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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What are your thoughts? Feel free to leave a comment below and we can discuss.

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

How AmerisourceBergen Transformed Their Business with BPM

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

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

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

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While many corporations have enabled millions of their customers to access a portion of their business operations through mobile apps, millions of their employees don’t have mobile access to the processes that support and drive those customer interactions.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The story shows how Adaptive Case Management enabled the organization to

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

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

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During the summit we will be unveiling the new OpenText BPM vision, as well as a lot of new, promising product and solution innovations. We are excited to have Clay Richardson, Senior Analyst for Forester Research, kick-off our user summit with a thought-provoking session on Social BPM and the powerful value it has for organizations. This year we have assembled a remarkable lineup of speakers across a variety of industries who will be sharing their best practice techniques, lessons learned and other helpful tips and tricks to expand your business improvement projects. A full list of our summit speakers is available on our online agenda, here.

In addition to the summit agenda, we have several key sponsors that will be showcasing throughout the event, including Microsoft and ICCM Solutions. There are also some great pre-summit workshops on November 7^th designed to give you all the resources to maximize your investment. Check out some of Metastorm and Global 360’s training classes and register, here.

If you haven’t registered for the 2011 OpenText BPM User Summit, why wait? Not only will you be the first to hear everything OpenText has in store for you (from both the OpenText BPM executive management team and product managers), but you will get priceless information from peers to help you advance your business improvement efforts.

Still have some questions or concerns? Leave a comment below or reach out to me directly at elizabet@opentext.com

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As Vice President of Global Field Marketing, Elizabeth Edwards oversees OpenText BPM’s worldwide marketing program initiatives for demand generation, online marketing, customer marketing and lead management. She has a multi-faceted background in business-to-business, high-technology marketing including customer service, database marketing, online marketing, direct marketing, advertising and strategic events. Elizabeth has planned and run the Annual Global User Summit for 10 years.

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Time is money and customer service is critical, so we’ve pulled together three quick tips to help you on-board your customers more efficiently and effectively. Now you can save money, improve overall customer and employee satisfaction, and gain a strategic advantage over your competitors.

#1 – Select a flexible business process management suite
Out of the box solutions for your new client on-boarding process aren’t going to give you the competitive edge that you need. Business process management allows you to build a customizable new client on-boarding process that is agile enough to allow you to evolve and change the process over time. For example, OpenText BPM integrates into your existing systems, giving you the ability to

• mask the complexity of underlying legacy systems
• create an aggregated view of client information across multiple systems and departments
• streamline and manage the best process for your success
• monitor inbound workflow with ease, providing you complete visibility into the status of a new customer’s progress
• improve customer service

#2- Get the right people together and collaborate
Process improvement will only be as good as the people, knowledge and skills that are brought to the table to implement the transformation. You need to capture the current on-boarding process and understand the people, process, systems and technologies that it involves. The best approach is to identify key stakeholders and understand the bottlenecks and why they occur before you start to remodel your process. From there you can analyze and determine the best approach for improving and automating your new process.

#3 – Monitor and report on your process
You will never know how much you have improved without setting a way to monitor and report on your process. Having visibility into your process is critical to your ability to control and manage your progress. You no longer have to worry about reporting on several regulatory mandates, including Know Your Customer (KYC), because BPM allows you to capture both your human-centric and system-centric processes. With these tools you not only have a holistic picture of how your organization’s on-boarding process is executed, but see down to the granular level details about a specific process, system or technology involved. A BPM suite with dashboard capabilities takes monitoring and reporting to a whole new level, giving you complete 24-7 visibility into every aspect of you process.

New client on-boarding doesn’t need to be headache
Long, unnecessary processes will hinder your organizations ability to on-board customers quickly – resulting in lost business to competitors. Investing in a robust, flexible BPM suite allows will help you automate and streamline key processes and dramatically improve your organization, resulting in increased ROI, higher productivity, better turnaround and more profitability.  

Do you have tips for improving new client on-boarding? Post a comment and share them.

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Time to Change Our Process Approach
Craig led with a challenge that our traditional approaches to process improvement are failing. It’s time to change our process approach. Prior approaches have become irrelevant because of the ascendance of “untamed” business processes. Those processes that form in the seams and shadows of organizations between packaged applications. Firms struggle to effectively deal with these and provide the necessary and expected customer experience. For example: 

• Customer on-boarding – takes the customer down the tunnel that reflects the internal systems and we need to flip the focus to the customer view
• Insurance claims processes – departmental silos are slowing claims resolution, raising liability risks, and giving customers bad experiences that can drive them to competitive alternatives (for my take on this area, check out How ACM Helped Fix My Car)
• Invoice processing – packaged applications and ERP systems don’t deal well with resolving exceptions with the customer in mind, and coordinating invoices with purchase orders, deal sheets and other critical supporting documents is a problem

The issue for IT and business leaders alike is to turn around the previous lost decade (1998 to 2009) consumed by rigid and often brittle packaged apps in silos, where 75 percent of IT budgets went to maintenance.

Analyst Advice: Invest in Dynamic Case Management Solutions
Craig’s advice on how best to deal with these untamed process issues is investment in dynamic case management solutions. Case Management will help to close the gap between processes that control and processes that engage, and will move us from our current environment to a more dynamic customer centric environment:

In effect, this is a movement toward a solution and support transformation where IT vanishes into the business. And, the resulting solution environment needs to simplify the complexity that businesses are facing.

Operational Excellence Expert Says Some of Most Difficult Problems Arise in the Complex Handoffs Between Systems, Activities, and People
With his focus on how businesses can gain high-velocity operational excellence, Steven J. Spear dove-tailed perfectly with Craig’s observations and advice for process improvement programs and approaches. Mr. Spear sees that some of our most difficult problems arise in the complex interrelationships and handoffs between systems, activities, and people – much like the untamed and less structured processes that Craig describes. Because of that it is hard to track what is connected to what and then hard to determine “the why” when it fails. To address this we must focus on ways to ensure that people have context and can see the complexity in which they are embedded and for which they are responsible, and at the same time simplifying that complexity for them.   

New ways of working – including knowledge sharing – are driving results for high-velocity companies and Mr. Spear provides some great examples in his book. One example right from our own Global 360 (now OpenText) customer community is Citi who presented their case management application at the Forrester conference. While I don’t have a recording of their Forrester presentation session to share, you can learn more about the Citi case study at How Citigroup Delivers Exceptional Customer Service with Case Management. I think it is a great illustration of how case management can play a key role in driving operational results.

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About Deb Miller
Deb Miller is Director of Market Development for Global 360 (now OpenText). Her work focuses on industry strategies for business process improvement. Her career includes more than 20 years of global industry experience with GE. You can read more of Deb’s writings at http://www.DebsG360.wordpress.com/ and follow her @DebsG360 on Twitter.

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