change that is also sustainable.

If you are looking for more information about how to succeed with BPM and case management, I recommend  the “7 Steps to Process Mastery” eBook series as a good read for those just starting on the journey and a useful reference for those who are well on their way.

References:
¹ Forrester Blog Posted by Clay Richardson on March 21, 2010
² Published by Meghan-Kiffer Press ISBN 0-929652-44-4
³ What successful transformations share, a McKinsey Global survey, January 2010

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As business leaders look past slow-to-change packaged applications and towards new ways to improve mission-critical processes, many organizations have started to embrace business process management (BPM) technologies. While the adoption of BPM suites increases each year, many organizations have yet to realize the rich benefits they can achieve by extending their BPM implementation beyond its traditional cost-cutting focus.

Not surprising, Clay Richardson, senior analyst at Forrester refers to some of the major benefits of process automation as low-hanging fruit – which includes for example, the elimination of bottlenecks – such as data entry duplication – to increase operational efficiency. Other benefits include the ability to quickly and effectively respond to compliance and process change, improve worker productivity, and increase collaboration between business and IT.¹ However, as an organization’s understanding, awareness and use of BPM matures, many key stakeholders begin to realize they can leverage these tools to continuously improve and transform their business.

BPM has the potential to deliver significant ROI and transform your organization. According to Forrester Research, many organizations who have achieved significant success have shifted their BPM priorities from reducing costs to improving customer experience and increasing value innovation. These companies see a tremendous return on investment in the form of increased competitiveness, customer growth, accelerated time to market, and improved operating model flexibility.

Organizations have the ability to continuously improve and change the way they operate by using BPM. With the right information, resources and team, businesses can achieve a strategic advantage over the competition. If you’re interested in learning more about identifying and measuring the ROI your organization can achieve from BPM, I encourage you to join Clay Richardson, Nathaniel Palmer, and Donna Tellam on Tuesday, February 21^st at 11:00 AM EST for a free webinar on Unlocking the Secrets of BPM ROI. You may also click here to access a free copy of Forrester’s ROI of BPM Suites report.

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Here in my first 2012 article of my ACM series is my perspective on agility, as influenced by my golden retriever Hayden who competed for many years in Dog Agility. He helped me form some truths I’d like to share that I believe apply equally to business agility.

Agility is about being better than the competition. In business, agility has become a competitive necessity — we need organizational and operational agility to thrive and perhaps to even survive in today’s markets. In the canine world, agility is literally a competitive team sport — with winners and losers just as in business. Dogs and their human handlers compete together to complete the agility course in the best time with the most accuracy.

Case Management as World-Class Agility Handler

As a self-admitted dog lover, it is not surprising that my views on agility are colored by my experiences in that world as well as the world of business. And, as a raving fan of business process and case management, it is also no surprise that I see this technology as critical to achieving successful business agility.

I think that case management is the perfect agility partner for the knowledge worker in business and performs many of the same functions that a world-class agility handler does. If case management is like a handler, then the knowledge worker is like my golden retriever in this analogy. [My apologies to those knowledge workers who might resent this comparison; please understand this is the highest form of compliment in my world view.]

I believe business can learn a lot about what it takes to succeed from how a golden retriever approaches things. Here are my four truths about agility for your consideration:

Four Truths About Achieving Agility Success

1. Be Fearless
In dog agility, the course and milestones are set differently each time and thus the events unfold differently each time. Though the golden does not know what order things might be happening, he does know he must run fast and be responsive to his handler to win. So the Golden is confident and attacks the course without hesitation and knows that helping him get there, providing the guardrails for success, is his handler.

That is exactly what can happen for knowledge workers using case management for unstructured ad hoc business processes. Their guidance through business uncertainty or processes that emerge and play out differently each time can be orchestrated by case management who can organize all the information, tasks and events for faster decision making and better outcomes. They can attack the task at hand and not be afraid they will go “off track.” Regulatory rules and any other requirements (the business equivalent of hitting each course milestone) can be incorporated in the case solution. And, when an exception is encountered or a mistake is made, case management provides support to adjust to it or correct it quickly and proceed.

2. Focus on the Goal
In order to win, you need to be goal oriented. In fact business agility can be measured by how well we accomplish our goals. In dog agility, the golden knows not to let distractions sidetrack him during the running of the course. There will be noise at the sidelines and unexpected events can occur (like a bird attack on the course one day ☺), but that does not deter him from hitting his milestone goals. In business, the case management paradigm also has a goal orientation, and coordinates goals along with other core process elements like data and rules, enabling clear visibility and focus on the goals for the knowledge worker and supervisors, managers and executives. Case also provides the flexibility and support to meet goals in different ways, just as different competitors in dog agility might run the course slightly differently between milestones.

3. Teamwork is everything
Teams can compensate for each other’s strengths and weaknesses. Hayden won one of his ribbons in agility on one of the hottest days of the year. His human partner made sure Hayden had a cold towel wrap right before the event so he would be at peak agility, but neglected to keep himself cool. When his handler stumbled at the end of the course from the heat, Hayden finished the course perfectly and WON. (There are no points deducted in agility if the handler falls ☺). With case management, the business team is empowered to work together effectively. Intelligent allocation can be done to level workloads, find the best skilled resources, and bring in collaborative advice from an expert network.

4. Understand the losses, Celebrate the victories
The golden and his handler learn from each event in dog agility. Though each new course you run will be different, you begin to understand techniques that could make you the fastest and most accurate the next time. The golden competes with all of his energy, enjoys the finish and celebrates the victories. In fact, everyone cheers for every dog that completes the agility course because that in itself is an accomplishment. In business, recognize and take satisfaction in each new account opened, each customer helped in record time, each policy offered and accepted, or each credit claim resolved. With case management more and more of these accomplishments will be possible in less time and with fewer resources and all of the learning of what was successful can be captured in the case ecosystem for the next time. When you do win against the competition or beat the SLA or go the extra mile to delight the customer, be sure to celebrate the job well done.

Speaking of Celebrating the Victories… As one of my favorite gurus once said, “Celebrate what you want to see more of.” — Tom Peters. And as one of my favorite goldens once “said,” “WOOF” — Talisman’s Hayden O’Briarland

Translation: “It’s fun to win! Pass the liver treats, please.”

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I cannot count the number of times I’ve been reminded of that bit of advice. The idea of knowing what you are doing, how well you are doing, and how well others are doing the same thing, touches on both our business and our personal lives. Anyone making an effort to be more competitive, more productive, or more efficient can benefit from “the score.”

As we all saw in the recent Super Bowl, the score was motivating actions of all-star players until the very last seconds of their performance. But the players were not the only ones motivated.  The score also motivated the coaches to architect new plays and game-winning strategies. The fans were motivated to cheer on their favorite players, encouraging them to improve the score. For everyone at the game, knowing the score helped them improve the fight, strategize, or cheer to improve the score. There is no doubt that Football is a ”social” game where the interactions of many can change the outcome.

Now, let’s turn to business. One of our account executives in the UK frequently tells a story  about one of our  large insurance clients. The client installed wide screen displays in all of their offices — not to watch the latest football matches – but to keep score within their business so that every day they would know:

• How many transactions that day required processing
• How many transactions were in progress
• How many transactions had  been completed
• How many transitions were at risk of being late

These monitors were showing everyone “the score” of the day’s activities.  The data reflecting the current state of the business was not shared by a select few, but by the masses. Having that information available helped motivate people to work not only faster, but smarter. If a deadline was at risk, the team huddled to figure out the best way to mitigate the delay. If the team was exceeding performance expectations, people could feel the buzz of excitement in the office.

This is just one way business process performance metrics of our solutions are being used in a social sense to motivate actions and interactions. It is a simple example of how gamification is being introduced in the work place.

This leads me to think about some of the great new social business process management (BPM) technologies OpenText is rolling out. Recent attendees at the OpenText BPM Summit last fall and those planning to attend our spring events (e.g., regional BPS Live! meetings and Gartner’s BPM Summit) saw or will see our new social server technology. This technology allows people to interact with one another in new, non-programmatic ways around a process and its outcome. The premise of the technology is simple in that “none of us is as smart as all of us.”

Using the technology in the context of business process management will allow our clients to interact with their colleagues as well as partners, customers, or constituents to speed and improve the outcome of an effort.  Coupling the social server technology with the performance metrics above moves us another step closer to bringing gamification concepts into our business process solutions. By knowing the score, participants will seek to improve the score. By seeking to improve the score, participants will encourage the talent, experience and know-how of others to influence outcomes for their business.

If you would like to read more about gamification entering the world of business applications, I encourage you to read the recent article in Forbes by Haydn Shaughnessy, called “The Day I Knew Gamification Would be a Winner.”  I would also encourage you to share your thoughts in the comments area below about how gamification of business process solutions could change your business’ score.

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February might be the shortest month of the year, but that’s not holding us back. Our calendar this month is jam-packed with informative webinars on a variety of topics around business process management (BPM) and enterprise architecture (EA). Check out the list below to see what we have to offer and be sure to register!

Communicating in the Language of Business
Thursday, February 9, 2012
11:00AM-12:00PM EST

It’s no secret that companies are looking to their enterprise architecture teams to increase business agility, cut costs, streamline operations and improve customer service. In this webinar, Sandra Moran, Director, Product Marketing for OpenText BPS will illustrate how enterprise architects can leverage customizable business performance intelligence dashboards to better demonstrate to both business and IT leaders the deeper value you can achieve from your EA investments. For more details and to register, click here.

Financial Services Webinar Series: Paperless Funding
Wednesday, February 15, 2012
11:00AM-12:00PM EST

In this 30 minute demo Brett Kovach, Senior Solution Consultant for OpenText BPS will show you how banks and major automotive and equipment financing organizations improved their lease and loan origination with three simple best practices for BPM. For more details and to register, click here.

Unlock the Secrets of BPM ROI: Insightful Study from Forrester Research
Tuesday, February 21, 2012
11:00AM-12:00PM EST

In the third installment of our Getting Started with BPM series, Clay Richardson, Senior Analyst, Forrester Research, Nathaniel Palmer, Editor-in-Chief of BPM.com, and Donna Tellam, BPM Solutions Director, User Experience Specialist, OpenText BPS will share proven strategies for BPM success. Learn from real-world examples of the challenges organizations face with BPM and how they’ve managed to overcome them. We encourage you to watch the first two installments, Practical Approach to Get Started with Process Improvement and Building the Right Team to Drive Process Improvement. For more details and to register, click here.

New Matter Intake Meets the iPhone
Wednesday, February 22, 2012
11:00AM-12:00PM EST

Gone are the days of being chained to your desk! Today, law firms can leverage mobile BPM capabilities — on the go — to expedite critical processes – such as new matter intake.  Mobile BPM keeps processes moving, regardless of the lawyer’s location. Join Keith Levin, Legal Sales Manager for OpenText BPS and Kristian Uggla, Legal Solutions Engineer for OpenText BPS, as they explain how OpenText’s new mobile BPM capabilities can increase your agility and reduce your time to value. For more details and to register, click here.

If you can’t make it to one of these webinars, don’t worry! We’ll have the recording onDemand so that you can watch it whenever you have the time. You can access the recordings, here.

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There is nothing like a great story to  illustrate some of the ways enterprise architecture initiatives are demonstrating value to the business. I hope you’ll take a few minutes to read the article because it highlights some of the specific ways Chubb has organized its team as well as  the company’s commitment to make architecture less about the process and more about adding value to actual business.

The result?

• A comprehensive partnership between IT and the lines of business that supports more effective decision making;
• Faster time to market;
• The ability to leverage sharable components, practices, technologies, and process across their federated organization.

Through this process they achieved real savings – like the $600,000 in 2010 just by identifying and then redistributing unused software licenses.

Not covered in this story is Chubb’s use of both enterprise architecture tools and business process management technology to support the operationalization of the gaps in business performance that can be automated and improved with business process management. You can read more about EA and BPM working together by downloading this Gartner Whitepaper.

I’ll be back soon with more on the how the evolution of EA and BPA are impacting the tools provided to address the needs of architects.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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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