The fact is – many companies are taking advantage of the downturn to rationalize operations and asking employees to do more with less. However, as I read through the story, I couldn’t help but think… in this economy people are working harder and longer, but are they working smarter?

And we’re not done yet. With an uncertain economic forecast at the forefront of their minds, executives today have the tendency to look for ways to further reduce their spending by cutting people, travel, budgets, events and anything deemed as non-essential. However, from my experience, many of the organizations are cutting without a plan. Doing more with less requires a more disciplined approach to executing your business plan. Doing more with less requires a smarter approach to deliver results.

We are fortunate today that business systems are beginning to incorporate the technologies that help improve the way work is done in an organization. By discovering best practices and automating business processes accordingly, companies can do more with less without shifting the full burden to their knowledge workers. Today, there are solutions that can help you dramatically improve process efficiency and employee productivity across your organization.

Business process management (BPM) software gives your organization the power and knowledge to work better, smarter and faster.

Increase your efficiency
Instead of cutting resources and offloading more work onto your employees, you can use BPM to understand and automate key processes – resulting in greater efficiency, fewer resources and reduced overhead.

Foster collaboration with knowledge workers across your enterprise
Finding a BPM tool with meaningful social networking capabilities gives knowledge workers the resources to collaborate on projects and access the right information, content and resources, effortlessly. With features – such as user profiles that highlight availability, skill sets and roles – managers can allocate work to the appropriate person, with the right skills and work load. This helps reduce stress on the knowledge worker and ensure projects are completed in a timely, efficient manner.

Establish greater visibility
For most organizations, it isn’t until they have delivered an initial BPM project that they can truly see their organization’s capabilities and where they can continue to make improvements. Once your processes are deployed through BPM you have the ability to understand the interrelationships within your processes to identify the right redundancies, discover process gaps and uncover underutilized systems. Instead of cutting resources you can make smart decisions that positively impact performance, profitability and customer experience, while promoting employee satisfaction.

With the final word on this economic downturn still unknown, it isn’t likely that companies will begin immediately adding back the positions lost. But, companies can do more to support the business in achieving more with fewer staff and without shifting the entire burden on their employees. Working smarter requires action and initiative on the part of companies to find better practices and enable employees with tools that are more on par with the technology solutions they use in their personal life. You’re just a call away to find out how.

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Gartner, Inc. even issued a “First Take” research note with its opinion on the new applications – the conclusion being that Metastorm has raised the bar for Social BPM environments and surpassed its existing competition.

Our ability to raise the bar was not by sheer luck.  In developing these new applications, Metastorm invested a great deal of time and energy in working with our customers and industry experts (as well as assimilating user feedback on the flaws in other vendor offerings) to understand market needs and focus on the key criteria that would deliver the most business value.  Such feedback included:

• A true Cloud platform – not just SaaS
• Collaboration and social networking tools that business users will embrace
• A rich user experience that mimics desktop applications, but runs in the Cloud
• Role-based personalization that is configurable at the individual user level
• Automatic capture of collaboration sessions – record, playback and audit
• Full integration of content and models with Metastorm’s enterprise architecture (EA), business process analysis (BPA) and business process management (BPM) software applications
• Not just workflow modeling

That last criteria is a critical distinction that many people overlook – any modeling and collaboration tool that is confined to just a workflow or process view is flawed by nature.  How can you truly capture and optimize a business process without fully understanding the bigger picture enterprise elements that contribute to process success?  

Metastorm has raised the bar on Social BPM by releasing a rich enterprise modeling environment on a true Cloud platform (Microsoft Windows Azure) with 11 different model types and 23 modeling objects, complemented by social collaboration tools that are inherent in the user environment.  Of course Metastorm M3 enables collaborative process discovery, but it also goes beyond process to enable collaboration on other enterprise assets, including people and organization models, business capabilities, goals, rules, requirements and systems, that factor into the true optimization of organizational performance.  Opening up insight and collaboration on a broad set of models, to a broad set of participants, on an unlimited scale, sets the stage for not only social interaction at the business level, but also increased accuracy of assumptions and faster realization of business improvements – improvements in processes and improvements in how your organization operates as a whole.

I encourage you to read the Gartner research note while it is available for public access through September – Metastorm Offerings Raise the Bar for Social BPM Environments.  Whether you are just starting to consider the value of Social BPM or you are unhappy with your current tool, now is the time to request a free trial of Metastorm M3 to take your efforts to whole new level.

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Operating on the Microsoft Windows Azure ™ platform, Metastorm M3 provides users with complete benefits of a private or public cloud, including scalability, performance, security, and elasticity.  Metastorm M3 is designed to be modeling for the masses, offering 11 different modeling types—goal, organization, capability, system, process/workflow, activity, rule, project, requirement, location and deliverable— from the Metastorm Enterprise software suite.  Additionally, Metastorm M3 provides 23 modeling objects and viewpoints, going beyond a traditional process model, to give users more comprehensive and holistic business improvements. 

Metastorm M3 empowers businesses by offering a cloud-based environment through which an unlimited number of users can easily improve their organizations using enterprise modeling and collaboration.  Business and IT users are given a rich, social environment in the Cloud where they are able to utilize social networking tools such as chat, whiteboard, model annotation, sharing, recording, and playback to design and implement business practices.  A distinguishing feature of Metastorm M3 is that it offers secure, cloud-based collaborative enterprise modeling for anyone, anywhere.  Metastorm M3 is an excellent tool for mass deployment because it offers built-in modeling guides and real-time help, requiring no prior knowledge of or training in enterprise modeling and no IT setup.  Additionally, its location in the Cloud allows users to gain unlimited access, opening a broader, global collaboration for businesses to achieve the most optimal results.

Metastorm M3 is designed to be used alone or with the Metastorm Enterprise software suite.  Any input, information and data captured in the Cloud is compatible with Metastorm’s enterprise architecture, business process analysis, business process management and integration products to ensure ongoing, shared visibility and the ability to incorporate user input enterprise-wide process improvements.

“Metastorm M3 is designed to go above and beyond any other tool available today to give our customers a distinct edge over their competition,” said Greg Carter, executive vice president of development and CTO of Metastorm.  “Leveraging our years of best practice experience in modeling, architecture strategy and process improvement, we have compiled a rich set of modeling and collaboration tools to empower users on a global scale to participate in business architecture and process definition activities that were once limited to a specific department or skill level.”

What to know more about Metastorm M3?  Check out the social media version of the press release here, complete with screenshots and other related materials.

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